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Transforming Customer Service with the Power of Artificial Intelligence in Automation
In the age of the enhanced customer experience (CX), companies can’t afford for their CSRs to be bogged down by repetitive enquiries and tedious manual data entry for orders. Read on to learn how the power of AI in automation can free your CSRs to provide the CX that your customers expect.
The expectations of the customer are continually increasing on a B2C level due to the ability to receive what they want faster and more efficiently than ever before. This expectation transfers to the B2B relationship too, because, if you can get something that quickly as an end user, why not as a company?
Reaching these rising expectations of pro-active customer service for teams can be a challenge, when Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are bogged down by repetitive enquiries and tedious manual data entry for orders. CSRs are having to spend time triaging emails to send to the relevant departments, prioritising incoming calls, and answering basic enquiries about shipping, invoices, and even change orders. All this time could be time spent doing value-adding activities such as calling customers to place orders following a quotation, building customer relationships, and prioritising urgent enquiries of a more complex nature.
Three of the main stand-out points of concern for the companies we support are:
- Time-consuming and error prone processes
- Inefficient communication and collaboration
- A lack of data visibility and insights.
AI-driven automation can drastically alleviate these pains
- Using solution built in processes and workflows streamlines processes.
- Internal and external communication within the automation solution removes the need to flick between tabs and systems, with everything being logged in one place for full visibility and easier reporting.
- Eliminating copy and paste activities, or having to physically type out orders from PDFs, XML, Images, or even the email content itself, by using solutions which incorporate AI technology to extract key information.
- Also using AI to analyse the sentiment of incoming emails and triaging those emails to prioritise negative enquiries that could be complaints, and saving time because nobody has a need to manually allocate tasks to individual CSRs to resolve.
Real World Example
Palmer Holland, an Esker customer, is a speciality chemical and ingredient distributor of raw materials. Relying heavily on email for process management and customer enquiries, they had a member of staff dedicating at least 4 hours a day to simply routing emails to CSR’s. Their order management process was also challenging and required CSRs to check many boxes just to enter an order. Part of their aim was to drastically reduce time spent on customer enquiries and data entry.
“It replaces a lot of manual order entry for CSRs, so they’ve been able to get that time back in their day. Now they can just focus on managing the orders in our ERP system instead of validating them. Esker has been very helpful in that regard.”
Aiza Toor - Customer Service Manager, Palmer Holland.
Some of the key results Palmer Holland achieved by utilising Esker’s AI-driven automation solutions included:
- Incoming enquiries are now correctly classified over 90% of the time
- Reduced average email routing time from approximately 4 hours per day to 4 hours per week
- 96.8% of orders are now correctly identified thanks to Esker Order Management
Additionally, Esker’s user-friendly interface allows for easy onboarding of new CSRs or other team members.
To read more of this case study click here.
When selecting AI-driven automation providers, it is crucial to evaluate a few key factors to ensure a successful and long-term partnership.
- Consider the company’s attitude towards research and development to ensure the solution is going to grow with your business and stay up-to-date with the market leading technologies.
- Have you done your research via independent sources such as leading market analysts? What do they and the provider’s customers say about the automation, delivery and service?
- Is the supplier taking the time to understand your needs fully and do they have a proven track record of addressing similar areas?
- What additional support would be available once the automation is in place?
- Is it a user-friendly interface that will be easy to onboard new team members with, and does this work with other departments and their processes?
- Finally, look at the values of the company and check whether they align with yours.
Hi! We’re Esker and we’d love to help your organisation to automate your Customer Service processes with our AI-driven solutions. Contact us for a chat, or request a demo today!