Advantages of automated customer service solutions for your business in Singapore

Maintaining an active presence across your e-commerce website, your social media and other messaging channels is a resource-heavy task. 

As AI-powered automation technology becomes more accessible and intelligent, Singapore companies in the retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries have been quickly incorporating customer service automation solutions to improve customer relationships, as other industries gradually follow suit. 

Let’s consider the following statistics from American Express’s Customer Service Barometer:

• 7 in 10 shoppers say they’ll spend more money (17% more, on average) with a business that provides consistently great customer service

• 33% of customers say they’d look to switch to a competitor after a single bad service experience

In other words, a happy customer will keep returning for more business. 

While it may seem simple to let robots handle everything for you, the challenge is that, in order to build authentic long-term customer relationships, you need to properly train these AI-driven tools to help you handle those relationships carefully. 

Wondering how can your customer service team effectively reap the advantages of automated customer service? Let’s get started. 

What is automated customer service?

Automated customer service refers to the use of technology and software to provide customer support and assistance without the need for human intervention. This can include chatbots, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and other types of automated software that can answer common customer questions, resolve issues, and provide information to customers. Automated customer service can help companies provide round-the-clock support, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience. 

Since slow response rates and unhelpful suggestions result in poor customer service, which prompts angry customers to spread negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) that drives potential customers away, businesses have a strong financial incentive to invest in an automated customer service system that will help maintain consistency and quality in shopping experiences across multiple communication channels. 

Here are some common automated customer service examples:

• Send automatic reply emails for order confirmations, delivery status updates, and customer feedback invitations

• Virtual concierges or assistants for membership enrollment, event registrations

• Chatbots for answering FAQs and qualifying leads

• Self-service portals for interactive guides or help center information

Finding a way to integrate Live Chat and Salesforce CRM into one platform? Here’s how you can do it on SleekFlow. 

How to use customer service automation examples for improving customer satisfaction

Let’s outline 3 automated customer service examples that are effective when handling challenges. Take these customer service automation solutions into account when planning your strategy and you’ll be ahead of the game.

Challenge #1: Delivering a consistent and personalised customer experience 24/7 

In Singapore’s highly competitive market, customers expect agents to go the extra mile and exceed their expectations. An efficient way to show customers that they are valued is to offer a personalised service. 

Source: McKinsey & Company Next in Personalization 2021 benchmarking survey

According to McKinsey report, personalisation most often drives a 10-15% revenue lift (with company-specific lift spanning 5-25%, driven by sector and ability to execute).  

From small businesses to large corporations, companies that focus on nurturing customer relationships create long-term value, leading to upward migration, retention, and brand loyalty. 

Solution #1: Use a chatbot for customer service automated responses

Chatbots are reliable customer service automation tools for routine and repetitive tasks when communicating with customers, such as pre-qualifying leads, sending confirmation notifications, or upselling after purchase. 

Let’s say you manage a tuition centre and you want to keep parents and students updated on the class schedule. You can integrate your chatbot with the class calendar to keep them informed of the changes. 

This would minimise the chances of parents calling your business number, thus enhancing the capacity for them to deal with more complex issues, such as tuition fee payment and student attendance. 

Challenge #2: Transferring customer enquiries to the right person for immediate follow-up

When large corporations have individual departments handling specific tasks, such as banks or airline companies, customers are often put “on hold”  while they are redirected to the right department to handle their enquiries. 

As the fast-paced society in Singapore has made customers impatient, making them wait while you find the right person to handle their enquiry can cause frustration and negative associations with your brand. 

Solution #2: Automate your customer service agents’ workflow through quick replies, auto-triggered template messages, and ticket routing

By automating your internal workflow, you can set quick reply responses and define the scenarios or keywords in which your reply would be automatically triggered. 

Whether you’re in the office or if it’s a public holiday in Singapore, these messages set up using an automated customer service system will give your customers the reassurance that their queries will be handled. 

You can also implement an automated ticketing system to route conversations or support requests to the right team. Ticket routing rules allow tasks to be efficiently passed on from the frontline support rep to internal specialists, decreasing response times drastically. 

