This is the second part of a series of articles on customer service automation. Find the first article here: The Irresistible Need for Customer Service Automation in Industrial Distribution
In The Irresistible Need for Customer Service Automation in Industrial Distribution, we outlined the rationale for automating customer service tasks that have traditionally been done manually. The economic, physical and even emotional motives are many, as businesses are pressured to move faster, better and cheaper every day.
There is not a one-solution-fits-all formula in this space, which makes implementing the right one challenging. There is, however, a common framework that companies can consider when looking to implement customer service automation. First, let’s look at those steps and then examine the myriad of available solutions and try to identify which might be best for your situation.
Building a Roadmap for Automation
The roadmap includes some inward soul searching, so be prepared to be critical. Because customer service has been a core part of every distributor’s business since its inception, it may be taken for granted. If so, it likely hasn’t been given the type of deep introspection and refinement that has benefited other business functions, such as warehouse management or inventory forecasting. Here are the steps we recommend:
Analyze the current state: Understanding your customer service team’s current makeup and processes is critical. It’s important to document the steps, details and time required to complete each task identified in Part 1. Besides gathering valuable data, surveying your team for this information will help foster the buy-in you will need during the launch stage. This is also a great time to take the temperature of the group towards their acceptance of the help they will be receiving to assist with onboarding plans.
Build the right team: This project needs the same People-Process-Technology strategies that any good technology plan must follow. Besides the necessary IT/Digital team, the project should include key members of the customer service team, a supervisor and the executive sponsor. It’s imperative to be clear with the participants about the business goals for making this automation transition: Many tech projects that either fail outright or are semi-successful do so because of a lack of clarity about these goals.
With that in mind, be sure to include engaged, vocal business-side participants on the team. A final note on building the team: How about something like this?
“Choose volunteers based primarily on their expertise and secondarily on their team skills. It’s tempting to choose people who are enthusiastic about the project, but qualifications should come first.”
Volunteers may help with the enthusiasm but may not provide the right team members to ensure the success of the project. Select volunteers wisely.
Involve IT security from the start: The fear and skepticism around AI and automation is warranted. Ensuring organizational data, security and compliance standards are met from the get-go, and are continually met as the project is faced with inevitable changes will help senior management sleep at night. Just a word of warning, however, don’t let the techies take over the project.
Choose solution providers wisely: Select solution providers who align with your market, company size and organizational needs. Easier said than done, right? This is especially challenging if you are only automating certain pieces of the service journey since many providers specialize in certain parts of the journey and may not excel at the piece your company needs. Getting advice and/or recommendations is extremely helpful to pick the horse you are going to ride.
Start small and scale quickly: If you are a large organization, we strongly recommend that you begin with small/pilot projects to minimize risk and adapt quickly. This approach can help with both budgeting and implementation. However, if you go down this road, use the early phases to learn how you will repeat the process at scale in the future, so you aren’t starting from scratch when it’s time to go big. This long-term approach will also inform your solution provider selection process.
The phased approach is also a reality of today’s business, where continued funding and support of the project may rely on your ability to demonstrate some immediate successes. In the customer service automation space, that may mean automated order entry, or automated order status retrieval – these will show immediate benefits but are only one piece of the overall larger solution.
Solution Categories
As mentioned, there are a growing number of companies that provide either complete end-to-end customer service automation solutions or at least a portion of the overall solution. As you can expect, large, well-recognized players, like Salesforce and Microsoft, participate in this sector, as well as established SaaS providers, right down to incredibly nimble and laser-focused start-ups. This is why having your short-term and long-term goals identified is crucial in picking the right provider. Their solutions can be categorized into the following groups (although some providers can span more than one of the categories):
- Order Management Systems (OMS): These large systems look to provide a complete solution to the challenges customer service teams face. By integrating to business systems and existing CRM solutions, they enable better service by providing a complete view of the customer. If you believe that service sells, this solution will work for you. However, the price tag, long timeline to implement and integration complexity make this a high-cost, high-reward type of solution.
- Order/Quote entry automation: This is one of the earliest and most adopted forms of customer service automation to date. This CSA saves the user from having to manually input purchase orders or enter RFQs into the company’s quote tool. It’s a significant time saver that’s relatively easy to implement. Further benefits exist if backend integration allows you to vet orders and if desired, automatically engage the customer when price or part numbers don’t match.
- Product recognition/matching: This unique AI-driven tool helps address one of the biggest problems that automation faces in the distribution/wholesale world – “What the heck is the part that the customer actually wants?” These platforms can source data from your ERP or PIM and do some of the heavy lifting in matching their part number to the part in your system.
- Customer Inquiry Management: These solutions are designed to provide the maximum assistance to customer service representatives by automatically recognizing the work required from a customer inquiry and then automating the retrieval of information needed to solve the problem. Customer inquiry management solutions even offer the option to pass information to customer self-help portals and websites to guide the customer to self-service.
- In-house AI solutions: This is the ultimate “create your own solution,” tailored to a company’s exact needs. Now that AI engines like OpenAI or Google Bard/Gemini allow commercial users access (or even a hosted version of their software for added security), a company can create their own prompt library to answer a group of specific questions and be further programmed to properly access the relevant information within the company infrastructure. This is an exciting (OK, maybe a little scary for most right now) solution for a company wanting to dip their toe into the AI pool and do it in a safe, structured way.
- RPA Engines: Finally, one of the most under-utilized and easy-to-implement automation solutions, RPA. Robotic Processing Automation is simply software bots that are taught to mimic a certain process that is repeated many times over. Easy to use and change, it can tackle the boring, repetitive (and unproductive) work many CSRs hate about their jobs.
Automating customer service in the industrial distribution and wholesaling sector is not just about keeping up with the times; it’s about supercharging your efficiency and customer satisfaction. With the right approach, automation can transform the landscape of customer service, making it more responsive, efficient and ultimately, more human.
Remember, automation in customer service isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about empowering them with AI, much like Ironman’s suit empowers Tony Stark. Ready to suit up?
Rick Pozniak is a distinguished authority in B2B automation, system integration and digital transformation, with a specialization in the North American wholesale/distribution and manufacturing sectors. With over three decades of experience, he has played a crucial role in optimizing customer and supplier channels through transactional, product data and customer service automation.
As the founder of Move78, a consulting and integration services company, he holds a pivotal position as a strategic intermediary. This role enables him to deliver impactful results for wholesalers, manufacturers and their solution providers, thus creating value for partners at both ends of technology implementations. Pozniak's firm also offers strategic guidance to organizations adapting to the uncertainty of AI, bridging the gap between business needs and technology implementation. Furthermore, they provide product development guidance to several strategic Solution Providers.