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How to optimize automated customer service

As a business manager you are often thinking about the best way to optimize your customer service. You want to give your customers the best service, but you also want it to be cost effective. Before the introduction of today's technology customer service was done manually. You had call centers that were manned with live agents; you had clerks who went through the volume of snail mail you received, etc. Everything took time to process and you had to employee people to do it.

In today's business world we can now look to automated customer service. We have all dealt with automated customer service, you call the phone company to find out about your bill and you get a recording that gives you choices on what information you can obtain, you order something from a company online and you get sent a confirmation email, you pay a bill online and get sent a confirmation email, and the list goes on. You can still get a live customer service person on the phone, but you have to go through the automated customer service before you can get that person.

With the introduction of automated customer service companies are looking for ways on how to best put this resource to work. You might hope that by using automated customer service you can start saving costs on employees, but that isn't always the case. Many routine issues can be handled by automated customer service, but you still have to have live operators to help solve those problems that you can not have a computer handle. But on top of that cost you also have the cost to maintain your automated customer service program, this includes upgrades to the software, IT people who perform general maintenance, etc.

One way to put use automated customer service is on your web page. You can post a FAQ section that customers can access. This section addresses questions that are commonly asked and provides answers to those questions. This can cover a wide range of topics, the more questions and answers you have address the more likely the customer will be able to solve their own problem. To best use this feature you want to be able to address what your customers are looking for, many times the question is answered in the FAQ section but because of the customers choice of words they can not access the answer when searching for it. Keep your FAQ section simple, think in terms that a customer would use, not what a business would use. Another feature that ties into the FAQ, but is also separate is the search feature, in order to optimize this feature you need to think in terms that your customers would use, just like your FAQ section.

Automated email responses are another way to use automated customer service. When your customers purchase something on your website more often then not they are given an order number and a confirmation number. To optimize this service that is already provided your company can send them an automated email that provides this information with a link to your customer service website and a telephone number in case of future problems. Another nice feature to include in the email is a tracking feature. This allows your customer to track the progress of their order without having to call your company to find out the status.

There are many ways to improve on your automated customer service so that they are being used to the best of their ability. By using addressing basic issues you can increase the performance of how this system interacts with the customers. If you are able to increase the automated usage you can cut back on your live customer service.

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