September 2024

6 Reasons Your Team Needs Email Automation for Customer Service

Posted on September 13, 2024 The Quiq Team

These days, more and more of the tedium of contact center work is being delegated to sophisticated automated platforms—and email is no different.

Email automation for customer service is an exciting frontier that promises to lower costs, boost retention and revenue, and ultimately make customers happier.

But how does it all work and what are the specific benefits of email AI automation? That’s what we’ll discuss today.

What is Email Automation for Customer Service?

Email automation for customer service allows you to automate and personalize email communication, significantly improving response times, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. It allows businesses to handle high volumes of inquiries while maintaining a human-like touch in interactions.

You’re probably already sending emails to customers, but with the right AI email support, you can quickly respond to a question about a warranty on a recently purchased item, clarify when an order is going to be delivered, etc. Your customers will be happier with faster responses, while your agents will have more time to do what they do best: solving more complex customer issues.

What Problems Does Automation for Customer Service Solve?

All the material below covers the benefits of email automation for customer service, but it’s worth briefly touching on why this is important in the first place. A great way to do that is by focusing on the impacts of email automation on your business and your customers. Let’s take these in order.

Without an asynchronous email platform, just about the only way to interact with customers at scale is by having a person respond to each message. This simply isn’t tenable for businesses dealing with a huge volume of inbound queries. Reducing this volume—and getting customer inquiries solved faster—is one of the places where email automation for customer service really shines.

There’s more. Ensuring that your emails reach consumers’ inboxes and not their spam folders is an ongoing challenge, which can ultimately impact the effectiveness of your communication strategy. Worse, traditional email also suffers from the fact that creating personalized and relevant email content for a large and diverse consumer base can be astoundingly resource-intensive and complex, to say nothing of the cost of sending large quantities of emails.

Now let’s look at things from your customers’ perspective. Manual approaches to processing customer emails tend to make it hard to offer your customers the experience they want. Almost half of today’s customers expect businesses to respond to emails in less than four hours, which is tricky to do unless you have someone (or an email AI assistant) assigned to that one task.

For all these reasons and more, savvy CX directors are spending serious energy looking into asynchronous email platforms and what they make possible.

6 Benefits of Email Automation for Customer Service

Speaking of making things possible, let’s now turn our attention to the major benefits of using asynchronous email software to automate customer communications.

1. Email Automation for Customer Service is (Relatively) Easy to Use

First, let’s address a common fear around adopting a new technology such as email AI, which is that it will be difficult to adopt and integrate.

Obviously, different platforms have different learning curves, but in our experience most asynchronous email platforms have been built around ease of use. They generally take little time to incorporate into your broader tech stack, and require very few technical skills.

Plus, since email AI is usually layered onto existing email platforms (like Zendesk), there’s a pretty good chance you’ll spend most of your time interacting with software you already understand.

Email management platforms usually provide APIs to help businesses manage and process their email workflows. This means that it is easy to get your AI orchestration platform and email management software to work together.

2. Your Team Can Answer Every Customer Email Faster

Owing to the sheer volume of communications, CX teams often face an uphill battle in email triage.

This is a place where email automation for customer service has a distinct advantage. Good platforms allow you to set up automated filters that perform actions based on subject lines or the language in the body of the email itself, which means emails can be tagged, sorted, and routed to the correct agent.

And now that the age of generative AI has dawned, many issues can be resolved directly by an AI assistant for email. If the problem happens to be a tricky one, the emails can still be sent to a human agent. This means customer questions can be answered quickly and your agents can focus on those requiring a human touch.

3. Email Automation Can Achieve Personalization at Scale

Speaking of the “human” touch, emails tend to be better received when they’re personalized to each customer. But here’s a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan: this personalization doesn’t actually have to be provided by human beings any longer!

This wasn’t the case even five years ago, but today’s AI email support solutions can personalize emails at scale using techniques like retrieval augmented generation. When a customer asks a question about an order, for example, their order history can be used by an email AI assistant to provide as many specific details as will be helpful.

4. Automation for Customer Service Can Help Boost Retention

The three preceding sections ultimately point to one important fact: email automation for customer service can help you boost retention. When you can ensure issues aren’t falling through the cracks and personalize each email, you stand a much better chance of meeting customers where they are and addressing their concerns in a way that doesn’t feel like you see them as one name among many.

