Should you use an automated customer service?

Deciding on what kind of customer service you want to use in your business depends on a variety of factors. Some factors you want to take into consideration is the size of your company, how much money you want to spend, how sophisticated your computer systems are, as well as various other factors.

There are two main types of customer service, live and automated. Live customer service employs the use of employees answering the phone, responding to emails, participating in a live chat session, etc. Live customer service representatives talk directly to the customer to help solve their problems or to answer their questions.

Automated customer service employs the use of computer generated responses. Some areas that are automated are search features on websites, FAQ sections, automatically generated emails, obtaining account information by phone, paying bills by phone or online, and anything else that does not require talking to an actual person.

While both types of customer service options have their advantages they both also have disadvantages. Employing people to deal with your customers can get quite expensive, but at the same time installing an automated customer service process can be expensive. The difference is that the cost of the automated customer service process goes down over time, the most expensive part is the initial installation, but with live customer service the cost remains the same because you have to pay your employees and the cost of employing them.

One of the advantages of employing live customer service help is that you can solve the complex issues for your customers that can not be solved online. One example of this would be a charge on your customer's credit card that they were unaware of. Part of this problem could be handled automatically, like what the charge is, when it was made, the amount of the charge and other general information. But where you can run into problems is if the customer believes the charge is fraudulent, many times when there is an unexplained charge customers do want to talk to a person to ensure that it is taken care of promptly. While customers can file a fraudulent claim online without the aid of human interaction, it gives them a piece of mind to know that the problem is being addressed.

The advantage of a live customer service department is the disadvantage of having a fully automated customer service department. If you use an entirely automated customer service department then your customers will not be able to speak to customer service representatives if they can not solve the problem on their own.

The most effective customer service process would be a combination of the two. For the easier problems and solutions you can use an automated customer service process, but you can still have customer service representatives available for your customers to talk too. This is already quite popular in larger corporations, but even smaller businesses can accomplish this.

By designing a website with a search feature and a FAQ section you are employing the use of an automated customer service process. By having people personally answer email questions, and answering phone calls you are using live customer service.

In deciding if you should use an automated customer service process instead of a live customer service process depends on how much money you want to spend and what kind of service you want to give your customers. As a business manager you need to fully evaluate the needs of your customers and if those needs to be can be meet by using an automated system, a live system, or if they are better meet by combining the two.