Consider this scenario: You’ve just recently hired a new customer support agent. Everyone’s thrilled, and you’re fishing through the supply closet to pull out the welcome banner.
There’s just one problem: Your team has a flurry of tickets coming in. Customers are calling and emailing. One of your product’s functionalities isn’t working right. You are essentially being pulled in 437 different directions. You know onboarding your new agent is critical to getting them customer-ready and oriented to company protocol, but you don’t have time.
We all know time is a precious commodity in any organization. We never seem to have enough when onboarding new hires. Still, whether they’re seasonal or not, agents need to be adequately onboarded so they can digest various current and historical company knowledge and gain confidence in themselves. For companies that desperately need help in their customer support efforts, time is of the essence.
There is a convenient and engaging solution that managers like you can deploy to combat these issues: customer support AI. Artificial Intelligence-based customer support is increasingly becoming a must-have to getting your new agents up to speed faster.
Keep reading for various ways customer support AI can enhance the onboarding process for customer service or support agents.
Freeing Up An Agent’s Time
The job of being a support agent is multi-faceted, and their tickets can run the gambit. Often, agents spend a chunk of their day taking on lower-level tasks or tickets, which pulls them away from other parts of their job, like learning more about your company’s history or policies.
Customer Support AI, such as Agatha Solve can quickly answer these tickets. Solve answers common questions using self-service options, like your knowledge base articles or help desk templates, while still providing top-notch customer service to those who need it.
Using customer support AI means agents are freed to do a myriad of other things, like learning the ins and outs of their queue or tackling higher-level tasks that must be performed by an actual person.
Agatha answers questions with a super high accuracy, so new agents don’t have to worry whether or not the customers they’re interacting with are getting the answers they need. Instead, they can feel assured that Agatha will call out the right answer in the text through the system’s understanding of language. The customer will get the most accurate answer the first time, no matter how it’s asked. That’s the beauty of our customer support AI.
Agatha can streamline a new agent’s workflow by answering what she can herself. If she can’t, she’ll automatically route to the agent. In either situation, your team can trust that Agatha’s got their back. When more tickets get solved the first time correctly, new agents can become more productive with less transition time. It’s a win-win!
Tap Into the Power of Your Collective Knowledge
The majority of the onboarding process for a new agent merely is learning— company policy, historical precedence, and customer need patterns. There’s a lot that people don’t learn in training though too. In the past, this would come in the form of leaning over to a veteran agent and asking where x or z answers are for a question, troubleshooting over lunch breaks, finding out about hidden resources someone has on a wiki somewhere. With time’s changing and people working remotely and being disconnected from their teams, you need to consolidate and centralize all that knowledge.
What if you could leverage that experience, veteran knowledge, training, and information to empower your agents on Day 1?
With customer support AI such as Agatha Assist, new agents can unlock your collective knowledge quickly and efficiently. That’s because Agatha can easily embed into your current helpdesk system, like Zendesk and Salesforce and other data sources (Confluence, WordPress, Nanorep, Readmeio, JIRA, Guru, Knowledge Bases, etc.), sprawled across your organization. New agents can spend time digging through this information to learn, but when the time comes, they can turn to Agatha to answer a ticket.
Agatha assists in other ways, too. New agents can select the knowledge sources that work best for the customer’s needs. So, if an agent has a question about anything, they can quickly find solutions using their preferred methods. Because customer support AI aggregates your help knowledge base, Agatha will send and answer our in record time
What does that mean for your agent’s efficiency? A new employee may find it difficult to know where to find certain answers, but with customer support AI tools like one-click answers and smarter search, that problem is eliminated. New agents can increase efficiency by up to 35% because they save man hours by getting the right answer the first time.
Help With Specific Inquiries
The machine learning of customer support AI, such as Agatha is a lifesaver for new agents. As they acclimate to their new role, a complicated ticket may cross their path, which could overwhelm them. But with AI, the chances are that the answer to their question lies somewhere within your company’s collective knowledge base(s), creating a support system for new agents.
A support system is vital because confidence matters for customer support agents. It’s the key to improving customer support and satisfaction. You wouldn’t want to work through a return or convoluted issue if your support agent sounded unsure of themselves or made you wait, would you?
Instead of agents spending up 75% of their time doing manual research to find their customers’ answers, and getting stressed as minutes tick by, customer support AI like Agatha will significantly reduce the average handling time. Agatha can reduce an agent’s stress over finding an answer by assisting them in locating the best info for the situation, and your customers will likely notice!
Why It Matters
The key to having a successful customer support team that actually improves customer experience is to ensure everyone is confident and up to date on the company’s ever-changing information, features, and support details. New agents will need more time acquiring knowledge about the company, believing in their abilities, and becoming integrated into the business, but all of this must be done.
Yet building a new agent’s capacity can take time, unless, that is, you provide agents with the right tools. With customer support AI solutions, like Agatha, an agent’s onboarding and training is embedded into the work they start to do, making the onboarding process more convenient and beneficial for everyone involved.
Getting a new agent ready to handle tickets with ease will take significantly less time, and you can roll out that welcome banner knowing your new agent is confident and prepared to go.
Interested in learning more? Contact one of our experts today to see how your team can leverage AI.
