January Success Spotlight: Revamping Your Operations with Automation in Mind

This year, brands of all shapes and sizes – but especially those that are growing quickly — will need to start thinking more strategically about how they can automate additional parts of their customer service operations. That’s because in today’s digital world, automation in customer service is quickly becoming a necessary means to delivering an efficient support experience for agents and customers alike. Helpshift regularly delivers new features that allow brands to increasingly automate their service, and Customer Success Manager Tim Dien has outlined some of these capabilities and benefits below.

What are automations and what do they accomplish in the context of messaging-based customer service?

Automations allows brands to reach optimal efficiency, improve agent response times, issue resolution, and ultimately customer satisfaction (CSAT). At its most basic level, Helpshift’s automations are a key tool to automate the triage and routing process without agent interaction, so agents can focus on resolving more complex issues. I like to think of customer support as an extension of the brand experience. Providing quick time to first response, through automated replies, while automating the issue and queue management for administrators, helps our brands achieve that.

Additionally, Helpshift’s automations are a key capability that enhance other features, like AI-powered issue classification, custom bots, and asynchronous messaging. By combining this functionality with our other tools, brands have access to a powerful and complete customer service solution. They can ensure a quick response time, while allowing users to reply when it’s convenient for them without losing the conversation history or the brand experience.

What are some examples of automation use cases across different industries?

For eCommerce brands, we recommend deploying automations for the following scenarios:

• Segmentation. Tailoring the experience for specific customers makes sense. If you have a segment of customers with a high Lifetime Value (LTV), you are likely going to treat them differently. This can be as simple as assigning them to a specific queue with agents who are designated for handling high value LTV customers.
• Orders. Order-specific issues around shipping may have shorter SLAs due to time sensitivity. Automations can be created to route these issue types to a high priority queue.
• Seasonality or Promotions. Perhaps you are running a promotion or your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. Automations can be used to auto-respond to users with promotion and seasonal-specific messaging around response times. Alternatively, these issues could be routed and assigned to a queue responsible for these specific issue types.

For gaming brands, we recommend deploying automations for the following scenarios:

• Tiered Players. You may want to handle a specific set of customers (VIPs) or those who spend a specific amount separately — so you can use automations to provide different messaging and different teams to handle free vs. paid gamers.
• Multiple Games or Apps. If you have multiple games, automations can help route to game-specific queues to keep issues organized.
• Multiple Languages. If you support multiple languages, automations can help route language-specific issues to language-specific queues, or provide automated responses in that language.

What specifically is the Helpshift platform able to automate?

I touched on what automations can do and how to combine these functions with other Helpshift features. Here’s a list.

• Automatically assign issues to agents and queues
• Automatically tag issues
• Trigger custom bots based on issue types or keywords
• Send auto-replies based on issue type or time of day (business hours)
• Update issue status automatically
• Reply automatically to issues and resolve those that don’t need agent attention, such as feedback
• Combine with AI-powered issue classification to run specific automations based on issue labels
• Combine with custom bots to automate routine steps in a conversation
• Run in-app, end-to-end workflows within asynchronous messaging conversations

The most encouraging part: implementing and setting up automations is simple to do.

Automations help brands respond to customers faster, maintains SLAs, prioritize issues based on business-rules or segmentation, and enable automatic follow-up with customers. Leveraging automations alongside Helpshift’s other features such as AI-powered issue classification, custom bots, and asynchronous messaging, allows your customer service team to elevate your customer support experience and massively improve on existing levels of efficiency.

See our automations in action and request a demo today!