We live in a digital world. It’s a world that’s changing faster and faster each day. They say if you can’t feel your competitors breathing down your neck, you’ve already been overtaken.

To keep up with competitors, entrepreneurs should always be looking out for new technologies that give them a competitive advantage. And support automation is one that should be at the top of the list. 

Whatever your growth strategy looks like, support automation can lend a hand. In fact, businesses can automate many of their tasks, freeing up their time for other important items they need to get to (that automation can’t help them with). 

In this article, we’ll take a look under the hood of support automation. We’ll outline what support automation is and how can it sustain customer relationships?

What is Support Automation? 

When it comes to automation tools, there are different kinds out there. There’s marketing automation, sales automation, email automation, and support automation. Each serves an important purpose for the department using them. But, when used correctly, they can positively impact the rest of the company. 

Support automation is a way of fixing your customers’ problems automatically. It’s providing service support without the limitations of office hours. It’s a way of saving your staff time and effort by automating certain tasks. 

If there’s a standardized, routine function, it’s a prime candidate for automation. For example, if a company receives hundreds of emails, all asking the same question, it could make sense to reply using an automated response email. So, instead of spending hours sifting through these emails, only to manually respond with the same solution to each, you can set up an automation that does it for you. 

How does this work? Well, some systems can scan inbound emails for keywords. That helps identify the nature of the query and send a more specific, personalized email reply. Robotic process automation, or RPA, is capable of performing all these tasks and more. 

Chatbots are a particularly sophisticated application. They can be programmed with a bank of common questions and answers, so each response is personalized and helpful. Increasingly, they’re connected to clever artificial intelligence, allowing them to cross the line from automotive to adaptive. 

Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

Why is Support Automation Important?

As organizations attract more customers, it becomes more difficult to maintain high standards. 

Some customer service tasks are repetitive. Think about working in a call center, answering the same queries over and over. Support automation fixes that. It saves you and your staff time so you can do things that can’t be automated. 

Service functions can be automated at every stage of the customer experience. Companies can offer personalized customer journeys that create a better experience of engaging with your organization. It’s streamlined. It’s joined up. It just makes sense.

It all adds up to better customer service. You can help more people, faster. If business is a race, support automation gives you a head start.

How Does Automation Help Support Customer Relationships?

Automation can support customer relationships in many ways. It makes the process of engaging with an organization much smoother. It’s also adaptable and can integrate data quality software, enabling you to offer a personalized service cost-effectively.

It can: 

Address Concerns Quickly

Source

A recent study revealed that 90% of customers rate an immediate response as “important” or “very important” when they have a customer service question. We live in a global society, a 24/7 world. Without support automation, it’s not feasible to do that all the time.

Have you ever wasted hours searching a frequently asked questions page on a website? With the invention of automated chatbots, those pages are becoming a thing of the past. Companies can set up automated support that identifies a customer query and directs them to the right page on your website knowledge base.

Automated customer service software that spans multiple platforms also helps raise a customer concern faster and makes sure it goes to the relevant person. 

Helps Customers Help Themselves

Your customers want convenience. Allowing them to help themselves achieves this in several ways. You can set up your prompts so that certain pieces of content you create can be shared to address their questions, like a quick fix guide or a relevant piece of video content online. 

It allows customers the choice. They can access the information to fix a problem or wait for a member of staff to become available.

Deliver Service on a Larger Scale

One of the greatest assets of support automation is the way it helps companies cope with increasing demand through digital workforce technologies. The more customers you have, the more staff you need to serve them. Support automation gives you an easier way to scale up your business. 

Chatbots can perform a troubleshooting function. If there are common issues that occur with a product or service, a chatbot can be programmed to provide information. 

Support automation allows companies to offer unique experiences to many customers at once. Most customer relationship management (CRM) software can now send outreach emails triggered by certain events. That could be anything from a purchase to a period of inactivity.

Improve Staff Productivity

Support automation can help your staff as well as your customers. In a busy call center, support automation is vital. Automating incoming and outgoing calls improves the productivity of a customer service agent. It can save time by automatically calling up any information you hold about the caller.

Support automation reduces the workload on each individual, freeing them up to do more complicated tasks. This improves the employee experience, which in turn improves the all-important customer experience. 

Key Takeaways

In business, it’s easy to get carried away with the idea of going out and finding customers. In this modern-day fairytale, sales staff become knights in shining armor, customers damsels in distress. 

The reality is less exciting. It’s more economical to take better care of your existing customers first. The companies that build strong relationships with their audience get a bigger chunk of their lifetime value.

Support automation is a great way to achieve this because it helps you to deliver better and more personalized customer experiences. This can be a lasting source of competitive advantage and a driver for business success.

Author Bio

Tammy Wood has been involved with SEO for two decades. Her current role is Director of Technical SEO for Automation Anywhere, an automation company. When not chasing keywords, Tammy enjoys reading, buying shoes, and writing articles about both RPA and SEO. Here is her LinkedIn.