Automation brings humanity back to digital customer experience

Legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov devised three laws for robotics:

1. A robot ought not to harm humans or cause harm to happen to humans through inaction.
2. A robot should obey human commands except if a command violates First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So, why are we talking about robots? Well, it is entirely likely that your organization will implement or already has implemented a kind of “robot” also known as automation. When it comes to automation in the customer and employee experiences, it must follow Asimov’s three laws for robotics. Simply stated, automation must be:

• Safe
• Efficient
• Predictable

Contrary to popular belief, humans and robots must rely on one another to build better, more human customer and employee experiences. But how?

Automate the Boring Stuff, Humanize Complex Tasks

In simplest terms, automation is technology which ensures that humans don’t need to do boring, repetitive tasks. Automation ought to help employees and customers so that they can get more done by saving time.

Imagine you work at a clinic that sees hundreds of patients per month. It benefits you and your patients to send automatic text message reminders about upcoming appointments or paperwork that needs to be filled out. Patients don’t have to worry about forgetting their appointments and you don’t need to manually text your hundreds of patients. Now, you can focus on seeing more patients and providing excellent, empathetic care instead of spending time sending out reminders.

While the time savings different businesses realize may be a few minutes or a few hours per day, every second adds up to big savings over a week or year. The result is that employees and customers save time, stress less, and have more meaningful interactions when they don’t need to worry about tedious processes before, during, or after an interaction.

What are the boring things you may ask? Often time it's necessary to start with good old-fashioned market research to understand the customer journey to help understand what needs proper automation.

Enhance the Customer Experience and Make Money

Businesses are increasingly implementing chat bots or interactive voice response (IVR) – that computerized voice that helps you check your bank balance over the phone – so that customers can self-help. As a result, customers get their answers faster and agents can use the time they gain from avoiding simple questions to address more complex tasks while customer engagement increases.

The effect on the business is less channel hopping from online to call centers, increased revenue from time savings, and greater customer loyalty. All this translates into money saved and money earned by your business.

Beyond IVR and chat bots, contact centers can automate dispositioning and agent notes with tools like Clarabridge’s Automated Narratives, saving thousands to millions of dollars depending on the volume of calls a contact center fields. Automatically tagging cases for follow-up and publishing to social media further saves your marketing and customer service teams time and money. Ultimately, this means more opportunities to interact with customers in ways that are more complex and fulfilling for employees and customers. Customer experience automation doesn't need to be complicated, using advanced software can help you get there and increase customer satisfaction in the process.

Utilizing an All-in-One Platform to Humanize Your Customer Experiences

All-in-one platforms like Clarabridge give you the ability to automate, analyze, and visualize your business processes so you can take control over your customer and employee experiences. More than that, Clarabridge puts the power to publish to social media, load 100% of customer feedback, and define new ways to measure performance with predictive analytics in your hands without needing a data science degree.

We make humanized experiences possible with automation because we do the same for our own customers and employees. Automation is not coming for your jobs; it is coming for the things you hate most about your job. Ultimately, you get to focus on the human aspects of your work, such comforting customers when times are tough or making them feel heard when you respond to their online reviews.

Automation enables empathy in customer experiences and digital customer service; embrace it as the robot that Isaac Asimov imagined it would be.