What is automated customer service?
Automated customer service is what businesses offer customers when they combine various support channels and features that can aid customers without human intervention.
Whereas traditional customer service usually relies on one-to-one conversations handled over the phone or via email, automated customer service enables customers to self-serve using one of a few intelligent tools and touchpoints:
Chatbots
Chatbots imbued with natural language processing can handle a range of customer service tasks by engaging in direct conversation with customers. A key benefit here is that customers can dip in and out at moments that suit them without having to repeat themselves—the tool reads the entire conversation history every time it responds.
Knowledge bases and FAQs
For some specific, common customer enquiries, it’s sometimes most efficient to point people to a knowledge base that can help them find answers at their own pace and without having to engage in conversation at all.
Ticketing systems
Prioritising and servicing customer interactions with digital ticketing systems is an important, if slightly less glamorous, part of the service automation puzzle. Automatically being able to route queries to the right people at the right time can help businesses streamline issue resolution—and ensure that no customer slips through the cracks.
Automated workflows
Sometimes customer service automation means lining up time and resolution-saving processes that trigger behind the scenes. That includes rule-based systems that work on ‘if this, then that’ principles to help flag important cases, issue returns or discounts, and send customers to the right departments.
Predictive resolution
If you can spot emerging issues before they affect a wide pool of customers, you’ll be able to take actions to nip things in the bud. Customer service software with inbuilt predictive analytics can automate the process of fire fighting—helping ease the burden on human customer service agents.
What are the benefits of customer service automation
Customer service automation offers benefits that compound and cascade across the business, with time savings feeding into agent productivity, and that extra productivity influencing key metrics like customer satisfaction.
These are the four pillars of customer service that all get a boost from customer service automation tools:
1. Speed
There are two facets to the speed gains on offer with customer service automation—raw speed of response from chatbots and automated workflows, and added efficiency gifted to human agents. The latter comes firstly via better prioritisation. Automated customer service allows simpler issues to solve themselves, freeing up agents to handle more complex customer interactions with lower wait times. Then there’s automated contextual aids—insight delivered to agents on calls and live webchats that help them get to the bottom of things faster than ever.
2. Availability
Automated customer service tools work 24/7, 365 days a year. That means any time a customer wants to get in touch, they can—and they’ll get a response in seconds. This can be critical for businesses without massive contact centres, where round-the-clock staffing might not be realistic. A chatbot that understands natural language, for example, can handle multiple chats at once, at any time of day—with automated systems that flag priority issues as they arrive.
3. Prioritisation
While every customer interaction is important, not all customer enquiries have the same level of urgency and complexity. Automated customer service solutions allow teams to ensure the most pressing tickets get sent straight to human agents, with intelligent filtering that lets customers self-serve whenever possible.
4. Human agent empowerment
In contrast to the 24/7 nature of some automated customer service tools, the people in your customer service team have a finite number of minutes in the day in which to make an impact. The good news is that these tools can help them do just that through a combination of all the benefits listed above. Smarter prioritisation helps human agents focus on the cases that matter, while automated workflows and notifications provide context-rich insights in the moment—helping support agents do their best work with superhuman understanding and empathy.
And all of that is vitally important because, while every interaction is a chance to deepen a customer relationship, it only takes one bad customer service experience to change that. Our research shows that:
- 32% of customers switch after one poor experience
- $4.7T annual revenue is at risk from preventable churn
- 64% of customers prefer tailored experiences
When implemented with care, automated customer service can help avoid that churn risk while making good on today’s customer expectations.
How to implement customer service automation
Choosing the right automated workflows and tools is all about understanding your customers’ needs, and how each implementation will impact the human agents working alongside them.
Your customer service automation journey should entail working through a few key steps—but with an understanding that customer service is never a solved problem. Instead, it’s an ongoing process of iteration and improvement.
Map customer journeys
Customer service teams often benefit from working through the process of customer journey mapping. A high-quality journey map can help pinpoint where problems are rearing their heads, where people’s needs aren’t being met, and which issues are better fits for automated solutions. Increasingly, customer service leaders find it difficult to persuade other senior stakeholders to make changes - that is, spend their own budgets to fix the issue - rather than just let the customer service team function as the ‘clean up crew’. Good journey mapping encourages leaders from different departments to take collective accountability and understand how their team contributes to the customer’s journey, and to work together on the best problem resolution.
An example here might be that, in a given month, a handful of customers report receiving the wrong size or colour of clothing, while others are calling in to ask if their package has been despatched.
