How Does Customer Support Help Onboard Agents Faster?

By Deon Nicholas

When it comes to leading customer support teams that are able to provide world-class customer service, it all starts with onboarding new agents in a way that is conducive to enabling them to provide that very support. 

Customer service reps have to learn everything they can about your organization in order to serve your customers. Aside from understanding the basics of how to do their job, agents have to be knowledgeable on every customer process and every company policy.

It’s a lot to keep track of so it makes sense you want to dedicate valuable time to training and onboarding them as thoroughly as possible. 

Can you imagine having to be an open source of knowledge at all times? There’s gotta be a way to make it easier. 

So what if you had some kind of tool to help ease that ramp time and the effort required to get new agents up to speed and actually helping customers as soon as possible? 

Forethought has your solution: customer support AI. And here are three different ways an AI tool can help train and onboard your agents faster and ultimately improve your customer experience. 

Provide Knowledge 

Large support teams seem to run into one big problem: there’s knowledge everywhere.

If it’s not stored and readily available for new agents then it’s likely stored in someone’s personal notes. So if one person knows one thing and another knows something else, how do you leverage your organization’s collective knowledge library for new agents? 

We’re talking your historical tickets, knowledge articles, macros, and notes from anywhere you could think of (even your oldest employee’s secret notes.) 

When implementing an AI tool, the AI learns about your organization by ingesting your company’s knowledge bases. It learns how agents have responded to past tickets, how they should be labeled, and how you set up responses. The best part? It can do all of this on its first day on the job.

With AI for customer support, new agents will be able to hit the ground running because they’ll have that collective knowledge at their fingertips. With tools such as Forethought’s Assist, agents can get help with answering questions by have artificial intelligence suggest answers based off past tickets. They’ll get suggested articles or responses when using AI and be able to get accurate answers out fast. 

Plus, reps who have been around longer can easily share any notes they have with new agents, making it easier to respond to queries that newbies might not know the answer to. AI for customer support enables quicker answers which makes for happy customers. 

Remove Repetitiveness 

You know those repetitive tickets you or your agents see everyday? You know, the ones that say things like… 

“Where’s my order?” 

“How do I log in?” 

“Where do I register?” 

“I lost my password.” 

Your team likely gets and sees these tickets day in and day out. And they’ve probably sent the same response to every single one. 

An easy solution would be to automate this task to make it easier for your teams to get to the tasks that may be more difficult to resolve. Automating this would look like automating the process of sending the correct macro to the customer whenever they send in a customer support request.

Here is just one example of AI helping support teams. Say you deal with shipping orders or something similar. Whenever someone asks, “What is my order status?” you can automate the customer getting a response that asks for their order number and then tells them where the order is. 

With the help of customer support AI, you can remove the repetitive task of replying to the same ticket with the same information over and over again. 

By automating part of the process, you free up time for your agents to get to more complex issues that may require more of their time. Just think about it, if your agents are spending a couple of hours every day doing the same task again and again, you get back all that time for your agents to work on other tasks or resolve even more tickets. 

Work Through Complexities 

Another issue we’ve seen support teams run into is not having enough time to get to the more complex customer issues they see coming in. Or sometimes it’s the opposite, they spend too much time trying to resolve the complex issues that come in and leave their less exciting tasks for later. 

This might mean simple tickets not getting the personalized attention they deserve or tickets being labeled incorrectly, increasing the time it will take to get them resolved. 

Teams who find themselves unable to get to tickets that take longer to resolve could greatly benefit from a tool that helps automate whatever is getting in the way of getting to the more complex work. We mentioned before how your agents are probably spending hours each week doing a task repeatedly, with AI you can get to the issues that require more knowledge or other people to resolve.

Working on complex tasks is exactly what Forethought can do too. We had a client who had the problem of needing to build out a workflow that could get customers refunds without inundating agents with the repetitive task. They had two options: build the workflow out themselves or have AI run it for them. With the help of AI they were able to deflect thousands of repetitive tickets that helped their agents get to more complex customer requests. 

Onboard Faster With AI

By providing your teams with a tool that allows them to work more efficiently and more diligently, you’ll find that onboarding your agents becomes easier and faster. 

Gone will be the days of agents not knowing where to find specific information for customer inquiries because with AI, they’ll be able to surface the knowledge they need with ease and provide customers with solutions that improve your metrics and KPIs. 

Our AI for customer support uses NLU to understand the intent of your customers when they’re seeking support answers. She learns by taking your knowledge bases and past support tickets to learn about your customers and what they come to you for the most. 

Customer support AI helps teams serve up the best information to customers in the best possible way and helps maintain or improve customer metrics. 

If you’re interested in learning more about what our AI agent can do for you, let’s chat or check out our customer stories if you’re hoping to learn more

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Interested in generative AI for customer support? Check out this guide to learn about the 3 key pillars you need to get started.

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