Customer Service automation should not look like this…

It should look like this!…

What are the driving forces of automation?
Quite simply, they are customers’ preferences and expectations. In today’s digital age, customers do not want to wait, they expect instant help with their issues 24/7. They also expect nothing less than a personalised and specific approach, and mostly through messaging. Most cases will involve the use of bots and automated messages but what automation really enables is freeing up time of Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to respond to enquiries a lot quicker. Today’s Customer Service teams must master the human element while meeting the expectations of their customer base.

These days, customers flat out expect more throughout their entire journey. Live chat, social media and mobile functionality are all channels that enhance Customer Experience (CX) and boost advocacy. If only you had the time and resources for it …

There are two ways to serve customers: proactively or reactively. Customers prefer the former — CSRs who can respond to email enquiries quickly and accurately, and always know why, when and where orders are being processed.

This is all fine in an ideal world but how are they supposed to do this if they simply don’t have the time and need to spend their time carrying out repetitive, tedious tasks day in, day out. AUTOMATION is the answer! Who wouldn’t want to improve quality of data, increase flexibility, increase consistency and identify process improvement opportunities faster?

Not only does automation radically reduce the amount of unfulfilling day-to-day tasks for CSRs, it opens the door for new career-pathing opportunities by necessarily redefining some positions. What’s more, customisable dashboards make it a cinch for managers to better identify top-performing CSRs by tracking metrics tied to individual performance.

Enter Esker…
Esker’s Customer Service solution suite automates routine tasks associated with managing customer requests, orders and claims so the CS team can perform more fulfilling tasks that directly impact your customers and company, while weeding out the root causes of failure in Customer Service processes such as:

Customer Enquiry Management

Acting as a digital assistant for the shared inbox, automation within the customer enquiry management process frees up your Customer Service team to address enquiries faster and improve CX by fixing issues such as:

• Lost or deleted emails
• Limited collaboration
• Lack of clarity & context when addressing customer enquiries Wasted time & talent by forcing staff to search & sort through shared inbox
• Cost impact of low productivity, higher turnover & customer dissatisfaction

Order Management

By enabling all incoming customer orders (fax, email, phone, website, portals, EDI, etc.) to be managed in a single, centralised solution, automation creates a value-added ripple effect, addressing common pains like:

• Order processing errors & slowdowns (leading to high DSO & sluggish cashflow)
• Lower levels of team collaboration, productivity & overall morale
• Narrow range of analytics, reporting & audit trail capabilities
• Excess paper, postage, transport & physical archiving expenses
• Increase in disputes & dissatisfied customers

Customer Claims Management

Another important duty of Customer Service teams is reducing the number of customer claims — something which AI-driven automation solves by addressing common claims management bottlenecks like:

• Inability to analyse claims by type, date or customer
• Limited collaboration with coworkers from multiple departments on the verification, approval of dispute of claims
• No way to automatically post claims as a credit note or to a G/L account in the ERP

Find out more here!

Upnesh Grewal

As Marketing Coordinator for Esker UK, Upnesh manages Esker UK's marketing campaigns and events for O2C solutions. She has been part of the Esker family since 2022.

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A critical component of success for today’s businesses is the ability to integrate and synchronise all of the various applications powering your digital initiatives.

That’s why Esker is excited to announce an addition to its already robust integration capabilities — enabling both its Customer Enquiry Management and Order Management automation solutions to natively integrate with Salesforce.

This expansion of Esker’s Customer Service automation ecosystem means that, whenever a customer order or enquiry is processed through Esker, a Salesforce case can be automatically created or synchronised using secure API authentication. This enables sales reps to gain full visibility over enquiries or orders on their customer accounts.

“Esker’s ability to act as a ‘single pane of glass’ for all customer communications related to enquiries and orders is a significant benefit for today’s B2B Customer Service teams,” says Aurélien Coq, Product Manager at Esker. “By integrating with Salesforce — and this on top of the ERP integration Esker has offered for years — our clients have access to a critical element of synchronisation to better manage their customers.”

A privately held American global food corporation is expected to be the first Esker customer utilising the new native integration with Salesforce.

To learn more about Esker’s Customer Service solution suite, its integrated communication platform, and its transformational impact on B2B Customer Service teams, visit our website.  

