Helpshift Product: New Reminder Automations Automate Customer Support Follow-Ups

Automate Your Customer Support Follow-Ups with Reminder Automation

It’s no secret your Agents are busy. Between answering new Issues, filing bug reports, and keeping customers happy, anything to make their lives easier is paramount to helping Agents increase their productivity. That’s why we’re rolling out Reminder Automations. Now, with Reminder Automations, Agents don’t have to waste time reminding users that your company is still waiting for the user’s response.

When to Use Reminder Automations

How many times have Agents had to manually write to users if they had any more questions or check if the problem was resolved? Reminder Automations will run a customized follow-up message, based on the following properties:

1. User Type
2. Issue Type
3. Number of days waiting.

Issue type: Sensitive cases with low First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates often require more information from the customer prior to resolution. If you haven’t heard back from a customer after a certain period of time and you are dependent on them to resolve a case, apply a specific tag to trigger a Reminder Automation that will encourage users to reply to the Agent’s question.

Tag type: Often times, customers will request Agents to contact them again during a specific time frame. Leverage Reminder Automations with Issue tags to improve the followup process and deliver timely service to your customers.

Language type: If your app is localized in multiple regions, you might also notice different customer engagement rates between each of those regions. Personalization is key to communicating with all your users around the globe; consider customizing your Reminder Automations to cater to each user’s native language.

User type: How are you segmenting your customers? What relationship do they have to your business? Whether it’s through geographic location, behavior and usage, or device type, it’s important to segment and deliver the right message to the right user at the right time. For example: A mobile e-commerce app might have a different tone and follow-up cadence when interacting with specific segments of their customer base like VIPs or first-time shoppers because these groups are most likely to return if the experience is memorable. Create tags based on user types to automate customer personalization.

How to Create Reminder Automations

Navigate to the Automations section (Settings ⇒ Automations). You’ll now see a new tab labeled “Remind Customers after X Days.”

Just like New Issue Automations and Auto Resolve Automations, you’ll see a similar pop-up when you click ‘+Add Automation’.

Customize Your Reminder Automation

Take advantage of the conditional fields (shown above) to craft highly personalized follow-up responses that sound like a human, rather than a robot.

If you have multiple apps, you’ll want to customize the reply based on the app name. For those of you who support multiple languages, you should select the language and type you reply in that language as well.

For example, say you want to create a dynamic follow-up message prompting your customers for more technical information for a Bug related ticket (Tag = ‘Bug’). To create this Reminder Automation input the “Bug” tag in the field “Has these Tags”. Next, insert the text you would like your customers to receive in the follow-up message specifically for Bug related tickets in the text field under ‘Then’.

Messages could look something like: “Haven’t heard from you. If you are still experiencing an issue can you please let us know which page it happened on?

Keep in mind a good Tagging system in place will allow you to reap the most benefits from all Automation features.

Automation Best Practices

Automations are designed to automate generic messages and tasks. You should use them to save Agents’ time, but without the cost of a poor user experience that seems “canned” or robotic. Helpshift is designed to support a chat-like communication channel so you can connect with users with a human touch. The best advice for Automations is to use Automations for certain things, not for everything.

Good use of Automations: “Were you still experiencing an issue when adding the item to your shopping cart?”

Poor use of Automations: “If you experience crashes, please uninstall the app and then go to the App Store and download the latest version.”

Pro Tip: If you have Auto Resolve Automation running on the same type of Issue, you’ll want to make sure the “x days after” values are not the same. If the “x days after” values are the same then the user will receive two automated messages this will cause a poor user experience, as they will see to immediate messages. We recommend having at least a day or two difference between your “x days after” values for Reminder Automations and Auto Resolve Automations.

We’ve also modified the UI of Automations, now you can toggle between the three types of Automations horizontally like below:

1. New Issue Automations
2. Reminder Automations (Remind customers after x days)
3. Auto Resolve Automations (Auto resolve issues after x day)

If you have any feedback or would like to get more out of your Helpshift experience, please email our Customer Success team directly at [email protected].