Automate Away The Wait - Jason Wong

What can your business do to automate the customer support process to save not only you and your team money and time, but the customer's time as well? Automating turns any customer support process into customer success, with each automation saving you, on average, one minute, which can quickly compound into hours per week extra that you can take advantage of, freeing you up for more important and valuable work. Doe Lashes own Jason Wong explains how you can get your average ticket-time down from over a day to just two hours, and other major savings.

Going Manual. You may ask, 'why not just go automated to begin with?' It seems like it would save you time and money on first consideration, but in truth you would be going about it blindly.  Without the hands on experience with your business, discovering its specific habits, hazards and hinderances, how you automate may not address any problems it should be fixing, or losing effectiveness altogether. Start from the bottom before you climb your way to the top.Know Your Data To Grow Your Data. What is the most common concern for most customer service contacts? Identify what is taking up most of your time, and automate it away. Chances are your number one time-waste for your service branch are tracking order requests, a process that was automated years ago for the majority of the industry. Know what problem takes up your time to begin with, then automate the solution with Macros, like those available through Gorgias.Automate Your Initial Response.  No one likes feeling ignored, especially not paying customers.  By automating the beginning of every customer service interaction to be as positively and receptively as possible, you not only keep a potentially frustrated or upset customer  calm and engaged, you buy your team some time to do some leg work that might otherwise annoy the customer, or may even solve the problem. It doesn't matter if it's obviously automatically generated if the following contact is answering the initial question or solving the client's problem.Teamwork Makes The Dream Work. Now that you've saved your customer support team from the doldrums of being an on-call FAQ, it's time to put them to work where they are most needed. Study your traffic figures, and determine when your customers are most likely to send in a ticket. If there's periods during the day when there are only a few tickets per hour, then there's really no need to have someone getting paid to do then what could easily be done later during busier hours. Develop a shift schedule that makes your team more efficient, and saves you money on staffed hours.Go To The Next Level. Eventually you'll start noticing patterns in other aspects of your business, such as outreach to potential partners, suppliers or promotional teams, which can be tedious and time consuming, and often left in the hands of you, the shop owner, who already is far too busy. Don't hate, automate. The same systems that help your customer service team can help you. Automate your systems, automate your operations, automate your outreach, automate your promotion  and marketing. Automate as much as you can, and never stop looking for new ways to save time.

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