Automated customer support helps provide instant responses that customers have come to expect in the ecommerce industry. Since human agents cannot be available all the time, automation is a lifesaver.
In fact, automation and chatbots save up to 30% in customer service costs by reducing the number of support tickets that agents handle.
Let’s discuss everything about customer service automation in the ecommerce business and 10 practical examples of support automation that you can implement in your business today.
What is ecommerce customer service automation?
Ecommerce customer service automation is a way to respond to customers using a knowledge base, rule-based chatbots, or artificial intelligence for conversation automation. It is designed to help customers find answers on their own, or create a bot that instantly answers common questions before handing over a chat to an agent.
Automated support reduces agent workload, saves time and money, and helps customers get instant responses to their queries.
As user expectations rise, brands need to leverage technology to offer what users want, with minimal effort.
10 ways to instantly automate customer service for your ecommerce business
But where can you start automating your support?
Automating your support is not a 1-day task. It’s a continuous, iterative process where you automate your support as you learn new questions that customers ask regularly.
Let’s look at some of the ways with which you can automate your ecommerce customer support.
1. Self-service to help customers find their own answers
What do customers do when they first experience a problem with a product you offer? They search for a solution online.
This is where self-service shines. If you identify all the common questions that your customers have in the first few days while using your products, you can provide an answer to all of them on your website.
If a customer looks up a solution and your website shows up with an answer, your customer will know that you understand their pain points, and have taken the effort to solve them in advance.
Here are a few self-service options to implement starting today:
- A “Getting Started” email sequence that helps your customers go from knowing nothing about how your product works to using it as their daily driver (depending on how complex your product is)
- Detailed help center articles that answer all questions that may come to a customer’s mind when using the product.
You can find what questions your customers are asking by browsing through all your support tickets or talking to the support team. - Alternatively, do a Google search as below to find all the results that mention your brand name, except your website. Replace the brand name and website as required.
“Brand name” -site:brandname.com
- Create an FAQ section on every landing page that answers questions that your customers may have immediately after reading that piece of content. With this, you’re leaving very little for them to guess or search about and giving them clarity about your product.
- Add a self-service widget on your website that sticks to the bottom of every page. If a customer has a query, they can check the self-service widget or search through your FAQs right there.
2. Respond to order or refund/return requests with auto-reply
Once the order has been placed, customers have fewer, more common questions:
- Where is my order?
- How to cancel my order?
- How to initiate a refund/exchange?
- How to use the product?
- Etc.
Most questions revolve around these topics and once you identify them, it becomes easy to respond to these questions with auto-responders.
DelightChat allows you to create rule-based autoresponders that identify words from a conversation and respond with an appropriate response based on them.
3. Create bots to provide answers from knowledge-base during chat
A simple rule-based chatbot can handle many common inbound queries.
If you understand the queries well, you can easily make do with very simple bots that work by identifying keywords from the conversation.
For example, if daily workflow includes a lot of order tracking, shipping details, payment issues, or product information queries, you can identify the words that are used in most of these queries and create chatbots to reduce more than 30% of the daily workflow.
Alternatively, virtual agents can also assist with reducing the workflow of your in-house team. A comprehensive help center can make things easy for your agents to answer all queries with minimal training and only forward queries that need higher-level decisions to be made.
4. Speed up support with canned responses
If you find your agents responding to a ticket with a very similar response multiple times, it’s more efficient to create canned response templates for them. Yout agents can then pick the canned response template right from the list and paste the response, edit the required details like customer names, order details, etc and send it over.
There’s also a better way to do it.
If you use a help desk app for Shopify like DelightChat, you can pull customer information from your Shopify account directly into a canned response.
So when a customer asks about their order, your agents do not have to look up any information. Canned responses can include dynamic fields that add the required information within the message.
5. Assign tickets to the right team members automatically
If you have dedicated team members for different types of queries or customers, you can automatically assign tickets to them. Business rules within your help desk tool can help you create this automation.
If you’re on DelightChat, go to [Automation Rules] from the Settings menu and click [+New Rule].
- Next, enter the name of the rule and switch the rule on
- Under “When”, select the channels that you want the rule to be active on, and if the rule should run on new ticket creation and/or when there is a new message on an existing ticket.
- Select the conditions when the automation should run. In our case, we’ll use the “Message Body” > “Contains” > all the keywords for a specific tag
- Finally, select the action under the “THEN” section by selecting “Assign to” and select the team member that you want to assign the ticket.
- Once you’re all set, click [Save Rule]
6. Tag customer tickets based on words within the query
Categorizing tickets is another added work for your agents on a daily basis. And it’s easy to miss or add a wrong tag to your tickets due to human error. But you can automate tagging of your tickets by identifying keywords in the tickets.
This makes it easy to tag all the common queries without introducing human error to the workflow.
If you’re on DelightChat, go to [Automation Rules] from the Settings menu and click [+New Rule].
- Next, enter the name of the rule and switch the rule on
- Under “When”, select the channels that you want the rule to be active on, and if the rule should run on new ticket creation and/or when there is a new message on an existing ticket.
- Select the conditions when the automation should run. In our case, we’ll use the “Message Body” > “Contains” > all the keywords for a specific tag
- Finally, select the action under the “THEN” section by selecting “Add Tag”. Next, select the tag that you need to assign based on the keywords you added in the previous step.
- Once you’re all set, click [Save Rule]
7. Simplify workflows with external tools (Zapier/Integromat)
Customer support teams that leverage automation between multiple applications can speed up their work exponentially.
Zapier, Integromat, Microsoft Flow, Automate.io, and many such tools offer integration between multiple tools across the web.
You can create automated shipping updates for your customers by integrating your shipping provider with Zapier and using it as a trigger to send an email to your customers.
You can further customize the workflow based on your requirements by editing the workflow.
The possibilities are endless when you combine two different business tools together and create a seamless workflow that not only simplifies work for your agents but also keeps customers happy!
8. After purchase automation
Once a customer has completed a purchase, you can create automated workflows to send a thank you email, add data from Stripe emails to a Google sheet, and save the payment confirmation attachments to a google drive folder.
Most of these integrations can be performed with either of the tools mentioned in the previous point. You can get creative and build multi-step workflows that allow you to go further into the customization and automation of your daily tasks.
9. Sync your customers to an email list to nurture them
Most email marketing tools allow you to integrate with Payment providers. For the ones you cannot, automation tools like the ones mentioned above can help you get your data in the right places.
You can even choose to trigger an email sequence after a customer completes their purchase by syncing their emails with your email marketing tool.
10. Create follow-up reminders for team members
Many customers request follow-ups depending on the product or service that you offer. It’s hard to keep track of these requests using a calendar or to-do list apps.
An easier way is to have the reminders set up within the helpdesk software of your choice.
On DelightChat, you can enable follow-up reminders for individual conversations.
- Open up a conversation where a customer has requested to follow up
- Click the “clock” icon on the top right of your chat screen
- Select the date and time for the follow-up
- Now click [Set Reminder]
When the time is triggered, the user will automatically receive a notification on their DelightChat notifications panel.
Keep automating
Automation needs an intricate understanding of your daily workflow. Once you map out the exact steps you perform to complete a task, automating those steps becomes much easier. DelightChat, a helpdesk tool for Shopify brands, is built to reduce as many steps of your customer support workflow as possible.
From automatically tagging, assigning, and responding to incoming queries, to using dynamic Shopify data in responses so your agents don’t need to look for the data, we’re building DelightChat to make your day-to-day support tasks as easy as possible.
Feel free to check the myriad of features or compare DelightChat with the competitors. And if you have any questions, our team is available to assist at support@delight.chat.
