Your customer support agents have a tough job.
We get it. We really do.
And they probably do a great job at their jobs! But that’s not to say that even the best support teams need their own form of support.
Plus, we’re of the mind that things will always be able to improve if you’re willing to work with it and find new ways to foster change. Finding where to go for help or deciding which direction to take can be difficult, but that’s what we’re here for!
With the help of AI for customer support, you’ll be able to improve your agents’ work lives and ultimately create a better customer experience for your customers.
After all, everyone wants a smooth and clear process for how to go about getting help and giving it.
AI-assisted customer support is the future and it’s rapidly becoming the present. With it, even top customer support teams around the world are seeing greatly improved results in efficiency and customer satisfaction.
If you want to know how AI can help, here are three ways AI for customer support elevates agents to new heights.
#1 Improved Efficiency
One thing we hear a lot from customer support leaders is that bottlenecks in support queues and the inability to streamline certain tasks and processes cause inefficiency in their teams.
Customer support agents often spend as much time researching their answers as they actually take to answer tickets.
What does this tell us? That your customers are constantly waiting for their tickets to be picked up and answered. This leads to frustrated customers who want faster answers and upset agents who wish there was a way to create efficiency.
AI for customer support can help support agents break free of this cycle.
Customer support AI works by ingesting every last piece of your historical data and learning from it to understand how you’ve responded to tickets in the past. This way the AI will be able to categorize similar tickets, understand which articles or macros to use in answers, and assist in removing mundane work.
And about that mundane work — are your agents still manually labeling tickets for where they need to go to get answered? Customer support AI can fill in that gap and label the tickets automatically, saving you so much time and letting agents work on other, more complex tasks.
#2 Meeting SLAs
Given the volume of customer queries that companies tend to receive, the faster they can be sorted through, assigned, and adequately addressed the better.
Speed is critical, especially when you’ve created service level agreements that you’re required to meet.
SLAs often dictate how quickly tickets need to be resolved or which ones need to be prioritized. The longer it takes for a customer to have their issues addressed, the less satisfied they tend to become.
Did you know the industry standard for average email and chat response times are currently around 12 hours, according to Help Scout’s report.
Your teams may be facing one of many issues:
- They’re missing tickets due to busy queues
- They don’t have the answers readily available for more complicated queries
- Agents may be picking the less-complicated tickets
- Handoffs are manual and create more trouble
- Or processes are clumsy and create bottlenecks
When using customer support AI, agents have more time to get to more complicated tickets while deflecting repetitive tickets that can be answered with AI. They won’t have to worry about handing things off or where they can find information when AI helps fill in the gaps.
#3 Better Ticket Categorization
Classifying, prioritizing, and preparing for tickets is as important a process in customer support as actually resolving the incoming queries.
Imagine if you sent in a ticket to a support team and you just never got a response. A few things could have occurred, but one we hear a lot of is tickets getting miscategorized.
This usually happens because an organization has someone manually labeling tickets or because customers misattribute their own queries. Plus you’re likely getting tickets through different channels and as the pile continues to grow, there’s nothing helping it die back down.
Customer support AI can automatically assign tags or labels to incoming tickets, helping triage customer cases more effectively. Because AI for customer support is learning from your past data, it can have more accurate insight into a labeling system for your teams.
Happier Support Agents and Customers
Nothing would make your agents’ lives easier than automatically knowing how to go about addressing a customer’s question. Similarly, nothing delights a customer more than immediately having their concerns understood.
This can become a reality with customer support AI, as AI has the ability to scan and categorize a ticket and then come up with suggestions as to how to go about addressing it in mere moments.
Everyone wins!
If you’re ready to take your support team to the next level by giving them the assistance of customer support AI, let’s chat!
Still have questions? If you’re wondering just how AI has changed support orgs at Lime or D2L, check out our customer stories.
With the vast base of knowledge at their disposal, customer support AI can liberate agents from having to sift through internal docs for answers or having to manually label tickets themselves.
Learn how you can get started today!
