What is automated support?

Automated support involves using technology to provide customer support that doesn’t require input from a human agent. Customer support can be automated in several ways, both on the agent side - with auto-assignment of tickets, auto-responses, etc and on the customer side with chatbots, proactive messaging, and IVR. 

Automating support streamlines your customer service offering, allowing you to provide 24/7 support at scale. It can improve customer satisfaction while taking a weight off your support team’s shoulders. Automated support can take care of the mundane and tedious support tasks, freeing up your reps’ time to focus on customers with complex questions. 

What are the benefits of automated support?

There are many benefits to incorporating automated support into your customer experience strategy.

1.  Scale customer support without increasing costs

Every company wants to scale customer service cost-efficiently. Automated support lets you do just that. Chatbots and self-service features can handle more and more customer interactions, freeing up your support rep's time to focus on more pressing matters. As a result, you can handle significantly more customer issues without having to hire more staff. 

2. Improve agent productivity by automating processes

When agents do answer queries, automated support features can make them even more productive. Intelligent ticket routing removes the need to manually assign tickets and means reps can get to work faster. Canned responses and auto-responses also mean reps can work smarter and not harder. 

3. Empower customers with self-service support

The majority of your customers expect a self-service portal, and automated support lets you deliver that for them. Features like chatbots and knowledge bases mean customers can find answers quickly without waiting for your reps to respond.

4. Reduce stress for customer service reps

If your reps are feeling overwhelmed by customer support requests, automated features like chatbots can give them the break they need. By handling the mundane parts of customer service, automated support features allows agents to focus on work that keeps them feeling valued and aligned with business success without risking burnout. 

How can you deliver automated support to customers?

Here are 4 powerful ways in which you can automate your customer support

1.  Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are one of the most common and powerful forms of automated support. In many cases, a well-designed chatbot will be able to resolve your customers’ most repetitive questions without needing to involve a customer service rep. Even in situations where they can't, intelligent and contextual agent handovers can save your reps a significant amount of time. 

Chatbots can also provide proactive support and point customers in the direction of self-service tools like knowledge bases.  And because chatbots can resolve thousands of visitor queries at once, they are the perfect solution for delivering scalable, automated support across all of your channels.

2. Self-service support

Self-service support tools such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and onboarding guides that help customers find answers to their questions without having to contact one of your customer service reps. While these tools aren’t as high-tech as chatbots, they are still an excellent and easy way to automate support.
 

3. Proactive messages

A clever way to automate support is to reach out to customers and ask if they need help before they have the chance to contact a customer service rep. Typically, these messages will come from a chatbot on your website or app, but you can also send push notifications on messaging apps. 
 

4. Automated ticket assignment

Automated and intelligent assignments allow service requests to be routed depending on predefined criteria. That could be expertise, skill level, or bandwidth. As a result, you cut the administrative duties of customer service managers in half while ensuring an even distribution of work and that the best reps are tackling the right problems.

What to look for in automated support software?

We recommend looking for the following features when finding the best customer service software for your brand.

1. Conversational AI chatbots

Chatbots are key to providing customer service automation, but businesses must look for a solution that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to detect the intent of prospects and learn from questions over time. Chatbots should also be omnichannel, allowing conversations to be automated across channels like web, in-app and messaging channels.

2. Automated proactive engagement

By reaching out to customers and visitors before they reach out, you can significantly decrease your customer service reps’ workloads and improve the customer experience. 

3. Intelligent agent handoff

Automated support won’t always seamlessly resolve customers' issues. When it fails, your software needs to provide intelligent handoff to reps with the capacity to solve issues quickly.

4. Automated messaging and canned responses

Automated support software should extend to customer service reps. Features like automated messaging and canned responses help them move faster and solve more queries.

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How do brands use Freshchat to automate customer support? 

Freshchat provides all of the features listed above and more. It’s why these customers have been able to see amazing results by automating support with Freshchat.

1.  Klarna agents are able to meet the company’s aggressive first response SLA of 60 seconds

Buy Now, Pay Later brand Klarna uses Freshchat to provide rapid customer service at scale across seven countries. Using Freshchat’s IntelliAssign feature, tickets are automatically routed to the right team member based on pre-set assignment rules. Reps can also auto-resolve conversations when customers don’t respond after a set period. 

2. Delivery Hero uses Freshchat to streamline communications between delivery riders and support agents

Message routing for the world’s leading local delivery platform is automated based on the rider’s country, city, language, and several other custom properties to ensure messages are sent to the right rep. Proactive messaging prevents customer service queries by notifying riders of potential delays. Automatic translations from multiple languages to English, before being fed into a global centralized database, make it possible for Delivery Hero to capture and analyze granular data. 

3. Travix  uses a digital-first approach for 80% of customer queries:

This leading global online travel company uses Freshchat’s automated support features to deflect customers from agents and achieve their goal of near-complete digitization of their customer service:. This was achieved using Travis, the company’s automated chatbot that was designed to handle six of the most common customer queries. Today, half of the customer queries are handled by automated solutions. 

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Frequently asked questions about self-service software