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Built into Esker’s Customer Enquiry Management solution, ChatGPT provides Customer Service (CS) professionals with an additional resource to efficiently handle customer enquiries such as order status, availability, pricing requests and product information questions. This added element of AI assistance enables CS teams to answer customer requests on time, increase customer satisfaction, and focus on more impactful and proactive outbound efforts.

Shared inboxes allow multiple CSRs to view and reply to emails, but retrieving accurate data like order, pricing and shipping data as well as previous conversations from a variety of systems (ERP, email, CRM, chat) can add hours of work and is error-prone. With AI-supported technologies, these processes are sped up significantly, cutting handling time down to just minutes.

“Managing a shared Customer Service inbox can get pretty messy, with enquiries often falling through the cracks and frustrated customers on the other end,” said Aurélien Coq, Customer Service Product Manager at Esker. “ChatGPT analyses inbound customer emails, queries different systems and generates an answer for the CSR to use. This saves incredible amounts of time, freeing up CSRs to perform more fulfilling tasks, and customers get what they expect — a quick and helpful response.”

The responses proposed by ChatGPT are reviewed, edited if needed and approved by the CSR, who answers the customer(s) directly. Human supervision ensures customers still interact with other humans; ChatGPT simply provides suitable suggestions based on the available data to assist the CS teams with speedy and accurate responses.

The recent advancements in NLP based on AI technology now offer capabilities that comprehend and generate natural language text coupled with sentiment analysis. ChatGPT is valuable to CS departments for its ability to understand and respond to questions in a human-like conversational dialogue format. Due to the integration with other back-office systems such as ERPs, CRMs, transport management and warehousing systems, Esker’s solution understands emails through category classification actions, key data extraction and sentiment analysis. ChatGPT acts as a two-way translator between human natural language and system machine language and back between system language to natural language. It allows customers to communicate with internal systems in a controlled manner and supervised by humans.

“While not intended to replace a CSR, ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that improves the customer service workflows and the customer experience,” concluded Coq.

Bundling innovative AI technologies for over a decade now, Esker’s solutions are continuously evolving to address concrete business cases with Customer Service automation. By eliminating repetitive and error-prone tasks, automation enables CSRs to focus on building better customer experiences.

Esker will be expanding the use of ChatGPT for additional solutions within its Source-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash suites.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Customers are the life blood of every business, which is something we very much believe in, here at Esker. In fact, customer satisfaction is a part of our company philosophy. Our Customer Experience (CX) Team are key in making our customers feel Valued, Understood and Engaged.

A Change in Consumer Attitudes

The pandemic served to not only accelerate underlying customer service trends in a matter of weeks, it was also a catalyst for many B2C consumers — 50% to be precise₁ — to hit the reset button on their purpose and priorities. This rapid shift in perspective not only affected their personal experiences (i.e., B2C), it also informed their professional ones (i.e., B2B). For example, speed, personal connection and digital competency are no longer hoped for when making purchasing decisions, they’re expected. These examples say it all:

• Approximately 3 in 4 younger B2B customers (i.e., Millennials and Gen Z) are willing to pay a premium for proactive and predictive customer support₂.
• A 2021 study revealed that B2B customers are 37% more likely to purchase more from companies that listen and incorporate service feedback₃.
• A paltry 17% of companies claim their digital experience (DX) is ahead of customer expectations, while 24% state their DX is lagging behind modern expectations₄.

Having worked with 50% of our customers for over 10 years, Esker appreciates that our customers want to ensure that their own customers are satisfied with the service they receive.

Esker’s Customer Enquiry Management Solution is a digital assistant for the customer service inbox

Esker’s Customer Enquiry Management solution works using our AI engine, classifying emails into different categories such as pricing query, availability, status request and product questions specific to each customer. It will then route these enquiries by email to the relevant person or department. It provides a dashboard displaying KPI’s such as enquiries by category, enquiries by customer, enquiries by date, and trend analysis for items such as price requests. The Customer Enquiry Management solution also integrates with our Order Management solution, routing orders to that solution from the customer service email inbox.

Address Enquiries Faster – No more messy inbox folders! Classify, route & answer customer requests quickly & accurately thanks to automation & AI-driven technology.
Build Better Relationships – Give your customers what they expect — a quick, consistent & helpful response. The end result? They keep doing business with you!
Be Proactive, Not Reactive – From strategic response & routing to real-time KPIs, Esker equips your team with the tools needed to provide a more proactive, personalised CX.

