We were joined by Randy Berridge, Head of Community Operations at Dott and Sarah Al-Hussaini, Co-Founder and COO at ultimate.ai to hear about how automation unlocks customer experience opportunities how to do it right.

When most support leaders think about automation they think about automating live conversations. However, Sarah told us that 60% of agent work happens outside of conversations with customers. Agents update fields, execute processes and carry out crucial but repetitive tasks. These are the opportunities that should be automated.

Randy sees automation as a connecter of channels. By the time an interaction reaches an agent, automation should have done the work to get all the necessary context and information for the agent to be as impactful as possible during a real time conversation. Dott are working to have high quality / low effort experiences for their users and agents. A way to start using automation is to set up automated account verification flows which reduce average handling times by 30%.

Working against the clock? Here are some of the key takeaways:

Deep dive into your data to spot the opportunities for automation.

• Investigate the overall handle time of interactions on both ends of the spectrum. Randy looks at what has an incredibly low vs. high handle time.
• Look at the number of touches. Contacts with one touch are prime for automation.
• Be aware of costs. Consider where you need to improve because of overspending.
• Clock the wait times. Proactively remind users that you’re waiting for information from them to solve their problems.

Stay away from pre-built models and templates.

• Using automation templates can feel like a quick win, if they aren’t set up with the historical customer service data your organisation has, the automated experience won’t feel bespoke and tailored to your customer.
• Using data to properly scope out the intent of your automation is critical to get the right structure for customers.
• Be honest with yourself about what you can achieve in the early days of your automation journey. Don’t try and make all the magic happen by setting up an end to end self service journey. Take your time in stages and phases to make it impactful and ensure you don’t cause disruption for users, team members, managers and the business.

Don’t automate the serious stuff.

• Anything safety or risk related is not for automation. Human touch is critical to show your users that you genuinely care for their safety.

Tell customers they’re speaking to a bot.

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• Offer transparency to your users and let them have a say on which journey they would like to choose whether that’s an automated or human experience. When customers opt-in to automation businesses see an improvement in their CSAT.

Automation is a modern operating model for support teams.

• Automation is going to look easier. It will be easier to make the compelling case to your business that you need to do it from the beginning of your brand lifecycle.
• When structuring your organisation, it’s won’t be about whether you automate but how much you automate.

Hear directly from Sarah & Randy and learn more about their experience in automation by watching the webinar.