A year ago, if you asked someone what ChatGPT was, you probably would have gotten a blank stare in return. Fast forward to the midpoint of 2023, however, and a majority of American adults are now familiar with the AI chatbot.
Conversational AI isn’t a new concept—in fact at Forethought, we’ve been in the business since 2017—but the public awareness provided by ChatGPT had a massive impact.
Evolving Capabilities and Expectations
One of the biggest effects of ChatGPT? Customer expectations around support have completely changed. Now that customers (and support agents) have experienced AI-powered support, the standards of yesterday don’t cut it anymore. These include:
- Clunky and generic chatbots that hinder the customer experience
- Long wait times, inefficient processes, and incorrect responses
- Tedious decision trees created manually for each potential question
Now, customers and agents expect more, including:
- Intelligent conversational interactions with chatbots
- Quick resolution times and accurate responses
- New workflows detected automatically to resolve tickets faster
The world has seen what’s possible with AI-driven support, and these elevated results are quickly becoming the new standard. So as a business leader, it’s crucial that you adapt as well.
In this article, we’ll walk through three of the biggest ways generative AI will revolutionize customer support—and how you can take advantage of these changes to have a positive impact on your bottom line moving forward.
Levels of AI Automation Maturity
First things first, let’s walk through the 5 levels of support automation.
Level 1: Knowledge Base. This type of support automation can pull static content or provide links to a public knowledge base, but it doesn’t have the ability to do more.
Level 2: Automated Chatbot. Here, user can walk through a guided, decision-tree style workflow. Less rigid, but still very limited in scope—and often inaccurate.
Level 3: Large Language Model (LLM). These allow for eloquent, human-like conversations. The issue, however, is that there’s no guarantee that any of the information provided is up to date or accurate.
Level 4: LLM + Knowledge Base. In this case, an LLM combines forces with a public knowledge base, providing conversational answers that are based on published information on the internet. These interactions are often positive, but inaccurate or generic responses are still an issue.
Level 5: The Autonomous Agent. This pinnacle of customer support automation combines generative AI built on proprietary LLMs that are fine-tuned on your system’s internal data. The result? Highly personalized, engaging interactions that provide up-to-date, accurate responses not just from publicly available information, but from thousands of data points from past tickets and macros.
True generative AI combines empathy and friendliness with helpful and actionable responses. Now that’s powerful.
Integrating Automated Workflow Discovery
Imagine this scenario. Your company has partnered with a chatbot provider to improve customer experiences. Great!
Even better, it’s touted as generative AI, meaning you’ll be providing best-in-class support that your customers expect. But once you get into the onboarding process, you learn that it might not be all that it’s cracked up to be.
You quickly learn that you now have to go into the platform and create manual workflows for every single possible customer question, issue, or concern.
A customer has a question about shipment tracking? Time to create a decision tree.
A user needs to reset their password? You get to make that workflow as well.
That doesn’t seem very automated. In fact, it’s estimated that creating all the necessary chatbot workflows for an organization would take an average of 160-192 hours.
With a true generative AI tool, say goodbye to this tedious process and hello to automated workflow discovery.
Not only do you not have to manually build a single bot, this level of generative AI continually detects gaps in your processes and builds new workflows automatically.
Bot building? No way. With true generative AI, this work is done for you.
Creating AI-Empowered Super Agents
It’s a given that true generative AI improves the experiences of your customers. But it can also transform how your support agents operate.
In fact, we’d even go as far as to say that generative AI can create AI-empowered super agents.
With a generative AI-powered tool like Forethought Assist, your agents will be able to work more effectively than ever before. Here’s how.
As soon as they open a new case, our AI gets right to work, surfacing existing macros, past tickets about similar questions, and relevant knowledge articles, all within the agent’s helpdesk.
This means they don’t have to spend time opening multiple tabs, manually searching for this information while customers wait for assistance. Instead, it’s all provided to them thanks to generative AI.
Over the last few months, there have been a lot of questions about how AI will impact support agents moving forward. We think that applied effectively, generative AI should empower and supercharge agents—not replace them.
And the result? A better experience for both your agents and customers alike.
What’s Next?
Generative AI has completely upleveled customer expectations around support—and experts predict that it’s here to stay. How will your team adapt?
One proven strategy is to partner with a customer support automation leader like Forethought. Since 2017, we’ve empowered customer service teams to maximize efficiency and productivity at each stage of the support journey with generative AI. This includes:
- Resolving common cases instantly with Solve
- Predicting and prioritizing cases with Triage
- Supercharging agents via productivity-boosting tools with Assist
- Optimizing workflows and support content with Discover
Leading brands, including Lime, Upwork, and Spoonflower have seen incredible results utilizing Forethought’s AI, including a 77% average reduction in response time and a 47% average ticket deflection rate.
Interested in learning how your organization could benefit from Forethought’s generative AI suite? Request a demo with one of our team members today!
