How Real Time Analytics Improves Customer Service Automation

Customer service automation is resolving customer queries with minimal to no human involvement. This is achieved through tools like chatbots, email automation, knowledge databases, interactive voice response systems and self-service resources.

Customer service automation is used to increase efficiency, allow for 24/7 customer service and reduce the time that agents spend on repetitive tasks. While automation can be a great tool for improving customer service, it shouldn’t be used to replace human support. Instead, automation should be used to improve the employee experience by reducing the amount of time spent on simple repetitive tasks and queries. 

Customer service automation can also help you use your human resources more efficiently by giving them more time to focus on complex inquiries, implement an improved customer experience, find process improvements and more. 

To help improve the effectiveness of customer service automation, many businesses are looking to real time analytics. 

Real time analytics captures data from customers as they are completing actions as opposed to using historical data from past interactions. This helps improve performance and responses, enhance customer relations and allows your team to adapt and become more proactive. It can also speed up decision making and streamline operations. 

When you combine automation with real time analytics, you will enjoy several other benefits as well: 

Real time data can provide automation systems with the information needed to direct queries to the correct place. For example, the wording that your customer uses in real time could tell your systems what page to send them to, what conversation flow a chatbot should use or which department a call should be routed to. 

This will help reduce the number of customers who end up in the wrong place and can also allow for after-hours support that is truly helpful, adding to the customer experience instead of damaging it. 

When you use real-time analytics, you can use the data to trigger automated actions. For example, if a customer is searching through your resources, you can have a chatbot pop up to ask them if they need more help. 

Similarly, if a customer has provided their email you can trigger an automated email flow to go out to them with other relevant or related information based on the page they’re visiting or other actions they are taking. 

Real time data can also help you manage internal operations to maximize efficiencies. 

For example, let’s say your average time is seven minutes. One of your agents finished a call three minutes before her next break. Instead of having her take a call that will eat into her break time, automation can tell her to head out early, reroute any upcoming calls and alert a supervisor using the real time data. 

This ensures that calls are answered in a timely manner and staff get the proper breaks without your manager having to manually oversee the process. This in turn gives your manager more time to focus on important projects.  

Similarly, automation could be used to determine the best time for each employee to go to lunch based on real-time queue length data. 

Both of these are basic examples of how real time data and automation systems can work together to maximize operational efficiencies. With the correct data and systems, the opportunities are even greater. 

Real time data not only feeds into your automation to manage flows and improve efficiencies. It can also tell you how effective your customer service automation really is. 

That’s because real time analytics can tell you how each automated flow and interaction is performing as it happens. This will help you identify patterns so that you can improve your automation to optimize the experience and better serve your customers. 

Are you interested in learning more about how real time analytics can improve your customer service program? Get in touch with Advantage Communications today. Our team of contact center experts would love to help.