7 min read With the increasing amount of competition in the B2B space, businesses can be seen experiencing a churn rate of 23% on average. And the most common reasons include failure to deliver value, product bugs, or a poor product experience – each of which can be addressed with proactive customer support.
In this post, we’re going to share the must-have B2B customer support automation and how AI co-pilots can help.
Table of Contents
Why is B2B customer support important?
Here’s why B2B companies are seen focusing more on customer support automation today:
- Improved customer satisfaction – Automation can help address frequently asked questions faster. The quick turnaround time on queries or being directed to the right resources can reduce the time it takes for users/ customers to put their purchases to work, leading to higher satisfaction.
- Better product adoption – Automated workflows can take a user from sign up to set up and usage of the product in a streamlined manner. This can help ease the path for product adoption.
- Higher user engagement – Being able to easily interact and get responses from the B2B company can lead to higher engagement rates. This is great for introducing users to new features and capabilities, increasing product stickiness, customer retention, and loyalty in the long run.
- Revenue growth – B2B businesses need to retain a minimum of 7% of their users for sustainable growth. Efficient customer support can help keep customers engaged, resolve issues faster, learn from their experiences, upsell, and cross-sell, enabling revenue growth.
Why is B2B customer support automation important?
B2B customer support is important for business growth – especially in competitive markets. But most companies struggle to scale this function, leading to losing the market rapidly. With B2B customer support automation, companies get to address a range of pain points like:
- High customer support costs – Hiring customer support agents with product knowledge can add to operational costs. Automations reduce the need for human agents by addressing common queries through workflows.
- Limited support hours – Most B2B companies address global markets but offering support across time zones can be tough. AI co-pilots and automation help offer 24/7 support.
- Language barriers – AI tools can provide multilingual customer support. This helps B2B businesses effectively communicate with customers globally.
- Scaling issues – Automation can handle higher volumes of inquiries during peak seasons. This helps human agents focus more on complex queries, reducing the churn typically experienced during the time.
- Consistency in support – AI co-pilots can be trained to offer consistent responses across channels. This helps standardize workflows and reduces the chances of human error or brand experience inconsistency.
- Data collection and insights – Automated customer support tools can collect valuable data about customer behavior, issues, patterns, and even sentiments. This helps make more informed decisions to improve both the product and the service.
- Inefficiencies in handling queries – Automation can help streamline the process. A good AI co-pilot solution can integrate with your tech stack to fetch information faster – this can reduce the back and forth, the wait time for queries, and resolution speed.
What are the different types of B2B customer support automation?
Here are the customer support automations we see B2B companies set up using Auralis AI:
1. Common query automation
B2B companies should automate responses to common customer inquiries. This includes FAQs, order status updates, account and product information, and basic troubleshooting. The B2B customer support automation can help reduce wait times and enable 24/7 assistance.
2. Ticketing automation
Categorizing incoming queries can be time-consuming and prone to errors. With AI co-pilots, support teams can analyze conversations in real-time. They can automatically categorize, prioritize, and assign incoming support tickets to the right agent/ department. This helps streamline workflows and prioritize tickets for faster resolutions.
3. Self-service knowledge base
AI co-pilots in customer support can guide customers to self-service portals with articles, guides, and tutorials. This helps customers troubleshoot common issues or find detailed information on their own, without having to wait on agents. Setting up this B2B customer support automation can help reduce the volume of support tickets.
4. Automated follow-ups and reminders
Set up automation to follow up with customers after a support interaction or when an issue is unresolved for a defined period. This helps offer proactive after-sales support, reminders for unresolved queries/ tickets, and even request feedback. The automation helps ensure no queries are left unresolved, resulting in a high customer satisfaction rate.
5. CRM integration automation
Support queries often include exchanging information that can help understand customers better. Solutions like Auralis AI integrate with CRMs to automatically update customer profiles with ticket status, communications, and support history. This helps build out a unified view of customers across channels and departments, helping with personalization and sales opportunities.
6. Escalation automation
Most B2B products may require addressing complex queries that require human intervention. Setting up automation to escalate high-priority issues can help agents prevent delays in resolving critical problems that could lead to churn. This is especially helpful in addressing tickets with high-impact issues or SLAs that require a fast response.
Also read: How to balance AI and human agents for optimal customer support
7. Customer feedback automation
Gathering feedback is an important part of improving what your product/ service has to offer. We recommend setting up a B2B customer support automation to request feedback after interactions. This can help gather insights on their satisfaction and experience, giving you actionable for improvement.
8. Proactive support automation
B2B companies can also send proactive support messages or alerts to customers. This can include notifications about service disruptions, product updates, or system maintenance. Automating this can help reduce incoming support inquiries and boost customer engagement in the long run by keeping them up-to-date.
9. Knowledge base updates
When integrated with your CMS and knowledge base, AI co-pilots can suggest updates when new issues or solutions are encountered during customer support. This helps create new entries for product features, common problems, or even process updates. The automation can help keep the knowledge base up-to-date with minimum manual input.
10. Agent workflow automation
Automating repetitive tasks like transferring or assigning tickets, sending case status updates and notifications, or triggering actions based on progress can help bring efficiency into the customer support workflows. This helps resolve complex issues faster while maintaining transparency across the team.
11. Personalized support automation
Companies can use B2B customer support automation to offer personalized recommendations, renewal reminders, or even share onboarding resources. This helps improve the customer experience by providing relevant and timely assistance based on individual needs, addressing the risk of churn proactively.
Also read: Best practices for implementing AI-powered support automation
Conclusion
AI-powered B2B customer support automation can benefit companies significantly. It can not only help reduce customer support costs but also help agents be more proactive, efficient, and productive as they handle complex queries on a day-to-day basis.
But it is also important to note that the same automated workflows don’t work for all B2B companies. We recommend understanding the typical customer journey for your product, identifying where agents tend to spend the most amount of time assisting them, and building custom workflows for AI co-pilots to follow.
This is where Auralis AI comes in, helping B2B companies automate almost 70% of their support queries with custom workflows.
