Automating customer service.
E-mails, chat, phone, forms, marketplaces: every day, customer service answers questions whose answer already exists in the ERP, the order system or carrier tracking. Automation and AI take on the sorting, the information search and the first draft of the reply; advisers keep the sensitive cases and the relationship.
The department
Who does what in the department.
One team, distinct roles. Those with their own page are linked.
Customer relationshead of customer relations or customer service manager
- Customer service e-mails, chat, phone, marketplaces
- After-sales and returns returns, warranties, repairs
- Customer relations manager teams, scheduling, outsourcers, escalations
- Service quality reply review, satisfaction, knowledge base
The relays : Logistics and carriers, who handle delivery; sales administration and finance, who issue invoices, credit notes and refunds; quality, which investigates product complaints; stores and e-commerce, which receive requests too. Customer service holds the thread between them all, facing the customer.
The ecosystem
What the department receives, and what it passes on.
Dotted flows are those where information is most often re-keyed by hand.
It receives
- Customer requestse-mails, chat, phone, forms
- Marketplace messagesplatform messaging
- Order statusesERP, e-commerce platform
- Delivery trackingcarriers, WMS
- Returns and complaintsreturns portal, stores, photos
Customer relationsticketing tool · ERP
It passes on
- Refunds and credit notesto finance and sales administration
- Returns to receiveto the warehouse
- Product complaintsto quality
- Delivery disputesto logistics and carriers
- Contact reasons and satisfactionto management, marketing and the offer
flow that worksflow often re-keyed
Across the department
What gets automated.
Not an isolated task, but the circuits that run through the department every month.
Sorting and routing requests
Every message, whatever the channel, is read by an AI agent that identifies the reason, the customer and the order, then sends it to the right queue with its priority.
First-line replies
Order tracking, lead times, return conditions: an AI agent answers from connected data and hands over to an adviser as soon as the request is sensitive.
The first draft of the reply
For other requests, the adviser receives a draft written from the knowledge base and the customer’s history, which they review and adjust.
Return and complaint files
Order, photos, applicable conditions and supporting documents gathered in the ticket, ready to be processed.
Escalations between departments
Logistics, quality, finance: every request passed on has a recipient, a deadline and reminders, visible in the same tool as the tickets.
Steering customer relations
Contact reasons, first response and resolution times, satisfaction: dashboards kept up to date without manual consolidation.
What stays human
- Goodwill gestures, out-of-policy refunds and decisions on complaints.
- Unhappy customers, key accounts and any situation that puts the brand’s image at stake.
- Regulatory reports (cosmetovigilance, pharmacovigilance, medical information), passed to the authorised teams.
Use cases
How to automate, case by case.
Each case starts from a question leadership teams ask. The starting point, what gets automated, the tools involved, and what stays in the teams’ hands.
How do you automate customer service with AI?
- Today
- Advisers read every request, look up the order in the ERP and the parcel with the carrier, then write the reply. A large share of requests concern the same topics, and difficult cases wait in the same queue as simple questions.
- What gets automated
- A first-line AI agent reads requests from every channel, finds the customer and the order, and answers the authorised contact reasons on its own from connected data and the knowledge base. It hands over to an adviser, with a summary of the case, as soon as a request is sensitive, ambiguous or outside its scope. Every reply sent is logged and reviewed by sample.
- What stays human
- The list of contact reasons entrusted to the agent, the handling of sensitive cases and the quality control of replies stay with customer relations management.
- Ticketing tool
- ERP
- First-line AI agent
- Knowledge base
How do you automate the routing of customer requests across channels and teams?
- Today
- E-mails, chat, phone, forms and marketplace messages arrive in different tools. A supervisor shares out the queue by hand every morning, by language, brand, customer type and adviser skills, and urgent requests get lost in the mass.
- What gets automated
- Every channel feeds a single queue in the ticketing tool. An AI agent classifies each request by contact reason, language, brand and customer type (consumer or professional), gives it a priority, then routes it to the competent team or adviser according to written rules. Requests from the same customer across several channels are grouped into a single case.
- What stays human
- Routing rules and priorities are set by the customer relations manager, who adjusts them when the workload changes.
- Ticketing tool
- Telephony
- Marketplace messaging
- AI classification agent
How do you automate a knowledge base shared between customer service, stores and the website?
- Today
- Return conditions, delivery times and procedures are written in different documents for customer service, sales staff and the website FAQ. When a rule changes, each version is corrected separately, and the customer receives answers that contradict each other.
- What gets automated
- A single knowledge base holds each rule once, with its owner and its validity date. It feeds the advisers’ reply macros, the AI agent, the website FAQ and the store guides. An AI agent spots unanswered questions in the tickets, drafts a first article and flags content contradicted by a recent procedure.
