Do you ask yourself how you can improve customer service on your eCommerce site? A customer service automation tool could be exactly what your team needs.

The truth is, that most e-commerce businesses have numerous customer service tasks that can be easily automated since they are mostly repetitive and labor-intensive.

Fortunately, the market is flooded with customer service automation software that can help your company improve the purchasing experiences of your customers, save money, and direct your team’s attention to more important tasks.

In this guide, we’ll look at seven different ways to automate support for your eCommerce business without sacrificing service quality. Let’s get started! 

• What Is Ecommerce Customer Service Automation?
• 7 Different Ways To Automate Customer Service 

What Is Ecommerce Customer Service Automation?

Ecommerce Customer service automation is the process of streamlining customer service to eliminate the need for human intervention and to respond to customer requests as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This means that your company will be able to provide support around the clock, regardless of your customers’ location, circumstances, or time zones.

In fact, you can deploy these automated support workflows through your customers’ preferred communication channels, meeting your users where they already spend time.

7 Different Ways To Automate Customer Service

There are several scenarios in which your team could benefit from customer service automation. We’ve covered a few of them below to help you understand what an automation tool can do for your business.

1. Automated routing and workflows
2. Chatbots
3. Canned responses
4. AI-powered search
5. Automated agent training
6. Review collection
7. Customer self-service portals 

Automated routing and workflows

The last thing your agents need is to sort through dozens of issues that have nothing to do with their department. This is where an automated ticketing management feature can help to streamline the process of creating and managing customer service tickets. These tickets can then be automatically assigned to support agents based on factors such as:

1. Number of tickets open
2. Area of expertise
3. Availability check

and then address, manage, and resolve them while keeping the customer informed.

There are other manual tasks in customer service workflows that can be time-consuming and error-prone:

• Workload management can be automated to ensure that your agents have a balanced queue.
• You can set up trigger-based automated emails to notify your customers that their request was received and is being processed, etc.

Ideally, you can configure the automation tool to automatically perform the desired actions based on the conditions you’ve specified.

Chatbots

You’re bound to come across a chatbot that offers assistance on most eCommerce websites these days. Chatbots are gaining popularity among businesses and customers worldwide. In fact, chatbots are the fastest-growing brand communication channel, with a global market value of more than $1.3 billion expected by 2024.

Besides helping your business optimize customer service costs by cutting down on hiring, training, and paying employees, here are some of the benefits of using a chatbot for your customer interactions:

-24/7 Customer support

-Quicker resolutions

-Multiple language support

-Personalized customer experience, etc.

Key things to keep in mind while choosing a chatbot for your website:

• You should be able to connect chatbots to your live chat platform.
• The tool should let you add a chat widget to your website to help customers who browse your site.
• You should be able to deploy chatbots across multiple touchpoints to allow users to contact you via their preferred channels.

Canned responses

I’m sure you’ve found that your agents often have to waste a lot of time responding to some frequently asked questions. To save your employees’ time, you can set up canned responses for quicker replies.

An effective automation tool will allow you to:

1. Save already sent messages as canned responses.
2. Add new canned responses while communicating with a customer.

Canned responses can be used in the following scenarios:

• Greeting a customer
• Requesting more details about the issue
• transferring a chat to another agent
• Notifying customers that the agents are offline
• Updates on customer issues
• Denying a customer request
• Resolving a ticket, etc

AI-powered search

Another thing most agents need help with while interacting with customers is quick access to comprehensive product and service knowledge.

Setting up conversational search in knowledge bases is one way to accomplish this.

1. Connect a chatbot to a knowledge base so that your agent can enter the keyword(s) of the topic they’re interested in, as well as the category it falls under.
2. The chatbot then uses the inputs to search your knowledge base for articles that can assist your agent in real-time.
3. The ideal next step would be to give your agents access to these knowledge articles, which they can read or post to a communication channel.

Automated agent training

There is no denying the value of having an effective training program in place for onboarding new agents to your support team. More often than not, the quality of your agent’s learning experience is determined by the training resources you provide.

However, the costs of onboarding and training new employees can be significant. In contrast, an automated agent training experience can ensure that your new employees have a consistently positive experience while saving costs. IBM saved approximately $200 million after implementing e-learning.

There are a few tools available, such as Saufter, which includes a training module that allows you to train and test your team members based on previous chats/tickets. The platform even grades their responses, allowing you to track their progress.

Review collection

Here’s a fact for you: 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. When your customers read genuine customer experiences, it helps them make informed decisions about purchasing your product or service.

But, let’s be honest, managing reviews takes a significant amount of time. The last thing your team needs is to manually keep up with online reviews on various platforms.

If your business is receiving more than a handful of reviews each month, an automated solution will save you a lot of time and effort.

There’s also the question of scale: with an automated product, you or your team will be better able to collect and manage reviews as volume increases.

Customer self-service portals 

Most customers like to figure things out on their own. In fact, studies show that 73% of customers prefer to find answers to product queries on their own. 

Set up a self-service portal that provides information and solutions to simple and repetitive issues to help customers in resolving problems on their own.

Why is this important? 

Because your customer service team no longer has to spend time answering simple questions, your customers with more pressing issues can now receive the attention they require. 

(Here’s something to keep in mind- One of the best ways to make self-service work for your customers is to provide them with relevant, up-to-date information.)

Why Should You Check Out Saufter?

There’s no denying the potential payoff of automating customer service for your eCommerce business moving forward. We’ve listed some reasons below why Saufter could be the solution for you. 

• The helpdesk improves response time and productivity by providing AI-suggested responses based on previous tickets handled.
• It also includes an automated training module for your team members to be trained and tested.
• The helpdesk has an automated returns center where your customers can create their own return or exchange requests.
• Help out your marketing team by automating the collection of Google reviews, Trustpilot reviews, and user-generated videos from satisfied customers.
• Saufter integrates email support as well as AI-drafted emails. This can significantly reduce your email traffic as well as your workload.
• With Saufter all of your customer interactions and communications can be managed in a single location.
• You can include a live chat widget on your website to allow visitors to raise concerns in real-time.
• With a single click, you can integrate with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magneto, and Woo-commerce, among others.

Saufter offers custom pricing.

Start your 15-day free trial and see for yourself if it’s a good fit for your needs.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we’ve looked at how automated customer service allows your customers to get the answers they need when and how they want. A customer service automation software will come in handy if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform to streamline your customer service.

First, determine what types of workflows you need automated: email campaigns, agent training, user review collection, customer returns, and so on. Then, do some research to find the best customer support automation software for your company. To put all of these solutions to the test, you can start a free trial with Saufter’s helpdesk today.