4 ways to improve the customer experience with automation
JP Arnaud-Marquez
·November 29, 2022
Ninety percent of customers use the customer support experience as a determining factor in deciding whether or not to work with a business – so you’d better make sure that yours shines if you want to win over new customers and keep the ones you’ve got.
When it comes to delivering a great customer experience, you need to think about the entire customer lifecycle – including the post-purchase experience.
When contacting support, your customers want to solve their problems quickly – whether it’s a question about a product they’re considering purchasing, checking on order status, troubleshooting an existing purchase, or dealing with the refund process, they want a seamless experience.
They need to be able to solve their problem in one place, without being routed through multiple channels. And it’s important that your brand delivers an integrated approach to customer support, where you’re taking into context any previous interactions they’ve had with your company.
So how can you make sure you’re meeting their needs, no matter what they need support with?
Using automation to support your customer experience can help you deliver on your customers’ expectations, enabling a fast, integrated approach to customer support that helps them resolve their issues immediately and doesn’t overload your team.
That helps you keep your CX team available to jump on issues where a personal touch is needed, while giving your customers the tools to self-service many of their support requests.
Here are some ways to use automation in the customer support process:
Integrate chatbots into your website and app
Chatbots are forecasted to deliver $11 billion in savings across the retail, healthcare, and banking industries by next year.
They can be integrated with your website or mobile app or social media channels, so that they are customers’ first point of interaction when they visit your web or mobile properties. Using existing data from your customer journey and CS tickets, you’ll be able to set them up with common workflows and Q&As that help customers answer common questions quickly.
For a clothing brand, for instance, your chatbot can be used to ask a series of questions that help build customized product recommendations for your customers, based on their favorite styles and their sizes.
You can also include quick links to common questions, such as “where’s my order?” or “what’s my return status?”
While simple rule-based chatbots can respond to many common questions and deliver automated workflows, you might also consider using a chatbot that incorporates conversational AI.
These chatbots can more actively respond to any question a customer might ask, using natural language processing, and can search your data in real-time to deliver relevant responses to their queries.
Incorporate helpdesk software
Using a helpdesk solution (which often includes chatbots as a component) can help you to integrate all of your customer support tickets in one centralized location, so that you have detailed context around their buyer’s journey and how you can most easily resolve their issues.
For example, our integration partner Gorgias gives your CS team the data to see the full spectrum of your customer’s behavior from one centralized dashboard. You’ll be able to automate repetitive tasks and set up workflows to respond to tickets automatically, or create text snippet macros that your CS agents can use to speed up response times.
Your agents have the tools to edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments all within the helpdesk platform, helping you speed up ticket resolution and help more customers without adding headcount to your team.
Use IVR to deliver automated phone support
Some customers prefer to call for support rather than chat or email – and in this case, interactive voice response (IVR) technology can help you to provide them with answers quickly.
IVR is a voice-recognition technology that can provide recorded answers in response to customer questions or statements with no need to engage a live agent.
For instance, if a customer is calling an ecommerce shoe store to check on their order status, the IVR technology can confirm the order based on the phone number they’re calling from, and search your database to deliver an answer based on the real-time status of the order in question.
If the question can’t be answered through your automated workflows, it’s important to provide the option to route the customer to a live agent – but by using IVR to support many common queries, you’ll be able to cut down on call wait time and ensure that the customer that do need live support are able to get it easily, while providing automated responses when possible.
Deliver automated customer returns management
Returns are par for the course in ecommerce, with up to 40% of product sales ending in a return. A return doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the customer relationship – in fact, if you’re able to deliver a great returns experience, 84% of customers say that they’re likely to buy from your brand again.
In order to do this, you need to move away from slow, manual returns processes and focus on optimizing the return experience with best-in-class technology.
With Loop, your customers are able to self-service their return requests, empowering them to quickly choose a return or exchange option – even if they’re exchanging for a completely different item in your store.
The seamless process means that you’re more likely to see customers choose exchanges, and will often see upsell revenue when they choose an item more expensive than their original purchase. Even better, all of this work is done on the back end, with no support requirements from your team.
Delivering a great customer experience through the entire journey isn’t easy – but with the right technology in place, it’s a lot easier than it used to be.
Get in touch for a demo to find out how Loop can help you optimize return costs and retain more revenue.
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