At Forethought, we know that the landscape of customer support AI, and just AI in general, is confusing and sometimes fraught with a lot of unnecessary complexity.
At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your customers are getting what they need. And we get that! We want to help you find the customer support AI that works for you.
We get that! And we want to help you find the AI that works for you.
Our CEO and co-founder, Deon Nicholas, spoke about this in a webinar recently discussing how you can make AI work for you. What do we see not working? Companies adopt AI before they understand the customer needs they’re trying to address. Perhaps a vendor oversold an AI’s capability or you accidentally committed to major upkeep to keep the AI relevant to customer issues. Maybe you thought a bot would help alleviate the volume of questions coming in. However, you actually still have a bottleneck with complicated tickets getting sent to the wrong departments or getting lost in the system.
What we realized is that the AI landscape has evolved and will continue to evolve. It’s more important than ever before that you understand which AI is most relevant to your business and customer needs.
In a large sense, there are four types of questions and needs coming into an organization. As you read through these, think about your customers’ needs and the experience you want to create. Which of the four below sounds like something you would hear a customer say most frequently?
1. I Need Some Quick Information.
These customers need a positive and even fun individual customer experience to keep them coming back the next time they make a purchase. They have a lot of “How do I…” or how, what, when, and where questions. Frequently, they just need a nudge toward the right answer.
2. I Want to Make Something Happen!
This type of customer needs a task executed. They want you to help them get something done and it’s usually a seemingly simple task, even if on the customer support side, it requires a little finesse.
3. I Want to Use Your Product Creatively and Feel Ownership.
These empowered customers need help understanding how to do something and are looking to creatively capitalize on the tools or platform that you sell them. They want to know “how to do something” and might need a little more support on their specific use case.
4. I Want to Trust and Rely On You…
Even if what we’re talking about it complicated.
With these customers, it’s most important to create trust and reliability, a sense that you can provide the right answers and clarify what is important despite all the noise or confusion. They ask questions looking for explanations of contracts, of policies, and of product specifications.
At Forethought, we believe that understanding your customers’ needs and desires is crucial to finding customer support AI that really works for you. In our webinar, we discuss what types of questions and needs are coming into your support organization and then we discuss what type of AI would help you resolve tensions that occur with the type of customer needs coming in.
