Using Customer Support AI to Improve Support Metrics

Your agents are your biggest assets when you’re running a support team. They run your daily processes and serve your customers to the best of their abilities.

What’s tough about customer support is that you can’t please everyone.

Customers expect more than ever these days. They’re hopeful for a customer experience that meets their needs and solves their problems easily and that’s difficult when only 19% of consumers believe customer service is exceeding their expectations.

As a business and support team leader your only hope is to provide your customers and agents with the necessary tools to help them get there. Finding solutions to customer needs impacts your organization in a number of ways.

Your support metrics and key performance indicators are dependent on the interactions you’re having with your customers and how they perceive those experiences.

In order to help improve your support metrics and KPIs you must first identify what areas need to be improved and figure out what tools you need in place to get the needle moving toward your goals.

Lucky for you, there is a wide variety of tools available to help you empower your agents and enable them to serve your customers better and more effectively and in turn improve your support metrics.

One tool making waves for scaling businesses and their support teams is customer support AI. In fact, AI is revolutionizing the way we handle customer support needs and how we enable agents to deliver better customer experience. Plus, the Temkin Group recently found that SaaS companies who invest in improving the customer experience can expect to increase revenue by $1 billion.

It’s time AI was part of your strategy and here’s why.

Delivering When Customers Need It

It’s no secret customers expect resolutions when they seek them. In fact, nearly half of customers expect companies to respond to customer emails faster than 4 hours and 12% of customers expect answers within 15 minutes. This changes when you’re utilizing chat options, increasing to 57% of customers expecting chat responses within minutes.

When you can implement a solution to help meet these expectations, you will have happier customers who feel they can trust your company to truly get them what they’re looking for.

AI for customer support can help your customers help themselves as well as help your teams deliver when customers need it.

As it stands your process likely looks like this: a customer sends in a support request through a contact form on your website and tries to explain their need with as much detail as possible. Then your team gets that ticket, labels it, routes it to the right person, then that person does some digging to answer it and then finally sends a response.

Unfortunately, there are many things that could cause issues with this process. First, you’re likely receiving the same variety of support requests over and over again. Second, if you have an individual labeling your tickets, how accurate and consistent are those labels? And third, how quickly are agents able to research answers they may not know off the top of their heads?

AI can help solve these issues and do a lot more for your business.

With AI your agents can deflect repetitive queries through email or chat with automated workflows that send customers the answers they need automatically. AI can help automate ticket tagging by using company data and ticket history to label tickets as they come in. And AI can help agents automatically add information to questions they’re answering and assist in suggesting commonly-used responses.

Customer support AI will make it so your teams resolve queries before they become tickets and allow agents to resolve those that do in a much faster fashion.

All this to say AI can help improve your most important metric: customer satisfaction.

Bettering Response Times

We’re constantly talking about the two things customers are looking for within support: speed and accuracy. With the help of customer support AI you can see an improvement in the metrics that likely matter most to your agents — response time and individual statistic KPIs.

First Response Times (FRT), Average Response Times (ART), Average Handle Time (AHT), cases closed per hour, and First Contact Resolution are all support metrics that your agents care about keeping consistent or improving overall.

We mentioned that using AI for customer support gets your customer what they need when they need it which in turn helps you improve time sensitive support metrics.

We’ve seen companies like Lime reduce their time to first response by up to 77% while others like Desire2Learn have increased cases closed by over 30% using customer support AI. They’re invested in transforming their customer experience and are using AI to do it.

According to Gartner, CX is the new marketing battlefront. Prioritizing your ability to have better response times should be part of that CX strategy you’re competing against your competitors with.

Changing The Agent Experience

You can’t improve your metrics without your agents and with the power of customer support AI you can change their experience for the better.

We mentioned that the role of a customer service agent is laden with processes that could eventually be streamlined to include AI help. With better tools you can make an agent’s work easier and remove mundane and repetitive tasks such as labeling incoming tickets and answering the most repetitive ones that come in.

Along with focus on customer experience, contact centers and support teams are shifting to improving the agent experience, which ICMI claims is essential to providing quality customer service that engages and satisfies customers.

Contact centers and support teams are known to have high attrition rates. We can attribute this to the stress related to customer service and often to the processes you are working to improve. Customer support AI can help you retain agents for longer periods of time by changing the way you onboard them and are able to help them ramp.

When you have happier agents, you have happier customers whose needs are met every time.