Ever have the feeling you’re on the brink of something great — then felt excitement immediately give way to weak knees? You might have felt this way when thinking about automating your company’s CX: It’s a once-in-a-(customer)-lifetime opportunity, which is why everyone else seems to be doing it, and doing it now. So why aren’t you?
The FOMO is real. What’s more, it’s evidence-based. According to Gartner, automated support has entered what is called the Early Mainstream phase. In other words, bots are here to stay, with most businesses thinking about when rather than if implementation will be the way to go.
Read on for 5 tell-tale signs it’s time for you to take the plunge:
Growing pains
From ecommerce to insurance, banking, telecommunications and igaming: these industries may have been touted as (secret) “winners” of the pandemic, but for some of them, those sudden, pandemic-induced surges in revenue came as a mixed blessing, as many have seen their customer requests explode. If you are experiencing rapid growth, your agents can’t keep up with incoming chats, or you have to turn off channels to maintain your service level response, then your company is ready to automate.
Topsy turvy holidays
2020 was a record-breaker: In the US alone, Black Friday raked in $14.13 billion dollars in online sales — and experts are expecting that number to increase by another 20% this year. While your support volume may fluctuate heavily around peak season, the size of your support team won’t — and shouldn’t.
“I would urge any CS leader to consider intelligent automation. Our platform is a great way to take CS automation into your own hands code-free, and to put your support data under a magnifying glass to actively make improvements!”
- Ehsan Ali, Account Executive, Ultimate
If you are dealing with uneven chat volumes, triggered by peak periods and holidays, automation will help anticipate demand, allowing you optimize staffing schedules and keeping both agents and customers cool and collected throughout the holiday rush.
Read our tips on how to prep your CS team for the holiday season.
Human agents handling mundane tasks
Many agents spend a majority of their time handling repetitive questions or gathering upfront information from a customer before solving a query via email or chat. Both issues usually dovetail in a set of common culprits like order tracking, returns, cancellations, and replacements. By letting a virtual agent handle repetitive tasks, like checking names, dates, and order numbers, you’re freeing up your human agents for complex tasks which require their attention.
Get started with CS automation
You want to upgrade your well-oiled CRM machine
If you are using a CRM like Zendesk, Salesforce or Freshworks and are getting more than 3,000 requests a month, you will have a case for improved ROI. Adding an intelligent layer of automation can improve core KPIs such as Average Handling Time (AHT) and First Response Time (FRT), due to the ability of virtual agents to build on and enrich your CRM data.
Want to know how to measure rapid results with automation?
You are (unwittingly) sitting on a treasure trove of historical support data
If you have access to historical support data, you will have an extra leg up in the race for optimal customer support. With features like our CS Automation Explorer, you can analyze past support requests to discover customers’ most frequent concerns, which will enable you to steer your virtual and human agents’ resources to where they’re most needed, when they’re most needed.