In today’s ever-changing business landscape, predicting which customer behaviors will persist post-pandemic can be challenging. However, one area businesses can control is the experiences they create for their customers. Automation, particularly when combined with AI, can help businesses improve and refine these experiences, resulting in higher sales, better resource utilization, and increased customer satisfaction. In fact, most organizations believe that customer experience is where their digital transformations provide the most value.
To help businesses achieve these benefits, IBM has identified six automation projects that can have a significant impact. These projects are not only cost-effective when using cloud software solutions, but they are also applicable to virtually every business. They have been found likely to create persistent value going forward. Furthermore, each of the induvial projects is able interact with and build on the other to multiply positive effects.
So, if you’re looking for ways to improve your customer experiences and increase customer loyalty, consider implementing one or more of these six automation projects. Not only will they provide immediate benefits, but they can also help future-proof your business in the long run.
Refund Request Approvals
One common challenge that many businesses face is managing customer refund requests efficiently. Without proper automation in place, these requests can become time-consuming, delay response times, and lead to inconsistencies, which can negatively impact customer satisfaction. In addition, manual refund approval processes are often expensive to scale and prone to errors, resulting in inaccurate service fees being repeated on the next bill, which further exacerbates customer frustrations.
To overcome these challenges, businesses can leverage decision services and workflow management to automate the refund approval process. Here’s what the automated refund approval process looks like:
- When a customer submits a refund request, it is automatically routed to a decision service that considers multiple inputs, such as customer propensity to churn, profitability, and transaction history, to determine whether to approve the request.
- The decision service ensures that the automated decision is as reliable as one made by human experts, minimizing the chances of errors and inconsistencies.
- Once the refund request is approved, the system issues the refund using workflow capability, notifies the customer, and updates backend systems accordingly. Manual intervention is only needed for exceptions, which further streamlines the process and saves time.
It’s important to note that while automation can significantly improve the refund approval process, businesses should avoid automating a personal apology when a human touch is warranted. In cases where a personal apology is necessary, it’s essential to have customer service representatives who can provide a human touch to ensure customer satisfaction.
Route customer requests
Our next automation project looks at the challenges of managing a large volume of incoming customer requests through various communication channels, such as emails, phone calls, and chats. Without proper automation in place, this can be a time-consuming process that detracts from other important tasks, such as identifying opportunities to better serve customers.
To address this challenge, businesses can leverage intelligent automation to streamline the customer request routing process. Here’s what the automated customer request routing process looks like:
- AI technology classifies incoming communications and extracts relevant data, such as the nature of the request and the customer’s contact information.
- A decision service determines the handling priority of each request based on multiple factors, such as the customer’s loyalty and profitability. This ensures that high-priority requests are handled first, improving response times and customer satisfaction.
- A new case is created to process each customer request using workflow capability. The case is automatically populated with the extracted data, making it easier for customer service representatives to address the request promptly and accurately.
While automation can significantly improve the customer request routing process, it’s essential to avoid automating actions or responses that appear insincere or lack empathy. Businesses should leave sympathy and empathy to human representatives to ensure that customers feel valued and heard.
Overall, automating the customer request routing process can help businesses save time, improve response times, and ultimately enhance the customer experience.
Update customer information
Automating the process of customer information updates can be beneficial in terms of efficiency and accuracy. By building robotic process automation (RPA) bots that can read and update customer data, organizations can ensure that customer information is updated in a timely and error-free manner. For instance, when a customer submits a new address online, the bot can automatically validate the new address and update the existing systems. If the address is invalid, the customer can be contacted for resolution. However, it is important to avoid automating any tasks or processes that a trained employee could do quicker than the customer.
Remote data upload
Enabling customers to upload information remotely and easily can greatly improve their experience and save time for employees. Here is what a remote data upload process looks like when automated:
- Customers use their mobile devices to capture relevant documents, such as IDs or forms.
- AI-powered mobile capture extracts necessary information from the documents, such as names or policy numbers.
- The extracted data is automatically validated to ensure accuracy, and customers can verify it before it’s uploaded to the system.
It’s important to avoid automating any actions that may annoy customers, such as sending multiple irrelevant texts or emails. Automated processes should enhance the customer experience, not detract from it.
Compliance verification in retail sales
In retail sales of regulated products, compliance verification is critical to ensure that only eligible customers are able to purchase these products. However, relying on manual oversight can be time-consuming, prone to errors, and difficult to scale. By automating the online purchase validation process in real-time using decision services, retailers can improve the efficiency and accuracy of compliance verification. Here’s what compliance verification looks like when automated:
- The system automatically evaluates regulated items against a predefined set of eligibility rules at the point of sale, before the order is confirmed.
- If the item meets the eligibility criteria, the purchase is approved, and the order is processed.
- If the item does not meet the eligibility criteria, the purchase is rejected, and the customer is notified with the reason for rejection.
- The system monitors the order and can adjust offerings to improve the customer experience based on decision outcomes.
However, it’s important to avoid automating advice in unclear situations. Instead, retailers should provide a quick and easy way for customers to reach a friendly, well-informed human who can provide assistance.
Respond to customer queries
In today’s fast-paced world, customers expect quick and accurate responses to their queries. Customer service representatives have to handle an increasing volume of customer queries and transactions. Despite the help of basic chatbots, it is not always possible to meet customer expectations for speed and quality. Often chatbot interactions end quickly because the chatbot has limited capabilities to respond accurately, or because the customer is unsure of what they need.
To address this challenge, businesses can integrate intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) into the systems used by customer service representatives. This improves efficiency and outcomes, as IVAs can emulate human service and support agents, guiding customers using natural language processing (NLP) while interpreting the context and providing relevant answers and feedback.
Once automated, a customer query is routed to an IVA, which engages with the customer in a conversational manner, providing real-time solutions to the customer’s problem. If the IVA can resolve the query, it executes the appropriate action. However, if needed, the IVA will route the customer to a human employee who can provide further assistance.
It is important to note that businesses should avoid automating actions that cause human employees to manage laborious tools or systems instead of connecting with customers. Instead, the aim should be to use IVAs to assist customer service representatives in providing quick and accurate solutions to customer queries, while enabling employees to focus on building stronger relationships with customers.
In conclusion, automating customer-facing processes can improve the efficiency, accuracy, and speed of customer service while also enhancing the overall customer experience. By automating tasks such as customer information updates, remote data uploads, compliance verification, and responding to customer queries, businesses can save time and resources, reduce errors, and free up employees to focus on more high-value tasks.
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation provides a comprehensive platform for automating a wide range of work at scale. Its modular design allows businesses to fill tactical gaps while laying the groundwork for future growth-driven automation. With a subscription-based model, businesses can start new projects quickly and affordably, positioning themselves for long-term success in an increasingly digital world. Find out more at https://www.ibm.com/products/cloud-pak-for-business-automation.