Do your customers like your customer support system? Is it easy for them to navigate? Have you tried using it yourself?
If it’s not a great experience for you, then it’s likely not a great experience for your customers.
And with 59% of consumers now caring about their experience, you need to improve the process.
You also need to consider how the process affects your actual customer support agents: they’re the ones having to route tickets as they come in and help resolve issues, but without the right tools, it can be difficult to serve up the best answers in the right amount of time.
With the landscape of chatbots and automation constantly changing and growing, people, like you, who are looking for solutions for their teams find it hard to understand the true benefits that customer support AI can bring to an organization. Let’s talk about some of the difficulties your customers might already be facing and how AI can help create a better customer experience when people come looking for help from support.
Solving Customer & Agent Issues
Your customers come to your support team for answers. They want to know where to find specific pieces of information and who they can go to when they can’t. They want to get answers quickly and easily.
Your agents, on the other hand, want to support your customers in the best ways they can. They want to be able to pull up accurate answers and do it in a timely manner. They’re likely currently trained to manually triage tickets and pull information from their scattered sources.
What this means right now is that as your queue of tickets slowly continues to grow, there’s nothing helping it die down. Your agents don’t have a great way to pull information for those easy-to-answer tickets and your customers get pulled into a cycle of asking questions and then just waiting for answers. Or worse, they have to navigate a redundant chatbot that is a pain for your team to manage.
What do you do? How do you eliminate mundane work, get agents the right tools to do their jobs well and not burn out, and improve your customer’s experience?
You automate with AI. And you end up doing a lot more. Here are four ways customer support AI creates a better customer experience.
#1. Accuracy = Happy Customers
The best AI option for customer support teams will use all your current and past data to learn everything it can about your customers’ needs and your ability to meet those needs.
This includes past tickets, incoming tickets, your agent-facing and customer-facing knowledge centers, and even any stored notes. Because AI is trained on all this stored information, your customers will get accurate answers every time they come looking for them. Whether you’re implemented into Zendesk, Salesforce, Jira, or have agent notes stored in other places, the best AI can access it all.
But what’s wrong with not getting the right answers? A few things.
Your customers want accuracy and without it will go running to your competitor.
Your customers want to know that they can trust your organization and therefore the people they go to when looking for information. They can’t build trust without accuracy.
Your customers want to build relationships with your company. And you probably do too.
Delivering the right answers improves a customer’s experience because they leave the situation feeling understood. And as much as your customers hope for speedy answers, nothing beats accuracy the first time something is asked. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how quickly an agent can answer a ticket if the answer isn’t right.
With the help of AI for customer support, your customers will get quality answers the first time they ask, helping improve first contact resolution rates and their overall experience.
#2 Create Efficiency to Meet SLAs
What goes hand-in-hand with serving accurate answers? Doing so efficiently and in a way that helps meet your SLAs.
A great customer service experience happens when your customers feel like the agent helping them understands their needs quickly. And a great agent experience happens when they feel like they’re able to find the answer or resolve a ticket within an agreed-upon amount of time.
Your customers don’t want to wait for answers. Some organizations feel like they’re limited in how they can help customers because they only use chat or only use email but the great thing about AI for customer support is that you can use it for both.
Automating email responses helps eliminate the customer-dreaded “You’re now in line-” email. Getting an email letting you know you’ll get a response later just causes more frustration in your customers and won’t have them coming back. AI can help agents find answers faster and resolve more tickets, reducing the amount of time customers are waiting to hear back.
AI for customer support teams can also vastly improve the chat experience by resolving commonly-asked tickets or helping agents find answers faster. Gone are the hours, or even days-long wait times.
AI for customer support can actually help you meet SLAs and improve customer experience. Meeting SLAs can be difficult when you’re trying to manage a queue of tickets that seems to stop growing. The best customer support AI can help you improve your org’s customers’ satisfaction because it’ll help get the right answer quickly the first time.
#3 Route to the Right Agent For Improved Satisfaction
Have you ever sent in a support request only to have an agent tell you they need to forward your request to someone else? It’s not a fun situation to be in, especially when you’re looking for an answer quickly and can’t find it anywhere on a company’s FAQ.
Your customers may be having frustrations with this and you might not even know it. Without the proper knowledge base organization or lack of it, your customers are having a hard time getting to the right people for their needs.
And if your customers are struggling, then your agents might be having a problem too.
What we’ve seen is that the root of the issue is in routing tickets. It’s boring, tedious, and mundane work that agents either don’t care to do properly or just don’t have the time to try to do properly.
Think about the types of tickets they need to label over and over– they have to detect spam, determine whether a ticket needs to be escalated, find out if someone’s request will decrease satisfaction scores, and also send tickets to other departments. That’s a lot of repetitive work.
But automating the actual routing of your tickets is super easy when you’re using AI that uses Natural Language Understanding and that is trained on all your past data. If it’s familiar with past tickets in your system, then those tickets will be sent to the right person with a high level of accuracy.
The best customer support AI for your team can label tickets that are spam and automatically get rid of those. It can send tickets to different departments, and triage based on sentiment and escalation needs. This will help your teams reduce the amount of time on repetitive tickets and improve the way your customers interact with your support teams.
If you were your customer, how would you feel if you were sent from one person to another just to answer a question? Routing to the right person the first time can greatly improve a customers’ experience.
#4 Grow With Your AI
The worst thing about implementing tools that work only like bandaids is that eventually that bandaid will fall off and you’ll need another, maybe an even bigger one.
Implementing a chatbot that needs heavy upkeep can be tedious and takes up valuable time. Hiring more agents doesn’t always work because when there’s peaks, there’s also lows and you won’t always need that many people. And doing nothing just hurts everyone.
You need AI that can continue to grow with your organization and that’s where our customer support AI comes in. The right AI for your customer support team doesn’t require regular manual updates because it works with your information center to continue learning anything you add to it. No more manual inputs or need to deal with technically heavy tools.
By decreasing the need for technical skill to manually keep up with the tools you’re using, you create happier agents who need less onboarding time and can focus on creating more ways that can improve your customer’s experience and overall satisfaction.
This also frees up your time. You now have time to find more ways to improve your team’s performance and in the end your organization’s performance. Customer support and customer satisfaction are the heart of your organization and without happy agents to create happy customers, you’ll be stuck ideating ways to delight your customers.
As your organization grows, AI should grow with you and we can do just that.
Improve Your Customers’ Experience
Without the right tools in place, you’ll leave your customers feeling misunderstood and forgotten in their efforts to find solutions for their problems. Your teams feel lost and like their efforts don’t matter.
Your customers and your agents would benefit from AI for customer support that improves the customer experience and the agent experience too.
With Agatha’s Triage you’ll not only help your customers get answers quicker and more accurately, you’ll also be able to help your teams meet their SLAs and focus on other tasks that can continue to improve customer satisfaction.
If you’re interested in learning more about Triage and how it can help your org, let’s chat.