5. It Provides Enhanced Data Insights

A further benefit of email automation is that the AI can analyze trends in customer inquiries, providing valuable insights for improving products and services. This will allow you to quickly and easily discover what is resonating and what’s falling flat, opening an endless frontier of customizations and fine-tuning.

6. It Can Improve Your Bottom Line

Finally, email automation for customer service can make you more profitable, in two ways:

First, it can lower costs. Once upon a time you might need a person whose entire day was devoted to sending and answering emails, but with AI email support, that’s less often the case.
Second, such automation can boost conversion rates better than batch email. Research indicates that using an automated solution can increase conversion by as much as 180%—a figure that simply can’t be ignored.

What are The Drawbacks of Automation for Customer Service?

Now, let’s spend a few minutes discussing some of the drawbacks of email automation for customer service. You should view these more as pitfalls to look out for than true drawbacks, as most of them can be avoided by judiciously evaluating your options.

1. You Have to Make Sure to Maintain the Personal Touch

Personalization is one of the most important advantages of these automated solutions, but only if you actually use them for that purpose. You could use an asynchronous email platform to streamline the process of sending batch emails, which would be to miss one of the biggest opportunities such platforms represent.

Make sure that any platform you choose offers you the ability to draw on your internal resources to make sure each email feels as though it was written for the recipient.

2. Email Automation For Customer Service Can Still Have Technical Issues

Above, we said that using asynchronous email software is easy, because it is. Nevertheless, it does still have more moving parts than Gmail, which means there will be some learning curve, and there’s always the possibility that you’ll run into technical issues.

None of this should be a major obstacle, but it’s worth mentioning so that you budget your time and onboarding procedures accordingly.

3. Some Automation Systems Don’t do well with Complex Issues

Finally, it’s commonplace to note that automation systems across a variety of different industries can fail to deal with subtle or complex issues. They might handle a routine query without issue, but other things might need to be routed to a human.

This isn’t a surprise, and shouldn’t turn you off from using AI conversational email tools anymore than it would turn you off from using large language models. It just means you need a way to catch tricky problems so they can be sent to the human beings with the skills to fix them.

Make the Most Use of Email Automation for Customer Service

Throughout this piece we’ve painted a rosy picture of this technology, and that’s because we believe it’s the future of email-based customer service interactions. With it you can reduce costs, reduce your agents’ workloads, and make customers happier, all at the same time.

If you’re intrigued, we encourage you to learn more about Quiq’s email AI here.

How to Text Message Your Customers

Posted on September 6, 2024September 9, 2024 The Quiq Team

We know consumers are shopping online more often than ever before and using mobile phones to do it. When Americans were surveyed in 2019, it was estimated that approximately all of them (96%) own a cell phone, and three-quarters (76%) use it to make purchases.

Though we’ve come to take this state of affairs for granted, the adoption and growth of cell phones in such a short time is astonishing. Smartphones followed soon after, and with that, consumers began communicating more than ever through text messaging and via social channels like Facebook. It wasn’t long before businesses started taking advantage of those communication preferences.

If your company isn’t seizing the opportunity represented by texting customers, you’re missing out. When you send a text message to customers, it can be personalized, easy, and fast, making this method the way consumers expect to be able to find answers and ask questions.

In what follows, we’ll flesh out and defend this claim, providing tips for texting customers effectively along the way. Let’s get going!

What is Business Texting for Customer Service?

Not so long ago, phone support, email, and web chat were the norm in how businesses and customers communicated. But these channels have largely given way to text messaging, which is why more and more businesses have made texting customers one of the pillars of their customer outreach strategy.

The reason behind this shift is straightforward: messaging is already the preferred method of communication for customers and most employees. Both parties are already comfortable with the channel because they frequently use it themselves, and unlike emails, text messages are almost always read and replied to.

There are, in other words, plenty of reasons why customers want to text you. Texting provides options, fits more seamlessly into our increasingly busy lives, is naturally less formal than a phone call or email, and can be handled asynchronously. What’s more, with today’s new large language models, personalization can now be done at scale, and an AI assistant is always available, day or night.

Is SMS or Rich Messaging Better for Texting Customers?

One small nuance that’s worth addressing is the differences between old-fashioned short message service (SMS) and rich messaging. When text messaging was first introduced, it was done with SMS. As its name implies, this approach was limited to sending relatively short messages consisting only of text.