One of our customers, Palmer Holland, are growing rapidly, and recognised that 4 hours a day spent going through customer enquiry emails was not sustainable. Palmer Holland wanted to maintain their growth and develop further growth, but without having to grow headcount, and so decided to automate with Esker’s Customer Enquiry Management solution.

Palmer Holland has seen transformation benefits that are contributing to significant time savings and helping to propel company growth. After automating customer enquiries, routing emails now only takes four hours a week, as opposed to four hours a day. This can be attributed to the fact that Esker’s quick-learning AI Engine is classifying enquiries correctly over 90% of the time.

Aiza Toor, Customer Service Manager at Palmer Holland, said, “It takes maybe a second or two to validate an enquiry now. The time savings is one of the biggest benefits.”

Investing in the Customer Experience

So why spend money automating when costs are rising in so many areas? It is a good question, but we need to go back to the start and remember that customers are the life blood of a business. Reputation can easily be damaged with poor customer service, so improving the customer experience should ensure that you are retaining those customers and therefore increasing revenues. Rather than triaging email enquiries, CSR’s can spend their time more effectively addressing customers enquiries faster. Also, by analysing customer enquiries, areas for improvement can be identified quicker.

You can read more about Esker’s Customer Enquiry Management solution on our website or in our new eBook.

Alternatively, do get in touch and I’d be very happy to provide you with a demo.

_1. Accenture, Life Reimagined: Mapping the motivations that matter for todays’ consumers. 2021.
_2. Accenture, End-to-Endless Customer Service Research. 2021.
_3. Accenture, End-to-Endless Customer Service Research. 2021.
_4. Adobe and Econsultancy, 2022 Digital Trends: B2B in Focus. 2022

Johanne Musson

Johanne is an Internal Account Manager for Esker UK. She has been part of the Esker family since 2022.

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Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, today announced the launch of its Customer Enquiries Management solution add-on to help customer service departments address enquiries faster and free up staff to focus on customer-facing activities. Seamlessly integrated with Esker’s Order Management solution, this add-on serves as a digital assistant for the customer service email inbox by classifying and routing messages to the right recipient or the right process.

Traditional email applications often cannot handle the email volumes that crowd the customer service inbox. Emails eventually get dumped into a few different folders, requiring someone to spend hours sorting and forwarding them to the appropriate recipient. Performance is further hampered because there is little to no visibility over which enquiries were answered and a lack of flexibility for other customer service representatives (CSRs) to take over, if necessary.

To improve the process, Esker’s Customer Enquiries Management solution uses AI capabilities to classify emails, such as RFQs, orders, status requests, remittances or claims into categories. Classified enquiries can then be answered using predefined email templates or routed via email to the appropriate person, department or process. Requests are addressed promptly, preserving good customer relationships. Thanks to automation, CSRs have more time to spend on added-value tasks focused on customer satisfaction.

Esker’s intelligent dashboards provide full visibility over the entire process, displaying real-time counters and KPIs to monitor and analyse customer enquiries by type, date or customer, enabling CSRs to quickly identify necessary process improvements.

Esker’s Customer Enquiries Management solution has made the CSR team’s job at Palmer Holland, a North American chemicals and ingredient distributor, noticeably easier. Using automated enquiry classification and routing, Esker’s solution provides CSRs with a collaborative platform to triage and analyse all 5,000 of its monthly customer requests quickly and easily. “It takes maybe a second or two to validate an enquiry now. The time savings is one of the biggest benefits,” said Aiza Toor, Customer Service Manager at Palmer Holland. Routing emails now only takes four hours a week, as opposed to four hours a day, thanks to Esker’s accurate AI-based enquiries classification.

“The addition of our Customer Enquiries Management solution to our Order-to-Cash suite aligns with our positive-sum growth strategy, as it helps both suppliers and customers build stronger relationships and improve the efficiency of their business processes,” said Aurélien Coq, Order Management Product Manager at Esker. “We help empower customer service departments with more strategic, fulfilling work and at the same time provide their customers with an improved experience — everyone wins.”

Esker’s Customer Enquiries Management solution is available worldwide.

Read full press release here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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