8 min read We live in times of instant gratification and when it comes to customer support experiences, the expectations are much the same.
Customers today expect quick resolutions to their queries with minimal friction on the channel of their preference. While this gives businesses the opportunity to engage their customers and build stronger relationships, ensuring top-notch service can quickly become overwhelming.
For many companies, balancing between efficiency and quality is a constant struggle – especially when dealing with high volumes of repetitive inquiries.
This is where automation and AI agents come into play – removing the routine and repetitive mundane tasks out of the way to make space for focusing more on complex issues.
In this post, we look into the common repetitive customer support tasks teams tackle and how AI automation can help.
Table of Contents
What are the common repetitive customer support tasks?
While these may vary based on the type of business, repetitive support tasks are the routine, predictable and frequently asked questions or actions that teams handle daily. These tasks usually follow a standard process and do not require any complex problem-solving. Here are some examples of the same:
- Appointment Scheduling: Automate booking, rescheduling, or canceling appointments with calendar integration and reminders.
- Subscription Management: Enable users to modify, upgrade, or cancel subscriptions automatically without manual intervention.
- Payment Inquiries: Provide instant responses to billing queries like due dates, payment methods, and balances.
- Technical Troubleshooting for Common Issues: Automate step-by-step troubleshooting for common technical problems like password resets or login issues.
- Invoice Generation and Retrieval: Automatically generate and send invoices to customers upon request or at specified intervals.
- Product or Service Availability: Instantly provide real-time information on product stock levels or service availability.
- Welcome Messages & Onboarding Guides: Send automated welcome emails and onboarding instructions to new customers.
- Service Downtime Notifications: Notify customers in advance about scheduled maintenance or unexpected service outages.
- Loyalty Program Points Inquiry: Automatically provide updates on loyalty point balances and available rewards.
- Shipment Delay Notifications: Send real-time notifications to customers about delays in their delivery schedules.
- Product Return/Exchange Processing: Automate the return/exchange request process by generating labels and tracking information.
- Delivery Status Updates: Provide real-time tracking updates from shipment to delivery through automated notifications.
- User Feedback Collection: Automatically send post-interaction surveys to collect customer feedback and satisfaction ratings.
- Basic Account Troubleshooting: Automate common account issues like password resets and account recovery.
- Warranty & Guarantee Requests: Streamline the process of submitting and tracking warranty claims and product replacements.
- General FAQs: Provide instant, automated responses to frequently asked questions about your products or services.
What are the benefits of AI and automation for customer support
Some of the common benefits of automating repetitive customer support tasks with AI include:
1. Increased efficiency
AI customer support agents work 24/7. By automating repetitive or routine tasks, you can reduce the wait times on query resolution and engage customers more proactively – even outside regular business hours. This helps you handle higher volumes of inquiries without increasing their headcount.
2. Improved agent productivity
When AI agents are handling repetitive tasks, human agents can focus more on complex issues. These could include queries that require problem-solving, empathy, and creativity. This helps improve agent productivity, enabling them to tackle and resolve more issues in less time.
Learn more about Auralis AI here
3. Improved customer experiences
Quick responses to simple questions can offer the instant gratification customers seek. At the same time, human agents have more bandwidth to look into complex issues with more attention, resulting in better resolution of issues.
4. Cost-effectiveness and scalability
As you scale the business, you may need to hire and train more human support agents – which can be a costly affair. By implementing AI-driven automation, businesses can effectively scale customer support without overspending on operations.
5. Multi-lingual support
AI can also help businesses easily offer customer support in multiple languages. This reduces the back-and-forth required when handling queries in different languages and makes the entire experience more seamless.
How to automate repetitive support tasks with AI – Step-by-step process
When starting to use AI for customer support automation, here’s how we recommend approaching the change:
1. Run a SWOT analysis
Start by analyzing your current customer support processes. We recommend doing a thorough SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of every aspect of customer support. This helps you pinpoint where AI agents and automation can be most beneficial. For example, tasks that consume excessive time or back and forth to gather information can become a priority for automation workflows.
2. Select repetitive tasks to automate
Next, identify the frequency at which those tasks have to be executed during customer support. Analyze the typical response to the queries and if it follows a common pattern that can be handled by AI agents instead of human intervention. This can include things like password resets, order tracking, answering FAQs, etc. A good idea is to look at tasks that are high in volume and low in complexity to start with.
3. Choose the right AI customer support tool
Look for solutions that let you customize the automation workflows as well as how the AI agents work. It should also be able to integrate seamlessly with your existing systems such as the CRM or the helpdesk software. The idea is to enable an easy flow of information to resolve queries faster.
4. Develop automation workflows
Create a detailed automation workflow for each task. We recommend outlining the steps you’d like the AI agent to take when a customer query comes in. For example, if the query is to reset a password, let the agent know how to verify user identity, generate a reset link, and notify the customer; but also include steps on when it should handoff to a human agent instead.
5. Train your AI with up-to-date data
Feed your AI support agents the most up-to-date data. This could be information about your brand, policies, products, services, and other data that can help resolve consumer queries. We recommend looking for a solution that easily integrates with your knowledge base or data platforms like Google Drive or even Notion, even if the data is available in different formats.
PS. Continuous learning is key. Ensure that the AI agents can adapt to new queries and improve over time.
6. Test and monitor performance
Once your automation is set up, closely monitor the performance of each workflow. Look at key customer support metrics like response times, accuracy, customer satisfaction rate, and engagement levels. You can also seek feedback to further optimize your automation for better engagement.
7. Scale the automation
When you have identified the pros and cons of using AI automation in customer support for your business, expand its use cases. Follow the same steps when setting up automation for new tasks so that the AI agents can juggle easily between high-volume and low-volume queries.
Why custom AI agents are the future of customer support
Automation has become a must-have today owing to the multiple touchpoints a business needs to establish for customers. But it’s the AI agents that are helping turn these touchpoints into opportunities for meaningful engagement between the business and the customer.
AI customer support agents can be tailored to specific business needs, learning from historical data and improving their performance over time. They can be easily integrated into the company’s existing processes and technology, making their automated workflows even stronger and further scalable.
Companies that are using AI and automation to address repetitive customer support tasks are seeing improved operational efficiency. But in addition, they are also able to offer more personalized resolution experiences to customers, helping brands build stronger relationships and drive higher loyalty.
Recommended read: How AI Co-Pilots Enhance Customer Support Efficiency
Conclusion
The future of customer support lies in being able to efficiently handle customer queries and that’s where AI-powered automation comes in.
Want to know more about how to set up custom automation for repetitive customer support tasks?