- What stays human
- Approving each article and its tone stays with the topic owner, who is accountable for what customers are told.
- Knowledge base
- Ticketing tool
- E-commerce platform
- AI drafting agent
How do you automate customer satisfaction measurement (CSAT, NPS)?
- Today
- Satisfaction surveys go out from a separate tool, with no link to the tickets. Results arrive at month end in a spreadsheet, and nobody can say which contact reason, channel or step caused a poor score.
- What gets automated
- A short survey goes out automatically when the ticket is closed or after a key step (delivery, refund), under rules that avoid asking the same customer twice. Each answer is linked to the ticket, the contact reason, the channel and the order. An AI agent classifies free-text comments by theme, and the dashboard updates itself.
- What stays human
- Calling back dissatisfied customers and agreeing action plans stay with the team.
- Ticketing tool
- Survey tool
- Reporting tool (BI)
- AI text analysis agent
How do you automate contact reason analysis to reduce avoidable requests?
- Today
- Contact reasons are picked by hand by advisers at closure, often “other” for lack of time. Management knows that some requests come from an unclear confirmation e-mail or a delivery delay, but cannot prove it.
- What gets automated
- An AI agent classifies each request against a common list of contact reasons and extracts the cause: missing information on the website, carrier delay, product defect, invoice error. Contact reasons are cross-referenced with orders, references and carriers in a dashboard. A monthly summary shows the teams concerned the causes that generate the most contacts.
- What stays human
- Fixes to the website, the offer, logistics or the product are decided with the teams concerned.
- Ticketing tool
- ERP
- Reporting tool (BI)
- AI classification agent
How do you automate customer complaint handling?
- Today
- A complaint arrives by e-mail, by phone or in store, then circulates between customer service, quality, logistics and finance through forwarded e-mails. Nobody can see where the case stands, and the customer chases before getting an answer.
- What gets automated
- Each complaint opens a single file with its documents: order, photos, exchanges, batch or serial number. An AI agent qualifies the nature of the complaint and routes it to the responsible team, with a response deadline and automatic reminders. The customer is informed at each step, and decisions (credit note, replacement, reasoned refusal) are logged in the file.
- What stays human
- The decision on the substance and any goodwill gesture stay with the authorised teams; regulatory reports follow their own process.
- Ticketing tool
- ERP
- Quality software
- AI classification agent
How do you automate B2B customer service for professional customers?
- Today
- Professional customers write to their sales rep, sales administration and customer service at once, about availability, backorders, invoices or credit notes. Each contact searches the ERP on their own, and the account’s negotiated terms are not visible to the adviser.
- What gets automated
- Professional requests are linked to the customer account, whose contacts, terms, open orders and invoices are displayed in the ticket from the ERP. An AI agent answers questions on availability, delivery dates and invoice copies, and routes anything touching prices and terms to sales administration or the sales rep. A customer portal also lets customers check this information without writing in.
- What stays human
- Commercial terms, billing disputes and the relationship with key accounts stay with the sales rep and sales administration.
- ERP
- Ticketing tool
- CRM
- Customer portal
How do you automate workload forecasting and adviser scheduling?
- Today
- The advisers’ schedule is built from the manager’s experience and a spreadsheet of past volumes. During sales, a launch or a delivery incident, the queue overflows, and reinforcements arrive after the peak.
- What gets automated
- Past volumes by channel, contact reason and time slot are consolidated from the ticketing tool and telephony, then matched against the commercial calendar, marketing campaigns and planned shipments. The tool proposes a workload forecast and a staffing need per time slot, and raises an alert when the actual queue departs from the forecast.
- What stays human
- The final schedule, reinforcements and the use of an outsourcer are decided by the customer relations manager.
- Ticketing tool
- Telephony
- Scheduling tool
- Reporting tool (BI)
How do you automate quality control of customer service replies?
- Today
- Every week, the quality lead rereads a few randomly chosen tickets against a scoring grid in a spreadsheet. The sample is too small to spot a recurring error, and feedback reaches advisers late.
- What gets automated
- An AI agent reviews the replies sent against a grid defined by the team: accuracy against the knowledge base, compliance with conditions, brand tone, mandatory wording. It flags replies to revisit and errors that recur, by contact reason or by team. The quality lead focuses their review on these flags.
- What stays human
- Assessing advisers and the coaching that follows stay with the manager, never with the AI agent.
- Ticketing tool
- Knowledge base
- AI review agent
- Reporting tool (BI)
How do you automate the handling of customer GDPR requests?
- Today
- Access, rectification and erasure requests reach customer service among other messages. The adviser forwards them to legal, which then searches for the data in the CRM, the ERP, the ticketing tool and the e-mailing tool, one by one.
