We talk about automation a lot at Gnatta, but that’s because of how integral it ito your business. You can’t run a customer service operation well without implementing some kind of automation. Without automating, you’re relegating your business to the slow zone. Your team are impeded and held back from their true potential. And e than you need to. Automation cuts costs. That’s just a fact.
What Does Automation Look Like?
Before we dive into how automation cuts costs, let’s take a brief look at what it actually is. The association with customer care automation is usually chatbots and the perceived complexity that comes with setting them up. But they’re not the be-all and end-all. And there are plenty of automation tools and features you can implement very easily.
Automation tools come in a myriad of forms. From automatic updates, to pre-written responses (and yes, even to chatbots), automation is really very versatile in its offering. At Gnatta, we use automation to prioritise important interactions, assign new interactions to advisors, collect customer information so the advisor doesn’t have to, and much more.
How Automation Cuts Costs
It’s all down to a boost in efficiency. Automation does two things for your business.
Automating Your Processes
Automation through workflows improves the efficiency of your processes. You can make sure you’re prioritising the interactions you want to so your most important customers or queries are answered ASAP. You can decide how many interactions your advisors will deal with at a time – and which channels they come through – so nobody is manually monitoring and assigning them. And you can decide when and how customers might be contacted post-service for follow-ups.
All of this together accumulates into an operation that is perfectly balanced and optimised, allowing you to get the best cost-reduction out of your service without sacrificing on customer satisfaction. In fact, automation can even improve your customer satisfaction when used well.
Automating Advisor Tasks
There are also tools and features that improve the efficiency of your advisors. When a chatbot can’t resolve a query, it can still gather customer information and pass it along to the advisor. By the time the advisor greets the customer, they have all the data they need to find an immediate resolution to the query.
Further automation like canned responses (when implemented well; don’t alienate your customers with robotic responses) can make a more complicated query much smoother. Your advisor can focus all their efforts on looking for a solution after spending thirty seconds personalising a pre-written response.
And those are just two examples.
When your advisors can whizz through interactions, they can both improve their productivity (and thereby save you money), and improve your customer satisfaction scores. Gartner predicts that by 2025, customers will look to other solutions than a company’s customer care for up to 75% of their queries and problems. We’re talking YouTube tutorials, Facebook posts, Trustpilot reviews, and similar platforms. And with customers so willing to look elsewhere, it’s especially important now to provide a great customer experience or you risk losing your customers’ trust.
Simpler Automation Can Still Save You Money
Automation tools have different levels of complexity when it comes to implementation. There’s no reason introducing automation to your operation has to be an all-or-nothing deal. Simple automation – the kind that takes very little effort to implement – can still save you a significant amount of money.
With the code needed to set up quick replies very simply laid out on social media info pages, it really couldn’t be simpler to start using automation. And if you don’t like the idea of setting up your own – or don’t have the dev team to handle it – you can always use software like Gnatta where quick replies can be turned on without any developer input.
Gnatta includes a myriad of automation tools as a standard. We make sure that all of the automation is Gnatta is fully customisable and easy to navigate so you’re in control at all times.
Implementing automation doesn’t have to be a headache. It can be relatively easy to set up and there tools like Gnatta out there to help you do it easily. The reward for using automation is a cheaper operation alongside a better service. It might seem like a pipedream but automation means the days a gone when you had to measure efficiency against customer happiness. Now, they’re one and the same.
