August 14, 2023
We're in the midst of an AI revolution, which may sound daunting for some. According to Zendesk, 79% of consumers believe AI has become crucial to modern customer service. AI does not mean automation only, ridding of all agents. View it more as a means of creating a lean process for customer support to enhance the overall customer experience. The idea is to allow agents to solve complex queries whilst leaving the repetitive work for AI. So, how can you adopt and implement AI within customer support?
Improve Productivity
To understand this significance, in reference to Deloitte, we should look back to the Industrial Revolution: humans created machines that mimicked human muscles and replicated the work of humans' hands and legs. Likewise, AI will scale our cognitive abilities. Asking customer support agents to triage responses isn't ideal. We want agents to focus their time on the areas that will create maximum business value. Doing so will distribute workloads and prioritise important requests during peak times. AI determines what to automate and what to escalate, meaning support agents are spending more time on more meaningful tasks to, in turn, heighten customer satisfaction.
Seamless Experience
The aim of the game is for AI to become the layer for existing context gaps to ensure every experience is seamless. We've mentioned using AI for triaging, so let's look at how we bridge the gap between automation and human. Zendesk reports 71% of leaders are rethinking the entire customer journey to build a more fluid experience, with 70% of consumers spending more with brands that provide a seamless experience between all points of contact. So, looking at the customer journey, it's important to note that setting the correct AI flow is vital to the process. The answers to the support questions set allow the customer support agent to understand the customer's needs to execute the best response. Ideally, the customer should never "feel" the handover process from bot to agent, creating a seamless experience.
Personalised Responses
Harvard Business Review states that competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyse, and utilise personalised customer data at scale and how a company uses AI to understand, shape, customise, and optimise the customer journey. For example, creating content cues within your platform allows AI to scan customer feedback and produce several articles and insights that the customer may find helpful before transferring to human support. Believe it or not, customers are crying out for personalisation, with Zendesk reporting 71% of respondents want AI to create these better-personalised experiences. And they understand that businesses will use customer data to generate this personalisation.
Think Then Implement
Implementing AI in the customer support process can revolutionise how you interact with your customers, enhancing efficiency and personalisation. Businesses should comprehensively assess their customer support needs and pain points to incorporate AI technology successfully. This analysis will help identify areas where AI can make the most significant impact, such as chatbots for handling repetitive inquiries or machine learning algorithms for sentiment analysis. Our Expert Services team can help analyse your current support process and recommend where to implement AI and exactly to do it.
Once we have identified your specific use cases, selecting the right AI tools and platforms becomes crucial. We will help you choose AI solutions that align with your goals, considering accuracy, scalability, and integration capabilities. It's essential to balance automation and human touch by carefully designing AI workflows that seamlessly transition between automated responses and human intervention when necessary. Lastly, we can help continuously monitor and evaluate your AI performance; combined with customer feedback, we help refine and optimise your AI-powered customer support process, ensuring it consistently delivers exceptional experiences while building trust and customer satisfaction.
The Takeaway…
The AI revolution is exciting for businesses, with AI as an enhancement, not a headcount replacement. The effective use of AI offers a seamless customer experience whilst providing a personalised approach that keeps customers loving your brand. Are you excited to learn more about AI? Click here to book a free call with our Expert Services team!
