Today, many companies have introduced an automated customer support function on their websites to enable their support teams to scale their work and provide 24/7 support.
At Nets we believe that by combining the strength of both bots and humans, we will create deeper relationships with our customers and provide them with the best possible customer experience. Implementing a chatbot on our website was thus a customer-centric decision, with the aim of providing faster service, increasing customer engagement, and improving customer experience in general.
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But what does ‘automated customer service’ really mean? Which benefits as well as potential drawbacks has Nets taken into consideration when implementing it? And how can a company effectively combine the strength of both bots and humans?
Continue reading this blog post, and you will find out…
What is automated customer service?
Automated customer service, or customer support automation, refers to the process that aims at reducing or eliminating the need for human interaction and involvement when resolving customer requests. Thus, automating customer service offers the opportunity to eliminate excessive and unnecessary human-to-human touchpoints.
The technologies used for customer service automation include chatbots, self-service tools, voice recognition, and other technologies used to aid the customer experience.
In particular, chatbots have become an increasingly important component in many companies’ support strategies. Nets has introduced a chatbot called ‘Netta’, which we have trained with a lot of Nets specific content to be able to offer our customers a new, fast, and efficient customer service channel.
What is the technology behind chatbots?
To start with, a chatbot is a tool functioning as the first point of contact for a customer entering a website with this support function.
Customer service chatbots use machine learning or ready-made scenarios to respond to basic customer requests and to help them navigate the website and find the right information.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), and pre-defined conversation flows, chatbots can answer customers’ questions and guide them through different steps such as logging in, making payments, or finish bookings. Additionally, AI-bots learn from each interaction and adjust their responses to provide better support over time.
The technology behind Nets’ virtual agent Netta is built on “advanced conversational AI technology based on sophisticated natural language understanding”, says Jan Hayden-Jensen, Senior Vice President, MS Onboarding & Maintenance, Customer Services at Nets. He further explains that the technology seeks to predict the customer’s intention, or the reason why the customer contacts our support, and it does so by recognizing and understanding natural language.
Why automated customer support?
There are numerous advantages to gain from introducing an automated customer support function, and thus multiple reasons for why Nets decided to do this as well.
Firstly, automation enables customer support to be delivered 24/7. Automation software can run around-the-clock and complete time-consuming routine tasks, so that support reps can focus on those conversations that require human intervention.
Thus, by introducing automated customer support, Nets’ customers can get assistance even our support agents are off from work – and when on duty our support reps can focus on relationship-building with our customers.
Did you know?
53% of consumers believe it is important for them to resolve their own product/service issues, rather than relying on customer service representatives.
Secondly, customers benefit from automated customer service since it minimizes waiting time, and results in quicker responses. This is of course also beneficial for the company, since for every minute a customer must wait in line, you risk losing this customer to a faster competitor.
But that’s not all…
Automated customer support reduces human errors such as possible mistakes or misspellings when putting in the data – resulting in better and more efficient support.
How does Nets combine bots and humans?
While automated support, such as chatbots, reduce the human errors, it can simultaneously imply a lack of human touch. The automated messages risk making the customers feel undervalued and unseen, which makes the emotional connection get lost.
Also, it is difficult to fully automate the support function since some of the support customers seek may be unique and the issues may be complex and require more time and attention to resolve than can be provided by chatbots and virtual agents.
Therefore, as a rule of thumb, chatbots are ideal to use for:
Automating routine tasks: such as making appointments, booking hotel rooms, order food. You can also teach your chatbot how to cross-and up-sell products and services to increase revenue. To give an example, the chatbot could ask the customer who just reserved an hotel room if they also are interested in purchasing a ticket to the hotel’s spa area.
Engage page visitors: chatbots study page visitor behaviour and help you find out what pages they have visited and how much time they spent on each page.
Following this logic, Nets’ virtual support agent Netta is trained on a large number of Nets specific information and is used for answering simple questions on topics ranging from onboarding to invoicing and terminal support. In case our customers have more complex inquiries they are transferred to either human chat or normal customer service phones or emails – so that they get the help they need.
Our chatbot Netta is thus there to deliver 24/7 support, reduce waiting time by delivering quick responses, and to make sure our support reps can focus on the more complex customer inquiries that require human interaction – so that we can build the best possible relationships with our customers.
The bottom line?
Automation in customer support cannot exactly replace human interaction – but it can effectively assist it. By being able to spend less time on handling simple, administrative customer request, your support team can focus their time on more critical and complex issues that require human interaction. This allows your team to deliver delightful experiences which will result in happy, loyal customers!