For the latter, stronger automation might help provide more granular tracking and clearer delivery expectations upfront. For the first issue, though, beyond an initial interaction, automation is less likely to resolve the issue—and it’s important to understand this difference. By sending the wrong item, trust has been broken, so a human agent is more likely to be able to bridge the gap.
Deploy the right tools for your needs
Implementing customer service automation software is all about building an integrated ecosystem—one where digital agents, human expertise and data can work together. Crucially, not all tools are built for the same purpose, so you’ll want to look at where your team feels the most friction.
If, for example, your goal is to reduce ticket numbers, look for experience management solutions that can scour your existing help docs to resolve common queries without human intervention.
But more complex workflows require more complex tools. If you need multi-step processes (like processing refunds or updating CRM data), you’ll need a more ‘agentic’ solution with deep integration across departments and systems.
Seamless omnichannel customer experience is a necessity in either scenario. If a customer starts a conversation with a chatbot on your website and later calls your support line, the human agent should be able to see the entire transcript—and the AI's attempted troubleshooting steps.
A general rule of thumb with tech implementation is to start small and scale up. That means automating the low hanging fruit jobs—the reactive processes like tracking, refunds and password resets—first. Once you have that nailed, you can think about moving towards more proactive customer service automation, like messaging a user who has encountered a known bug before they even reach out.
Test and learn
It’s important to keep a continual eye on what’s working and what’s not. Customer feedback and user behaviour analytics are powerful insight sources here—and they need to be solicited and monitored on an ongoing basis.
Customer service automation tools aren’t ‘set and forget’ solutions; you’ll need to ensure that processes designed to improve customer satisfaction aren’t accidentally working to reduce it. And that means a deep understanding of the metrics that underpin successful customer support resolution—like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Automated Resolution Rate (ARR), and Resolution Time (vs. Handle Time).
The goal here is that for any new tech deployment, there are processes in place to monitor its effectiveness on an ongoing basis.
Keeping the human touch
Automating customer service isn’t a silver bullet, and technology won’t ever replace the most crucial part of customer support: human interaction. As such, it’s critical to gather data around which channels are most in use, what the most common reasons for needing service are, and which are the easiest or hardest to resolve. This will help highlight where AI can help, and where humans are best kept at the forefront.
At Qualtrics, we’ve developed a unique new benchmark to help organisations measure how and when human agents work best versus automated interaction handling: the Agent Effectiveness benchmark, AP3.
Broadly, this breaks down along contact themes; the more important or higher stakes the reason for contact, the more likely a customer is to insist on connection to a human agent. And it’s with this in mind that we measure the key behaviours that impact customer perceptions and outcomes.
These behaviours are:
- Friendliness
- Knowledgeability
- Understanding needs
Without friendliness, a customer will have a poor impression of the organisation. Without knowledgeability, the customer is more likely to contact again, or not be able to understand why a particular solution is being recommended. Without feeling that their needs have been truly understood, the customer won’t have confidence in the resolution. Acting as an intersection between efficiency, satisfaction, and compliance, each of these behaviours contributes to a truly successful interaction.
And, crucially, these apply to both AI and human interactions. So if you can work to score each interaction against those behaviours, you’ll know which customer interactions can be satisfactorily handled by an automated system, and which ones work best with a human at the helm.
What’s the future of customer service automation?
AI and agentic workflows may be the current cutting edge of automated customer service software, but the ongoing goal is to provide more holistic, connected, and personalised solutions.
The future in this field is all about connecting data silos and channels to provide a more seamless experience for every customer. In practice, that means a future where humans and automated tools can increasingly hand over to one another without friction, and without customers really feeling the difference—except where they explicitly value a human interaction.
Customer service automation can already handle the small stuff—refunds and login issues—and the big problems—like billing issues and renewals. But what will increasingly matter in tomorrow’s customer experience environment is being able to use customer data and history to link all of these capabilities in a way that feels truly personal. All without losing the human touch.
The Qualtrics difference
Qualtrics® offers automated customer experience management solutions that empower human agents by augmenting their abilities with next-level tools.
The result is data-driven, omnichannel customer service that helps businesses build an unbreakable connection with their customers. That includes our pioneering Experience Agents™, which take in the signals your business is already collecting, understand the context behind them, and act instantly to safeguard relationships, reduce risk, and build trust.
With Qualtrics, you’ll resolve issues directly inside surveys, protect your commitments in every ticket, and rescue revenue in your customers’ most important digital moments.
