With each passing day, automation is continuing its evolution around the world. It’s having a particular impact on customer service, where technology is creating smoother and more efficient interactions between businesses and the customers they’ve dedicated themselves to serving.
It’s an important distinction, as customer experience is one of the cornerstones of a business’s competitive advantage. If you were to take a look at even your closest competitor, you’re probably looking at a very similar organization to your own in some ways. During a time when most entrepreneurs’ number one pain point is competition, many businesses out there do what you do.
However, nobody does it quite like how you do it, which is why customer experience is so crucial. People are willing to pay more and are ultimately more loyal for better experiences, making customer service a foundational effort for your future success. The more you can lean into automation and help strengthen this position, the better off you’ll ultimately be.
Overall, automation enhances service in many different ways, all of which are worth examining.
1. Reducing Response Times and Boosting Accuracy
One of the best examples of how automation is reshaping customer service involves reducing response times and boosting accuracy.
Take something as seemingly simple as a digital form, for example. Even as recently as 10 years ago, most information from a customer service line would need to be entered manually. A customer would call up and convey their issue to a representative, who would write it down and try to make sure it finds its way to the appropriate department. It would then be up to someone in that department to finally get around to reading the information, acting on it, etc.
With a digital form, however, all this changes. A customer doesn’t even need to pick up the phone and make a call if they don’t want to. They can enter all their own information into the form in their own words. That data is captured in a uniform way and transmitted to the appropriate personnel immediately. There’s no game of “Internet phone tag” to worry about, and there’s no concern that the ticket will be lost. It’s fast, easy, and efficient – not to mention more accurate than ever before.
2. Enabling Self-Service and Creating 24/7/365 Support
That segues nicely into another way automation is reshaping customer service: it’s enabling self-service and creating an environment where people can get the support they need 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
In the “old days,” when customer service was still heavily dependent on phone support, you could typically only reach a business during normal working hours. Then came call centers, which normally expanded to 24-hour support capabilities—but you still had to deal with call volumes.
Now, you have automation and tools like chatbots that can handle basic customer queries and even perform certain tasks like accepting payments. They can do this all day, every day, and they never need to eat, sleep, or take a vacation.
AI-driven analytics are similar. They can ingest all the data a business handles and use that insight to improve its customer support efforts. This allows companies to better understand the tangible needs of their real customers. At that point, they’re not acting on guesswork or intuition—they’re making decisions based on fact. This helps businesses stay competitive in a customer-centric world, too.
3. Streamlining Routine Tasks
Finally, automation is reshaping customer service simply because it’s helping to streamline a lot of the routine tasks that representatives formerly needed to contend with.
That’s not to say that these tasks weren’t important, because they are. It’s just that many of the things that would fall under this category are as time-consuming as they are menial. Automation frees up the invaluable time of a customer service representative so they can focus on more complex jobs. They can devote their attention to those high-value interactions that truly need the human touch.
Not only does this lead to a much more efficient customer service environment, but it also helps create more personalized and meaningful support experiences. Automation didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel on this—these types of benefits did exist in the past. It’s just that they were much, much harder to achieve—especially for those smaller enterprises out there.
Conclusion
In the end, these are just a few of the many ways automation reshapes customer service.
Especially in a field like this one, you’ve undoubtedly heard people express fears that automation would “take away jobs” or “replace humans” in the future. From one perspective, yes – this is a possibility because the technology has the potential to do that, at least in theory.
But doing so and leaving it there would be failing to see the forest for the trees. It would be failing to tap into even a fraction of the full potential that something as powerful as automation brings with it.
Because automation, when leveraged properly, shouldn’t be about replacing anything at all. Instead, it should be about supporting and empowering human employees – getting rid of those time-consuming and menial tasks that take up so much of their time and mental energy so that they can focus everything on those jobs that truly matter.
That’s not to say that customer service doesn’t “truly matter” because it does. But if you can help someone arrive at their desired conclusion and achieve a satisfying outcome with self-service tools, why wouldn’t you? If you can give them the type of enjoyable experience that your competitors can’t match before they ever make it to a human customer service employee, isn’t that a step worth taking?
Humans will always be a necessary part of a field like customer service – it’s just that the support role they play will invariably change. In doing so, it will create a world of new opportunities – and one that couldn’t have come along at a better moment.
