“Thank you for contacting us. We aim to respond promptly within 24 hours.”
Sound familiar? Despite promises of quick responses, they often arrive only after a customer nagging you. And, sadly, we often miss the mark. Every customer has had the frustrating experience of having to have multiple conversations with your customer support team, or worse, getting no response to your emails.
As a result, it's no surprise that many customers encounter poor service and lose brand loyalty. In fact, 46% of Singapore retailers reported a decline in customer loyalty in the past year alone. For businesses, substandard customer service like this can undermine the painstaking efforts they put into building their brand, especially when you look at the customer complaints flooding social media platforms.
Brands are actively exploring technology solutions to address this challenge. Among the crucial elements of an effective customer service automation strategy, email automation stands out because it allows for personalized and natural conversations.
Optimizing email support is key to seamless customer service
In the age of instant messaging, email is often overlooked. But despite its emergence as a communication tool over 50 years ago, the humble email remains a fundamental pillar of business communication and customer interaction. In Singapore, a society with strong internet connections and near-universal use of smartphones, email communication remains popular.
However, due to the high volume of messages that customer service agents receive, customers may experience delays and poor service. Currently, many businesses still have outdated ticketing systems that fail to meet Singaporeans' expectations for a seamless and fast experience. Moreover, if contact service representatives are unable to respond to emails in sufficient time, how can the most important aspect of the customer experience, personalization, be achieved?
Therefore, the challenge lies not in the email medium itself, but in how businesses manage email inflows. Fortunately, email automation powered by generative AI is revolutionizing customer support by enabling faster and more personalized support, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Deliver personalized customer interactions in email with Gen AI
According to McKinsey research, 71% of consumers expect companies to provide personalized interactions, and 76% are dissatisfied when they don't. Nothing degrades a customer's perception of a brand more than a one-size-fits-all, mechanical email response that lacks personalization and natural flow. The importance of conversational language and personalization in ensuring customer satisfaction cannot be overstated.
Recent advances in large-scale language models (LLMs) and generative AI have revolutionized customer interactions by enabling real human-like conversations at scale. Unlike previous attempts at automated email responses, modern email automation solutions can provide a superior customer experience. They excel at deciphering complex, unstructured emails written in natural human language, accurately identifying the essence, emotion, and urgency of each communication.
Email automation with Gen AI allows personalization to go beyond simple keyword recognition to understanding multiple intents within complex emails. It extends to understanding the unique characteristics of the user behind the email. By leveraging user insights, organizations can craft contextual responses that resonate with individual recipients.
Consider a scenario where a customer emails a product complaint to a clothing retailer. Traditional automation may offer standard apology and return options. However, modern email automation solutions are much more advanced. Automatically run workflows, consult knowledge bases and CRM systems, and drill down into user profiles to understand purchasing patterns and preferences. With this insight, the system creates a personalized response that recognizes the customer's dissatisfaction, offers a refund, and even offers future discounts (if company policy allows). The tone of the response adapts to the customer's emotions, adding empathic and contextual responses.
Additionally, Gen AI enables email automation that mimics the natural flow of human conversation. By analyzing previous interactions and employing advanced LLM and natural language processing algorithms, the system generates authentic, human-like responses. This feature enhances overall customer service, allowing customers to receive real-time responses and personalized interactions, making them feel heard and valued.
Brands invest significant resources to develop their reputations in competitive markets. But still low customer satisfaction scores indicate gaps in the customer experience journey. Email automation tools are not an instant solution to poor experiences, but they play a vital role in providing top-level customer service. By moving beyond the rote, cookie-cutter responses that are common in email communications, companies can improve the quality of their service. This is a key customer-centric goal that is central to sustainable business growth.
Rashid Khan is Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Yellow.ai.
