The cost of providing customer service is about to go down even further. Read this post to understand why and help yourself optimise your internal customer service team or re-negotiate with your external supplier.
Another post about AI and other wonders of technology?
No, this is a post about the financial benefits of all the buzz.
Is it a post about cutting costs without having the customer experience in mind?
No, the beautiful thing is that tech solves repetitive and simple problems right away and improves the customer experience!
There are four important reasons for us invoicing our clients less in the future than we do today. The exact same reasons are relevant for your internal customer service team and the reasons will help you set the right expectations for any external provider you might use.
The four reasons are
We all get smarter!
Across the 250 shops we work with today, there is one conversation for every five orders. 10 years ago we had a conversation for every second order and we currently even have clients with a mere one conversation for every 10 orders. The reason for this development is that we, as consumers, are becoming experienced online shoppers and know our way around. As online sellers, we are also much more experienced, make fewer mistakes and are more proactive in our communication with customers. All this leads to a decrease in customer service load and your costs.
Quick response comes from quick responses
We call them quick responses. The pre-written answers to repetitive questions in customer service. They take some time to prepare and maintain, but when done properly, the daily work becomes efficient and an employee manages more responses per hour, meaning the cost per response should go down. We reduce our cost per email with quick responses and will reduce our clients price per e-mail conversation from April 1.
Auto-tagging of conversations
We are currently testing a tool that allows us to automatically tag all conversations using AI and machine learning. This means the exact moment a customer’s email hits our system, we know what it is about and can route it directly to the appropriate employee or directly to the warehouse if we, e.g., need them to stop a cancelled order - or, as discussed in the next bullet, secure an automatic action in our back-end followed by an auto-generated mail to the customer. In addition, the tool will provide detailed information about the reasons for contact and allow you to fix problems early and at their roots to avoid the next conversation. This is going to reduce costs as well!
Automated customer service
Granted, it might not sound like a service. However, we have realized that fast customer service is also good customer service - and automated customer service is fast!
Do you need help figuring out the right shoe size or changing the delivery address to your vacation house? A clever chatbot might be able to handle this - at 11 in the evening. That is nice and it is only the beginning, we will see a lot of questions being handled without human touch and this will lead to a lower variable cost.
These four elements all reduce the cost of customer service.
However, making the investments necessary to benefit from these new technologies yourself can be a mouthful. We have made those investments and are confident we will experience a positive return over time as we put them to use for all of our clients.
In other words, reach out to MakesYouLocal to hear how far we are along the AI- and technology route and whether we might be able to accelerate your way to a cost reduction on customer service.
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