Want more ideas on setting automatically triggered template messages? Refer to the customer service automated template responses on WhatsApp in our blog.   

Challenge #3: Organising and centralising data across various channels

Another challenge that larger companies face is combatting data silos, which refers to the inaccessibility of data across departments. 

As a result, customer service agents do not have sufficient or consistent data to help customers with their queries in a timely manner. Repeat customers are also unable to receive prioritised treatment as the company lacks the means to nurture these relationships. 

More importantly, data silos hinder the financial performance of companies because of inefficiencies, like someone from the marketing team needing to manually transfer data to the customer support team. 

Did you know that you can sync all your contacts from Salesforce or HubSpot to SleekFlow? Head to our blog to read about our latest product feature - SleekFlow Salesforce contact sync and SleekFlow HubSpot contact sync.

Solution #3: Self-service portals and chatbot for FAQs to track and analyse data

Source: Help centre for user troubleshooting, portal by Slack

Having a searchable database, like a searchable FAQ page or FAQ chatbot, cuts out the middleman and directs customers immediately to problem-solve on their own. 

To break down the data silos, companies need to invest in customer service automation solutions that will integrate and centralise their databases in omnichannel CRMs or self-service portals. 

As a result, they will have a more holistic overview of their customer's preferences and develop a more customer-centric experience.

SleekFlow is suitable for any industry that requires customer service. The potential is pretty limitless with the integration of multiple CRMs.

Jovan Lin

AVP Marketing & Corporate Communications

See how PSB Academy, an award-winning education institution, aced CRM improvements with customer service automation solutions on SleekFlow.

Advantages of automated customer service

There are several advantages of using an automated customer service system for your business in Singapore, including:

• Reduce costs by cutting down on the need for human customer support staff, particularly for handling routine and repetitive tasks

• Increased efficiency with quick responses for customer enquiries and requests

• Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty with instant, accurate and consistent support

• 24/7 availability with a chatbot that offers round-the-clock support, even for customers outside of Singapore in different time zones

• Data collection and analyses on customer interactions, which can be used to identify trends and improve the overall customer experience

• Highly scalable to meet changing business needs, without the need for additional staffing or infrastructure

Ways to automate customer service for your business in Singapore

Singapore has a highly competitive business environment, and optimising existing resources is key to growth. In this case, equipping yourselves with customer service automation solutions is the way to get you there. 

SleekFlow’s all-in-one omnichannel solution helps businesses in Singapore streamline internal processes, support, and ultimately sell to customers better. 

The good news is that Automation is one of SleekFlow’s key features. To highlight some key functions: 

1. Never miss another opportunity to convert leads into loyal customers

Photo: Assigning conversations to other teammates on SleekFlow

• Route incoming messages and construct an intelligent workflow to auto-assign conversations to the right person 

• Create automation rules and put contacts into different lists for immediate follow-up

2. Catch your customers at the right time

• Integrate your Shopify store to SleekFlow to draft orders for customers in the chat and collect payment with an in-chat payment link

• Provide order status updates or abandoned cart reminders to your customers without lifting a finger 

• Instantly greet customers (even outside of business hours), send birthday discounts, or retargeting campaign messages when they visit your e-commerce store 

• Schedule messages to be sent at a later time or during a specific event (e.g. send messages to attract customers with discount codes for the Great Singapore Sale)

3. Multi-level chatbots for freeing up your customer service agents’ time from repetitive tasks

Image: SleekFlow's chatbot interface for enhancing customer support experiences

• Build a customised chatbot that will help you qualify leads and answer straightforward FAQs

• Enhance your customer service agents’ job satisfaction by eliminating manual or menial tasks

• Gather insights on customer behaviour across channels

SleekFlow web and mobile applications are stable, fast, and user-friendly compared to the WhatsApp Business app. Our maximum first response time is reduced from 4 hours to an hour. As a result, customer support efficiency has improved by 60%.

Andy Ng

Founder of Tutor Circle

Explore the success story of Tutor Circle, and see how they manage customer expectations with customer service automation solutions on SleekFlow.