As the ubiquity of smartphones grew, so did the range of messages customers wanted to send, leading to the far more expansive ‘rich’ messaging. Rich messaging supports emojis, buttons, video and audio, product cards, and more.
Rich messaging has become the de facto standard, so if you think you should be texting customers more often, you’ll probably have to do it with rich messaging.

4 Best Practices for Texting Customers

Now that we’ve explained a bit about why sending text messages to customers makes good business sense, let’s make sure you know how to do it effectively. In the next few sections, we’ll discuss some of the general best practices for texting customers.

1. Be Conversational (and Professional)

First, strive to strike a balance between being professional and being conversational. People expect texting a business to be more professional than texting a friend, of course. But we live in a relatively informal age, and text messaging gives businesses more interesting, less stuffy ways to engage with customers. Emojis, for example, add personality and make conversations livelier.

All of this is made possible through rich messaging, which we briefly discussed above. Rich messaging is what powers the interactive buttons, images, carousels, and other elements that make Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp so delightful. This fosters a superior customer experience in part because it’s just more enjoyable to consume and respond to these rich messages, but also because it helps customers get what they want faster and more easily.

As a matter of policy, it’s probably wise to identify and approve a set of emojis your contact center agents or AI assistants are allowed to use. This is a policy that must be set in the context of a brand’s voice and tone, which is critical to delivering a consistent customer experience.

Then, text messages are uniquely well-suited for two-way conversations, so make sure your text messages are set up for that. When texting, customers expect to be able to reply back. After all, a conversation is not very useful if it’s only one-sided.

2. Be Timely and Consistent

Customers will text your contact center for help with a variety of issues, so make sure you have policies and procedures in place to answer promptly. Text messaging enjoys the advantage of being asynchronous–meaning conversations can be paused and restarted by either party at will–but customers will still expect you to get back to them quickly.

To expand on this point a bit, text messaging is very convenient for customers and (in a different way) for agents. A customer can fire off a text asking about returning an item (or something similar), then drop their kids off at school, then reply to your agent, then pick up their dry-cleaning, and so on.

On your end, however, you should treat these incoming messages with the urgency you would show for any other communication channel.

Now, having said that, text messaging offers benefits to agents as well. They may need to reply quickly, but they can also juggle a number of conversations at the same time in a manner not possible with a phone call. This means more issues shipped, a reduced average handling time, and improved customer satisfaction.

3. Personalize Your Replies with Generative AI

Alright, now we turn to the big opportunity in customer experience: generative AI. If you’re like us, it was pretty much immediately obvious that LLMs like ChatGPT were going to have a profound impact on our industry, and this intuition has been borne out by the evidence. LLMs can automatically resolve many issues, especially fairly routine ones, without the need for a human agent to intervene at all.

They also excel at personalizing content to individual customers at a scale inconceivable just two years ago. Machine-based personalization isn’t new; you’ve surely noticed how Spotify and Netflix both learn what you like and offer uniquely tailored recommendations, for example.

Until generative AI, however, personalizing a text message to customers could only be done by a human being. But now, models can leverage retrieval-augmented generation to reply in customer-specific ways–by pulling content from a knowledge base or answering a question about returns by looking at purchase dates stored in a database, for instance.

4. Make It Easy to Opt-In or Out of Texts

Finally, you should make it as easy as possible for clients to choose whether they want to continue receiving text messages from you. Customers may get a lot of value from texts about promotions, order status, and appointment reminders, but they’ll get fatigued if you bombard them with excessive or unwanted messages.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to be more explicit about the differences between inbound and outbound messages here.

For outbound messages (to customers), brands need to collect explicit customer permission for each of their use cases. If a customer grants permission to receive outbound messages for order updates, that permission can’t then be used for promotions or other use cases as well.

For inbound messages (from customers), the most important thing is that customers be able to easily send a message when they’ve got a question. These will often be related to an initial outbound message, such as when an order was delivered and the customer messages to ask how to initiate a return or assemble the item. There’s no opt-in requirement in this scenario, but, as with outbound messages, you shouldn’t take that as carte blanche to send endless text messages to customers.

Ensure your messages are relevant, not spammy, and let customers control the quantity.

Final Thoughts on How to Text Message Customers

Conversational AI platforms for CX, like Quiq, make it easy to build better connections by texting customers. Learn more about how Quiq enables SMS here, and get started today with this powerful communication channel!