Productivity gains are often made when a repetitive task with a yes/no decision process is automated to relieve a person from performing this task. This frees that person up to do more worthwhile work (not, hopefully, to get laid off) and the task is performed without a person having to remember to do it.

Problems occur, however, when automation is poorly planned. There are many areas that can benefit from automation, including customer service and support, but if the automation causes delays, customer dissatisfaction, or other errors, the productivity gain is nullified. This is what has happened with interactive voice response; an attempt to automate too much of the process has been made in many cases and customers are rebelling.

In customer support, the interaction with the customer is not what is automated, it is the customer record that has automated pieces of the process.

For example, a customer phones in a complaint. The customer service representative interacts with the customer and submits an incident to the customer support software on his behalf. At that point, automation can streamline and protect that incident ticket until completion.

Automation patterned on business rules can:

• send an alert to a designated support person if a service level agreement is in jeopardy 
• escalate a ticket that meets certain rules: ticket of a high value customer, ticket indicating a risk of injury or death from malfunction, ticket that is aging past a certain time/date
• enforce step-wise processes where a previous step must be completed before going on the the next step
• automatically respond to an email with an acknowledgement of receipt or even with suggested answers to questions and issues, or
  
• opening an incident ticket using the information in the email plus sending the incident number to the customer to use for status checks.

These are all processes that benefit from task, or business rule, automation. Each decision is a clear yes/no. There is no need for the customer to interact or be involved. The automation ensures that critical issues or timing is not missed due to human error and streamlines an element of the customer support process such as a speedy acknowledgement of an email.

What this does is take processes that are highly subject to human error and makes certain they get done, leaving the human to do the actual interacting with other humans.

Great customer service is meant to be dripping with generosity and positive attitudes. Most customers who contact customer service, whether by e-mail, in person, or (heaven forbid) by telephone, are not happy about a service or a product that they have received so they are not in the best of moods. Dealing with company representatives who are cranky at worst and lethargic at best will not present an adequate solution. In fact, it will only create more issues by making the customer more agitated which in turn will create bad press.

Seeing as this is January, the month for resolutions, let us in the business world make a resolution to keep that positive, generous spirit, which was so contagious in December, and show that we are proud to be helping our customers, that we truly appreciate their business and that we will do everything in our power to make their experience with the company and its products a beautiful one.

However, simply making that resolution isn’t enough. Like weight loss, you actually have to do something to make it happen.You can stand in front of a mirror all day long wishing those love-handles away, but they won’t go anywhere until you start doing something about it. In the matter of customer service though, here are a few ideas that will help keep that new resolution.

First, let your information be easy accessible. Whether the customer is looking for basic FAQs or who to send their issue to, the information should be easily obtained on the company website.

Second, give the customer options on how to report their problem. Don’t just let an automated voice on a phone do your customer service work for you. Allow the customer to start an incident ticket through the self-service center or talk to a representative via Live Chat, both of which are contained in PhaseWare’s arsenal of software.

Third, keep the customer in the loop. Keeping the customer updated lets them know that they aren’t forgotten and that the issue is being resolved. PhaseWare’s Event Engine software does this task automatically, which helps you do your job better.

Finally, do a follow-up with the customer. Give them a week or so and then check-in to make sure that the problem stayed resolved, not to mention, it shows customers how much you truly appreciate their business.

All in all, just remember what kind of business we are in and who keeps us in it—the customer.

We write a lot about submitting incidents (or trouble tickets) and how they will be more rapidly resolved using a customer support software application.  We even talk about tracking that ticket from end to end. And saving money and time along the way.

But what happens in the middle? How do the incidents get resolved more rapidly? Where does that trouble ticket go in its journey through the customer service software?

Well, let's go back and look at how we might keep track of those tickets now: how we escalate them, assign them, how we make certain they are closed. 

For many smaller enterprises, the ticket tracking system is very manual. It may be as little as a spreadsheet with some sticky notes thrown in. If that. For those using a rudimentary customer support solution, it is possible the system is made up of several non-integrated parts  causing tickets to be passed along somehow from one system to another either through a human keying them in or some sort of software patch to try to help things along.

As you can see, these approaches can result in errors and lost or unclosed trouble tickets.  Part of the problem is the inability to see the whole process at once, part of it is the introduction of errors through human data re-entry or poorly written code. Human error include those introduced into the data or process as it is retyped, a common problem with manual and/or repetitive processes.

One of the best things about an integrated customer support software solution is the ability to solve these two parts of the problem. The first by making data available for all areas of the system and the providing the ability to create specific reports with it. The second problem, of error introduction, is reduced for much the same reason. The system is integrated and all parts "talk to each other" with ease. With APIs the system can even talk to a different system when needed without introducing special patches. 

But what software is really good at is automating routine steps that can be easily missed in a manual system. And while some of those abilities are part of many applications there are times when even more automation is needed. With an application such as PhaseWare's Event Engine many more of the incident management routines can be handled by the software. 

For each step of the process, an incident ticket is evaluated to determine where it needs to go next according to some preset criteria. This might be called business rule automation or workflow process automation. The rule may be as simple as determining if the trouble ticket should be escalated or closed, a typical if-then choice involved in many software routines. Or the rule may be more complicated, such as the rules about performing a multi-step process in which each step must be done in a specific order, something else software does a lot of. 

Anywhere a choice must be made, a business rule can be written to cover it. And if a business rule can be written for a human to implement, then software can implement it just as easily and much faster. Some examples may be:

• a business rule to automatically send an email status report at a predetermined interval
• a business rule to list the steps to handle a trouble ticket through a complicated investigation workflow with the steps in order, so no steps are missed because the system will not allow the second step to be input before the first. 
• a business rule to automatically escalate incident tickets when they have aged a specific number of days with no interaction.

This is just a small list of some of the potential business rules or processes that can be automated. The software handles it in the background making certain it doesn't fall through the cracks, that all the i's are dotted and t's crossed, and minding the p's and q's along with it.

Email from customers can be replied to and incidents created automatically using the content of the email to deteremine what needs to be done. Reports can be produced automatically and in real time if certain targets are missed. Ticket status can be automatically updated.

Not only does automation customer support software perform all these things automatically and without adding error, it does so without all the human intervention and busywork of the old system. Maybe each shift has one or more agents assigned to create incident tickets from incoming emails, go back to check up on aging tickets, or re-enter data into a separate application. Those agents can now be used to do the important stuff:

• interacting with our customers,
  
• creating relationships,
  
• upselling and cross-selling,
  
• giving the company a human voice and a human brain where it is needed most.