- What gets automated
- An AI agent spots requests that fall under the GDPR, takes them out of the normal queue and opens a file with its legal deadline. Once the requester’s identity is verified, the tool lists the customer’s data across the connected systems and prepares the extract or the list of deletions to carry out. Every step is logged so it can be accounted for.
- What stays human
- The reply to the requester and the cases where data must be kept (accounting obligation, dispute) are decided by the data protection officer or the lawyer.
- Ticketing tool
- CRM
- ERP
- Record of processing activities
How do you automate customer notifications when a delivery is late?
- Today
- When a carrier falls behind or a stockout pushes back shipments, customer service finds out through customer calls. Advisers then answer a wave of identical requests one by one.
- What gets automated
- The tool monitors statuses from the ERP, the WMS and the carriers, and spots orders running late against the promised date. A message goes to the customer before they ask, with the new date and what they can do, and the AI agent has the same information to answer. Customer service sees on one screen the orders affected and the requests they have generated.
- What stays human
- The content of the message, any goodwill gesture and the customers to call personally are decided by the team.
- ERP
- WMS
- Carrier portals
- Messaging
How do you automate multilingual customer service?
- Today
- Requests in a foreign language wait for the adviser who speaks it, or go through a translation tool by copy and paste. International brands multiply teams or outsourcers by country, with knowledge bases that drift apart.
- What gets automated
- An AI agent detects the language of each request, translates it for the adviser and drafts the reply in the customer’s language from a single knowledge base, adapted to each country’s conditions. Sensitive or high-stakes replies are reviewed before sending by a person fluent in the language.
- What stays human
- The tone specific to each market and the review of sensitive replies stay with advisers fluent in the language.
- Ticketing tool
- Knowledge base
- AI translation agent
- AI drafting agent
Depending on your sector
The same principles, different rules.
- Fashion and luxury
Demanding international clientele, personal replies in their language, concierge services, repairs and personalisation requests to follow flawlessly.
- Retail
Omnichannel end customers, online orders collected or returned in store, “where is my order?” in volume and peaks at every key commercial moment.
- Cosmetics and beauty
Questions on use, composition and tolerance, complaints to route to cosmetovigilance, sales on the website, through selective distribution and on marketplaces.
- B2B distribution and wholesale
Professional customers, availability, lead times, backorders, invoices and credit notes, in close contact with sales administration and sales reps.
- Construction and property
Requests from co-owners, owners’ councils and site clients, to link to the right building, unit or site and follow through to closure.
- Industry
Professional customers, references and serial numbers, technical after-sales and on-site interventions, in contact with production and quality.
- Pharma and healthcare
Orders and deliveries to pharmacies and facilities; medical information and pharmacovigilance passed to the authorised teams, never to an AI agent.
Your system
The ticketing tool and the ERP stay in place.
Requests and their history stay in the ticketing tool; orders, invoices and credit notes in the ERP; deliveries with the carriers. Automation connects around them: it links these tools that communicate poorly with each other, reads messages, prepares replies and raises alerts. No forced change of tool.
- Ticketing tool
- ERP
- E-commerce platform
- Carrier portals
- Telephony
- Marketplace messaging
- Reporting tool (BI)
Frequent questions
What leadership teams ask.
- How do you automate customer service?
- By starting from the requests that come up most and whose answer already exists in the tools: order tracking, lead times, returns, invoices. First connect the ticketing tool to the ERP and the carriers, automate one contact reason, measure it, then move on to the next.
- Can an AI agent replace advisers?
- No. It handles simple, verifiable requests, prepares replies for the others and hands over to a person as soon as a request is sensitive: unhappy customer, complaint, goodwill gesture, regulatory matter. Advisers keep their time for the cases that need it.
- Which channel should customer service automation start with?
- The one that carries the most repetitive requests, often e-mail and forms. Chat and phone follow, once the knowledge base and the connections to the tools are reliable.
- Do you need to change ticketing tool to automate?
- Rarely. Automation connects to the tool in place, to the ERP and to the carriers. The diagnosis shows whether a limitation of the tool justifies changing it.
- How do you stop an AI agent giving a customer a wrong answer?
- By limiting it to validated sources (knowledge base, order data), by making it state where its answer comes from and by setting the contact reasons it never handles alone. Replies are reviewed by sample, and the knowledge base is corrected as soon as an error appears.
- How do you measure the effect of automation on customer service?
- On the indicators already tracked: first response time, resolution time, first contact resolution rate, satisfaction (CSAT, NPS), volume by contact reason. Measure them before, then after each contact reason is automated.
- Is B2B customer service automated the same way as B2C?
- The principles are the same, the data differs: customer account, negotiated terms, multiple contacts, EDI orders. Automation relies more on the ERP and works closely with sales administration and sales reps.
- Is customer data protected?
- Access is limited by role, personal data is processed in line with the GDPR, retention periods are applied in the tool, and the hosting of AI models is chosen with the IT department.
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