Business automation is becoming more crucial for service providers worldwide. With the rising demand for digital support and services, organizations struggle with the massive load on their traditional call centers and agents.

Digital customer service diverts some load off the call centers, allowing agents to respond to multiple customers simultaneously and immediately. Still, a significant amount of time-consuming tasks are executed by human agents, requiring extensive costs and operational resources.

Repetitive questions are a common issue in customer service. Customers often ask similar questions, making agents repeatedly respond with the same answers. Another common issue is the lack of knowledge regarding the customer. 35% of customers ranked a representative’s lack of knowledge or inability to resolve the issue as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. The second most frustrating issue (32%) is having to repeat the same information multiple times.

Various industries such as healthcare, telecom, finance and more, face similar challenges in customer service. Among these challenges: low agent productivity per customer, slow response time, lack of knowledge, and poor customer experience. Overcoming these customer service challenges is achievable through business process automation.

Business Automation Definition and Benefits

Business process automation (BPA) is described by Gartner as the automation of complex business processes and functions beyond conventional data manipulation and record-keeping activities, usually through advanced technologies.

BPA, according to Gartner, focuses on “run the business” as opposed to “count the business” types of automation efforts and often deals with event-driven, mission-critical, core processes. BPA usually supports an enterprise’s knowledge workers in satisfying the needs of its many constituencies.

Why Business Automation is Important For Customer Service  

1. Lowers operational costs and increases efficiency – an automated customer communication platform can send automatic messages and solve issues for multiple customers simultaneously 24/7 without the need for human intervention. By doing so, your business can save time and manpower while increasing efficiency.
2. Generates a unified customer experience through omnichannel communication – an automated customer service system allows your agents to manage communication from one central interface. Agents can communicate in large masses 24/7 through multiple channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Chat, Email, SMS, Video Chat, and more while providing a unified experience across all channels.
3. Greater agent productivity and satisfaction – using an automated omnichannel communication platform increases agent productivity by allowing them to respond to multiple customers simultaneously. It also reduces the load on your call centers and agents, by allowing them to focus on solving more complex issues. Better agent productivity means more efficiency and greater employee satisfaction.
4. Boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty – immediately replying and solving customer issues in one interaction generates higher satisfaction and preserves brand loyalty over time.
5. Measure performance and optimize communication based on reports – tracking your performance is an essential part of automated communication. Tracking and measuring data allows your organizations to adjust accordingly in order to improve customer engagement and business processes.

Businesses worldwide understand the importance of process automation. According to a McKinsey survey, 66% of companies across sectors were piloting solutions to automate at least one business process, up from 57% two years earlier. However, the number of companies that fully automated at least one function grew more modestly, from 29% in 2018 to 31% in 2020.

Commbox Business Automation: Must-Have Features For Your Customer Service

Commbox provides end-to-end automation solutions for customer service in companies and enterprises, making them autonomous. Using Commbox AI-based platform, businesses can automate recurring tasks that are excessively time-consuming, allowing agents to focus on more critical tasks. Commbox automation solution impacts any aspect of customer service, including users, customers, employees, and partners.

Meet The Commbox Automation Hub

Commbox offers multiple automation capabilities and features that can automate your customer service and business processes. Doing so saves time, manpower, and other resources while increasing productivity, effectiveness, and satisfaction among your employees and customers.

The Commbox Automation Hub includes three main components: Studio, AI and Rules.

STUDIO – The studio allows your business to automate processes using integrated data from all internal systems (CRM, ERP, billing, etc.). Using the studio, you can create customized bots and manage your entire customer communication from any channel (WhatsApp, Messenger, Chat, etc) through one central interface. The studio also allows you to create automated workflows according to your business working hours plan.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Commbox’s AI can understand your customer intentions and trains your agents to do the same. Your agents can understand customer intentions from all communication channels without the need for technical knowledge and provide customers with ready-made answers from the knowledge base that it creates. Using AI, you can automatically engage customers and perform predefined actions upon identifying their intentions based on complex logic.

RULES – Commbox allows you to determine rules and actions to automate customer service. Rules can run even before a customer inquiry was made, set by keywords or a defined trigger, without using a script. Rules can also change the current inquiry channel, send automatic messages, add tags, change the inquiry status, route to a different channel or launch other CommBox apps (e.g. chat, forms).

The Commbox platform includes more innovative features, modules, and integrations to improve customer service and business processes.

• Digital signature – this module allows customers to sign forms during a conversation with your representative. It is a co-browsing tool that enables representatives to monitor and guide the customers through complex forms.
• 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) – the two-factor authentication (2FA) module is a two-step verification and authentication process used as an extra layer of security. It will send an SMS message after the password is typed in to verify the platform user identity.
• Customer Verification – this module allows external services to verify customer actions (i.e. approve the payment through a third-party credit card service). It allows representatives to identify customers and verify external actions in parallel to the actual conversations with the customers.
• CRM Integration – Commbox also contains multiple integration modules for CRM’s such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle. These integration modules allow you to easily connect your CRM resources with the CommBox platform.
• API – the CommBox REST API allows you to integrate and perform queries to CommBox systems. The API is based on REST principles. It supports GET, POST, and DELETE requests. After receiving your request, the API sends back an HTTP code as a response in JSON.