Service automation is a rapidly growing area of interest for many organizations, as it offers the potential to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide customers with a better experience. The service automation framework provides the design elements and processes to systematically optimize the user experience by providing automated services. This framework is based on existing best practices in terms of design thinking and service management, with the main objective of offering automated services. At its core, service automation is the process of reducing the number of interactions between customers and human agents in customer service.
It begins with the three concentric circles, which together form the basic components for offering valuable services to users. These components are infrastructure, data, devices, and software. By making this transition, service providers can offer their services instantly, cost-effectively and to a potentially larger market. Organizations can achieve rapid growth and gain a competitive advantage if they rely on service automation.
Companies such as Spotify, Netflix and Uber (which offer 100% automated services) have demonstrated this. The main purpose of service automation is to convert the analog (or manual) steps of the service delivery process into automated steps. This allows an organization to gain a competitive advantage in the future. Successful service organizations offer their predefined services (service design) to customers (users) using some assets or tools (technology). Service automation is not so much an internal process model through which organizations can organize their service delivery, but a business model that allows an organization to gain a competitive advantage in the future. Once these services are broken down into smaller steps, these actions must be included in scripts and workflows, effectively turning them into automated services.
This makes the model “intelligent”, meaning that it provides the methods and processes that allow the service to interact with users without human intervention. Customer service automation may have been around for a while, but it's still getting better as technology advances.
