How to Implement Customer Support Automation Without Losing the Human Touch

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Customer support operations in all industries have wrestled with a new challenge since the emergence of technologies like AI: how to apply automation to the customer experience while maintaining the personalisation customers crave.

AI has transformed the customer support landscape, largely for the better. According to Zendesk, two-thirds of business leaders say investments in customer service AI result in significant performance improvements. Naturally, customer support leaders are concerned that too much automation makes interactions feel impersonal, but without it, delivering an individualised experience to every customer requires an immense amount of time and labor.

The good news is automation doesn’t necessarily mean robotic, and personalised doesn’t necessarily mean time-consuming — if you have the right tools to balance both. Aircall provides a customer communication and intelligence platform that enables customer support teams to achieve this balance.

Here, we reveal best practices for successfully applying both automation and personalisation to customer support interactions so support representatives can deliver exceptional, efficient experiences without losing the human touch.

Understanding the Balance: Automation vs. Personalisation

The modern customer expects businesses to provide both personalisation and digital support with some level of automation. McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and Gartner found that 93% who navigate from self-service to a human representative report elevated levels of satisfaction.^,

However, over-reliance on automated processes forces customers into self-service loops when they might need human assistance — resulting in a poor experience.

To get this balance right, business leaders need to grasp one main concept: automation and AI are here to augment the qualities unique to humans, not replace them. Empathy, intuition, and judgment are still exclusive to humans. If you leverage technology to elevate the capabilities of your human employees to connect with customers on a meaningful level, you’ll strike this balance perfectly.

Identifying Key Areas for Automation

To keep your human support representatives doing what they do best — connecting with people — leaders should automate routine tasks. Automation technologies are best-suited to relieving humans from repetitive work. Consider offloading the following to automation tools:

• Answering frequently asked questions

• Logging call data like duration and participants

• Sending follow-up emails

• Entering certain types of data

• Maintaining routine correspondence

• Updating customer records

• Generating reports

Call logging in particular is an essential task that has the potential to free up significant time for agents when offloaded to automation tools. Aircall’s platform automates call logging to eliminate the risk of error associated with manual call data entry, streamline reporting, and boost productivity. Customer support teams use Aircall to quickly log call data, sort through logs easily, retrieve the right information, and make better data-driven decisions.

Leveraging AI for Personalised Automation

When used correctly, AI can both personalise customer interactions on its own and help human representatives do so. For example, businesses can leverage AI-driven personalisation in the form of chatbots that understand customer preferences using machine learning. These bots have the capacity to tailor interactions based on responses received from customers.

AI can provide humans with vital information for understanding common points of friction, areas for improvement, and more. Using sentiment analysis tools, for instance, teams get clear data on how customers feel about products, services, and experiences. Aircall uses AI sentiment analysis tools and machine learning to go beyond detecting specific emotions. The platform helps teams route tickets to relevant agents, respond to issues before they mount, accurately assess agent performance, and more.

Maintaining Human Touch in Automated Interactions

There are two keys to keeping the human touch a part of any automated interaction:

• Use natural language processing (NLP) to send messages that feel more human.

• Allow customers to easily transition from automated support to human support.

NLP is an AI-driven technology that analyses human language, understands it, and — in conjunction with other AI tools like machine learning — helps to generate personalised content. When your customers are interacting with your automated solutions, NLP keeps the conversation feeling natural. 

Giving customers control over their experience — and the ability to choose self-service or human-based help — is important for maintaining the human touch in your support operations. Don’t force customers to interact with automated tools simply to save time and labor. 

Integrating Automation With Customer Success Teams

Automation greatly benefits customer support teams when it’s aligned with goals and integrated with workflow tools. Consider how Aircall enables customer support teams to integrate their communication platform with any number of CRM solutions. By integrating Aircall with Hubspot, for example, leaders can set up a ticket priority system in Hubspot to standardise customer support response strategies. In this instance, the human effort of connecting with customers is augmented by technology that prioritises the right conversations, so humans don’t make a mistake by taking a lower-priority call first. 

It’s important to establish your team’s goals and metrics for success with automation so you can be clear on what responsibilities stay with humans and which ones get offloaded to those tools.  

Measuring the Impact of Automation on Customer Success

Let’s say your goals include meeting key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

• Higher first-contact resolution

• Lower average handle times

• Higher CSAT

• Shorter wait times

A platform like Aircall allows you to clearly see the impact of automation against these metrics as you integrate it into your customer support operations. It shows you real-time performance data and analytics, where your team is improving as they leverage automation, how customers are interacting with tools like self-service, and more. With this visibility, you can evaluate and adjust your strategies to ensure your team is applying the human touch where needed.

How Aircall Enhances Customer Success Automation

Aircall was designed with customer support success in mind and offers unique tools to help companies strike the perfect balance between personalisation and automation. Our customer communication and intelligence platform augments your human team with automation in several ways.

Call Routing for Higher First-call Resolution Numbers

Aircall’s call routing software automatically routes calls to the most relevant teams and agents, getting customers to the right person on the first try and expediting first-call resolution. When integrated with your CRM solution, Aircall leverages CRM data to route calls based on customer information such as segment, region, account owner, last touchpoint, and more.

Real-time Coaching for a Better-performing Team

Aircall’s Agent Coaching feature helps leaders assist support agents when their expertise is needed. Supervisors can listen in on calls in real-time and whisper to an agent without alerting the customer. These opportunities for improvement help bolster overall team performance and productivity while resulting in happier customers.

Analytics for Clear Visibility Into Automation’s Impact

Using Aircall’s Analytics, customer support leaders can see where they might be experiencing performance lapses or where automation may enhance human agents’ productivity. The Aircall dashboard shows supervisors when and why calls go unanswered, what topics customers are commonly raising with agents, the progression of activity toward meeting KPIs, and more. Analytics deliver clear oversight about the customer experience so leaders can make data-driven decisions about staffing and the use of automation. 

How CloudTrucks Improved the Customer Experience With Aircall

CloudTrucks offers a platform that simplifies operations for trucking businesses of all sizes, and one of its missions is to provide outstanding customer support in an industry where things can go wrong. Its customers range from Walmart to local highway heroes, and it needed a way to streamline customer support calls while improving service and scaling for the future.

Turning to Aircall, CloudTrucks knew that the range of integrations available and the analytics features of the platform would help the business build a more responsive support department. The company has since integrated Aircall with Zendesk to help agents personalise interactions using customer data drawn directly from the CRM when a call comes through. Teams also use Aircall’s analytics features to understand how the support team meets its goals and identify areas for improvement.

Start Offering the Best of Both Worlds With Aircall

Your customer support team doesn’t have to choose between automation or personalisation to deliver stellar experiences. AI and the right technology let you introduce the perfect amount of automation to enhance your human team while maintaining a human touch in every interaction. 

With Aircall’s inbound call centre solutions, striking this balance is easy. We offer the tools support teams need to achieve the right mix of efficiency and tailored help in every interaction. Explore our call centre software today to learn more and book a demo. 

Sources:

1. CX Trends 2024 | Embrace the future of AI-powered CX. CX Trends 2024. Published 2024. Accessed August 30, 2024. https://cxtrends.zendesk.com/?_ga=2.207709649.2127918109.1723745286-1326269055.1723745286&_gl=1

2. ‌McKinsey. The value of getting personalization right--or wrong--is multiplying. McKinsey & Company. Published November 12, 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying

3. ‌Gartner Survey Finds 62% of Customer Service Channel Transitions are “High Effort.” Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-07-11-gartner-survey-finds-62-percent-of-customer-service-channel-transitions-are-high-effort

Published on October 30, 2024.