In this episode of The Support Automation Show, Justin talks about his incredible experiences with his recent interviews and discusses what the audience and other listeners should expect to learn about support automation from innovative leaders in customer and employee support.
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Justin: [music] Welcome to The Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity. Join us for conversations with leaders and customer or employee support who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge. I’m your host, Justin Schmidt. We’re going to do something a little different on the support automation show today.
I’ve had incredible interviews with leaders in customer support and employee support over the last several months. And I’ve really had my eyes open to all the innovative ways that these leaders are implementing technology and process improvements to automate as much of the customer and employee support experiences as they can, and really reaping the benefits of that automation.
And I hope that these conversations have sparked some ideas in your minds on how you can bring automation into the support functions at your business. But today let’s take a slight detour and just talk about support automation in general, what that means, what are the components of it? So that way, going forward with future episodes, we can have an agreement of terms.
Ultimately, there are changing behaviors and expectations for customers and employees that I think are driving this. Customers want self-service, omnichannel seamless escalation, and above all else. Speed. And convenience employees want to feel like they’re working on important projects and not just executing repetitive tasks.
And in both of these instances, it’s the technology stack that drives the delivery of these expectations. If your customer experience stack isn’t up to the task. You’re not going to be able to deliver self-service. You’re not gonna be able to deliver on any channel. And at the end of the day, it’s not going to be faster and more convenient.
If your team members need to go to 15 different apps to pull out 15 different pieces of data and then come back to a spreadsheet or something to stitch that all together and finally get what they need to go execute on something. And they have to do that every single time that that execution needs to happen.
You’re going to very quickly run into burnout and a bad experience. So we believe that a well-run and well-optimized technology platform to enable the benefit for these two constituents could be an extremely powerful force in the enterprise. So what is support automation? Support automation is the use of technology to simplify how customers and employees receive help and information support automation is spread across several categories of software, your help desk, or your service desk or CRM.
Uh, workflow or robotic process automation platform. Maybe you’ve got some sort of document processing or OCR to pull in documents and push it along that path. You have survey software, live chats, chatbots knowledge basis, and the process of tying all of these different tools together. And designing your business process around the experiences that happen across these tools that support automation.
So support automation platform would be the combination of these tools and the value in between the products, the data flow between them, the API calls, et cetera, that truly creates value. We’re big believers here at capacity on the power of platforms. You know, we look at a platform several different ways, right?
One it’s a framework that connects numerous products together. It’s generative in that you separate the logic from the products that you can create new solutions on the platform over time. And when you think about it, another way to say this is that the majority of value in a product lives on the, at the node, right?
The individual product and a platform, the real value he lives in the edges, the connection between those products. So the connection between your chatbot and your now knowledge base, or the connection between. Pulling in documents, extracting information, and sending that off to another step in the workflow.
That’s the power of a platform. And sometimes that platform is a combination of different vendors. Sometimes it’s all one vendor, and I hope that in these discussions, we can get the wheels turning inside of people’s heads to think how can I build a support automation platform inside my organization?
What are the tools that I need? What are some of the process improvements that I need? How do I manage the change and how do I bring this value to our customers? Or how do I bring this value to our employees? We hope this show illuminates this concept for you. And we hope that this show provides the spark that turns into.
A full embrace of the power of automation and support for your customers or support for your teams and whether you choose capacity or not. If the conversation gets started and better experiences are delivered to customers and employees and support leaders feel more empowered and can create more opportunities for the people on their teams.
Then we’ve done our job here on this show. So, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being part of this journey. As we grow this community and I’ll see you next week, the support automation show is brought to you by capacity. Visit capacity.com to find everything you need for automating support and business processes.
In one powerful platform, you can find the show by searching for support automation in your favorite podcast app. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes on behalf of the team here at capacity. Thanks for listening.