Asking a customer multiple times what their problem is a fundamental example of customer service agent manual toil that should be replaced with automation, says an executive at a company specializing in machine learning algorithms for CS.

“Having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system or do research when it could automatically be captured” are other examples, said Jonathan Rende (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of products at PagerDuty Inc. “All that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case.”

Rende spoke with industry analyst Lisa Martin at PagerDuty Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how customer service automation was ripe for implementation. (* Disclosure below.)

‘Customer is a signal’

The customer not only benefits from automation because problems get solved faster, but brand reputation issues are minimalized so the company benefits, Rende pointed out. It also helps the back-end teams diagnose and fix issues faster.

“Greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from monitoring products,” Rende said. “The customer is a signal, and it’s so important to be attentive to that signal.”

Getting teams ahead of problems is also helped by automation: “The incident response is smarter, it’s faster, and it’s being able to detect things before the customer even notices.”

Reinforcing the idea that back-end and front-end both benefit from improved customer service, Rende gave the example of a shopping cart that may not be working correctly. The more two-way the communication is between the two corporate ends the better the results: If the customer service team knows about the potential issue right away, they can proactively communicate  with customers to let them know.

“Sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don’t know about yet,” he said. “You can turn bad experiences into really good ones.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PagerDuty Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE