June 19, 2024
“How to engage customers and keep them engaged is a focal question for organisations across the B2C landscape. Engaged customers are more loyal, have more touchpoints with their chosen brands, and deliver more excellent value over their lifetime.” - McKinsey
According to McKinsey two-thirds of millennials expect real-time customer service, and three-quarters of all customers expect a consistent cross-channel service experience. So, to cover more channels and meet the modern customer demand, the obvious answer is to add more trained employees to deliver great customer service, right? Wrong, with cost pressures rising at least as quickly as service expectations, it’s just not a sustainable option. So, how can AI be effectively implemented to solve this challenge whilst delivering a positive customer experience and enhancing business results?
Enhance Agent Productivity
According to McKinsey, AI-based agent support systems are already becoming a key tool for companies seeking to offer extremely effective personal service to demanding customers. The critical factor here is to ensure all historic support data has been correlated to understand and discover your automation priorities. Why? This process will identify your customers' needs so you can automatically deliver exactly what they want. SaaSy spends time meticulously understanding these needs and scenarios and, by doing this, creates the most effective environments to ensure your customer's needs are met every time. We implement automation for effective triaging as a perfect example of how AI can enhance your support agents' productivity. The SaaSy People can create your customised workflows to respond to queries, signpost your customers to the solutions to meet their needs and free up your agent's time to focus on more meaningful work. Using AI to deliver efficient ticket routing can assess incoming queries and automatically assign them to the most suitable agent or department, reducing response times and ensuring that customers receive prompt attention.
Key factors The SaaSy People consider when implementing AI for our customers:
Data Quality: Ensure that your historical support data is clean, accurate, and comprehensive for effective AI analysis.
Customisation: Tailor your AI solutions to your specific customer base and support workflows.
Human-AI Collaboration: While AI is powerful, human agents remain essential for handling complex or sensitive issues. Strive for seamless collaboration between humans and AI.
24/7 Support
Offering 24/7 support through AI opens a host of opportunities not only for the customer but the business alike. Instant availability through implementing AI allows customer interactions to remain consistent regardless of time zones or holidays. This ensures that customers receive immediate assistance whenever they need it, and customers no longer have to wait in queues for an agent to become available. AI can address their queries instantly, leading to improved satisfaction. Our SaaSy experts can create coherency by tailoring responses following pre-defined workflows. Our partner solutions offer the added benefit of handling large volumes of enquiries simultaneously, reducing the need for human support teams outside working hours.
When implementing 24/7 AI, it’s important to consider:
Effectively Train the AI: Feed the AI system relevant data and train it to understand customer inquiries and provide accurate responses.
Integrate with Existing Systems: SaaSy ensures seamless integration with your existing customer support infrastructure, such as CRM systems or ticketing platforms.
Monitor and Optimise: Frequent health checks are essential in continuously monitoring the AI's performance, gathering feedback, and refining its responses to improve accuracy and customer satisfaction.
Increased Customer Engagement
You’re instantly getting ahead of the game when implementing and enhancing your AI solution to increase customer engagement. According to Forbes, the ultimate goal of customer engagement is to build lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with customers, leading to an increased lifetime value for the brand. Level up your customer engagement strategy by implementing an effective AI solution and preempting queries with solutions on hand to ensure you’re giving your customers what they want before they know they want it! AI is personalised for every organisation. Harvesting and analysing your data to understand customer intent and how to efficiently navigate the customer to the end goal smoothly, without the need for lengthy human interaction, is essential when looking to implement AI to maintain focus on the customer journey. By continuously analysing customer interactions and feedback, AI can identify areas for improvement in your support processes. Regular health checks allow our experts to optimise workflows and deliver ever-improving customer experiences over time whilst providing key metrics like customer satisfaction, resolution rates, and average handling time, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your support offering.
The Takeaway
While AI offers many benefits, it's important to remember that it's not a complete replacement for human interaction. Instead, it’s there as a tool to focus your agent's time on where they can really deliver a meaningful impact. Ensure that your customers can easily access human support when needed, especially for complex or sensitive issues.
If you’re looking to enhance customer experience, create efficiencies within your customer support team and delight your customers further by implementing AI the correct way, click here to speak with one of our team where they can share best practices for AI projects we’ve worked on in your industry!
