The best possible outcome of automation is to ensure certain goals are reached consistently. For example, if your health and safety planning protocols reliably ensured a 0% safety failure rate throughout the entire premises, that’s what we might call an excellent system. But would it mean that its procedures will never need to be updated? Of course not.
As such, any form of automation and management will need some form of human touch. Learning how to apply that, deftly, without breaking a well-operating system, is a skill in itself. Many business owners are having discussions such as this as they try to figure out where new AI protocols and management opportunities could exist within their operational framework.
Customer service is a great example. This is because if you were able to quickly sort through customer outreach and complaints without using up valuable support agent time, that’s a worthwhile approach to gun for.
But at the same time, the need for human attention often implies that a system may have gone wrong somewhere. Your team may only have a dozen support agents and that’s a generous number, and while you could always outsource and scale that as you grow, putting in systems to prevent the need for a human presence could be ideal.
How might you go about this? Let’s consider eight examples, below:
1. AI Chatbots With Specific Rules
AI chatbots are everywhere now, but you can easily see which businesses have spent time setting them up and which are still using the generic adoption protocols with vague responses.
Of course, these tools aren’t necessarily perfect, but they’re getting better. A well-designed chatbot can handle initial queries, route customers to the right department, or provide quick answers to basic questions. They’re really effective should you use a rule based conversational platform to set up the flowchart of their decision-making as you might train a customer support agent to achieve.
This means setting specific rules and clear escalation pathways. If the bot doesn’t understand something or senses frustration, it should know when to hand things off to a person.
The great part here is that there’s no real downtime for your bot, they can process a query at any time and won’t need bathroom breaks either. You might not replace your team entirely but they’re a fantastic supplement to keep you agile.
Better yet, they can always lead to putting in an official request, such as offering email or live chat support options if the problem can’t be resolved by the bot.
2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Sections
It’s easy to think of an FAQ as a wall of text that you have to read the entirety of before you get to your question, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore. This is of course why they’re viewed as relics, but you can prove that wrong with a little worthwhile design.
The most effective FAQ sections are dynamic, searchable, and continuously updated based on actual customer interactions. If you’d prefer, you can call this a “learning center” or whatever else helps bust the stigma of just sending someone to your carefully written guides.
That means you need to take time to categorize your FAQs logically. Grouping similar questions together or using a keyword system can help. You might even hire a copywriter to pen clear, concise language that mirrors how your customers actually speak.
Be sure to include screenshots, short videos, or animated GIFs that demonstrate complex processes to make it more accessible. This way, customers will return to this, perhaps instead of contacting you next time.
3. Online Video & Written Tutorials
Video tutorials offer something written guides can’t, which is a helpful visual demonstration. Anyone who has fought with flat-pack furniture, a terrible guide written in another language, and wished they could just use a QR code to see a video has likely seen this before.
A 3-minute screen recording can often explain a complex process more effectively than a thousand-word document, even if it’s just a welcome to new individuals that have signed up and want to learn about how to manage their account from the portal. Remember to script your tutorials carefully and speak conversationally, while considering where users might get confused.
Written tutorials complement videos perfectly. Some users prefer reading, while others want to watch, and don’t forget that many AI tools that provide summary or snippets (like on Google’s SERP or even Gemini) will try to break that info down if they ask for it. If you offer both, you’re ensuring maximum reach and it’ll be less likely they need to reach out to you.
4. Included Product Tutorials
When a customer purchases your product, their onboarding experience matters immensely to them, and can solidify the first impressions they have of your brand. Of course, if you have an included guide or tutorial for use, then they don’t have to Google or contact you for an answer.
This will absolutely depend on what kind of product you use. These could be interactive walkthroughs as we discussed above, tooltips that appear when users hover over specific features, or short, contextual help videos depending on the service you’re offering. In person it could be a mini-booklet or even just sticker arrows on the product that show which way it should be utilized.
5. Troubleshooting Guides
It’s good to assume that even the most perfectly-written and developed tutorial is going to confuse someone. That’s just the way of the world.
That’s why a healthy troubleshooting section for each product, found online, can be very helpful. It can be linked from our prior advice about the learning center section of your website, or may be in the back area of the booklet.
The best way to get across this info is to create flowcharts or decision trees that help users diagnose and potentially resolve their own issues. Of course, it’s wise to start with the most common problems and work your way to more complex scenarios.
Use clear, non-technical language right no, as it’s best to assume the user has zero technical background. Provide step-by-step instructions that are impossible to misunderstand with imperative language that shows what to do when. Include clear indicators of when a user should stop trying to resolve an issue independently and contact human support, such as if a safety issue is present.
This way you can make sure that if someone is calling you, that’s usually because they have a very good reason to do so.
6. Community Sections & Forums
If you develop a sense of community, you may be very surprised who is willing and able to contribute to it. Online communities can become powerful self-service support areas in that way, especially if you’ve mindful about how you structure and incentivize good contributions.
Some may have user forums where users help other users, community advocates and ambassadors etc. That way it reduces the load on your support team. However, some community moderators or actual employers will need to have full admin access to correct bad info or link to more official guides.
You can use a points system to encourage users to do their best here. A good example is that of GiffGaff, a mobile phone network provider in the UK, who offer contract-like SIMs but without contractual obligations. Users generally think this is a good idea and so the community forums have been built from a sense of goodwill.
You can also help this goodwill perhaps by giving certain individuals a product discount if their forum profile has enough positive upvotes or community badges. This way you help to reward those who get involved. Who knows how many minutes of customer support time this could prevent?
7. Outreach On Platforms
Platforms like Reddit, Stack Exchange, or industry-specific forums are becoming very helpful areas for understanding customer pain points and talking to them directly, again through an approved community outreach specialist.
For all they say about Redditors (and not unjustly), there’s a good amount of feedback to be had on a platform like this and if you’re active in a community dedicated to your service, then you can offer answers immediately without having to wait for the calls or emails to flood in.
You can also see how the general wider conversations about your products are going on, potentially preventing a PR issue or seeing status outages before you even realized they were happening.
8. Blog Updates, Technical News, Status Pages
A handy blog you share updates from can be a worthwhile enterprise, especially if you have them on a weekly or monthly basis. It’ll help people understand what to expect, such as when festivals might release parking information and maps before the festival so the customer support agents won’t need to be contacted. Technical news can follow the same principle, such as if you’re about to push a software update and what the patch notes entail.
A status page can also be helpful, as it might show when you’re aware of issues in service and keep individuals updated as you push out updates or fixes to test. All of this combines convenience and a sense of calm in your company.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily redirect customer agent access for the better.
What is Outsource School?
Outsource School helps you to unlock the potential of virtual assistants and accelerate your business growth.
This is the exact system Outsource School’s founders, Nathan Hirsch and Connor Gillivan, used to go from zero to 8 figures and 40+ virtual assistants with an exit in 2019.
Since being founded in 2020, Outsource School has helped 1,000+ business owners hire 2,000+ virtual assistants for their companies.
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- Outsource School Case Study: How We Scaled to 45+ VAs and 8 Figures in Revenue
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