Think of a business.

That business wishes it could automate more.

Basically every organization is interested in increasing their use automation because it can save them so much money.

That’s a fair reason! But an even better one is the potential to improve the experience your customers will have.

Here are 3 kinds of automation that fit the bill:

1. Conversational AI

What used to be the domain of large businesses (with tons of money) is now available to a far wider pool of people.

First – what is conversational IVR?

Think of an Amazon Alexa, built specifically to provide service and answer questions about your business.

Customers phone in and get through to the AI system.

They don’t have to get service that way… but plenty of people *do* choose to.

Which makes total sense – lots of people are used to speaking with Alexa or similar systems every day. This is a pretty small step for them.

The benefit for your business is the big potential cost saving.

If just 5% of your callers take this self-service route instead, that’s probably worth a lot, right?

On top of that, the callers which do still go through to agents have likely provided some info to the AI.

That info is delivered to the agent, so the call is far easier to handle.

Win-win!

2. Helpdesk Automation

Helpdesk tech is another tool that used to be exclusive to rich businesses.

But not anymore!

Now the world and his aunt has a helpdesk system with some kind of supporting ticketing in place.

But don’t you find that new tech sometimes solves old problems and introduces new ones?

With Helpdesk ticketing, the new problem is acting on tickets, making sure they’re up to date, and creating tickets from different contact channels.

Helpdesk automation effectively removes this problem by integrating your cloud helpdesk software with any other channel – even telephony!

That means getting automated ticketing.

Agents are prompted to follow up on outstanding issues and, if a customer calls back, the agent can immediately see what they last called about.

It’s a pretty huge deal to automate all that work; it definitely saves agents dozens of hours each, and means that more of each call can focus on actual conversation rather than manual research.

3. Contact routing

Another pierce of automation that saves an incredible amount of time – contact routing.

Here’s a scenario – you walk into your local coffee shop. You go there all the time, but the barista still asks, “Hey – who are you?”

You give the barista your name and ask for your usual… but the barista doesn’t know what that is.

And you start wondering why you keep coming here!

That’s the scenario most contact centers create for their customers. Their customer satisfaction metrics are in the gutter because they hardly ever use available customer data to tailor their services to that customer’s needs.

That’s a major CX problem but it’s also more expensive than it needs to be.

Automate contact routing draws from data records like your CRM and your Helpdesk to figure out what kind of service any given customer needs.

 Everything gets faster, and customers get the service they actually need – not generic service.

Conclusion

There are a ton of automations that small businesses can benefit from.

As a rule of thumb, look for affordable projects that make life easier for your customers and you can’t go far wrong.

Serving people is what makes the difference between whether or not they choose you over the competition.