How to Optimize Your Support Operations With AI
The following article was written by Hailee Woodward and created in conjunction with our friends at Ultimate.
Since the release of ChatGPT, AI has taken the world by storm. You’ve no doubt seen countless news articles and LinkedIn posts about the importance of jumping on these developments and integrating them into your product — otherwise you’ll fall behind your competitors. But automation in the context of support is more than just a passing trend or a bandwagon you should jump on.
Generative AI — the tech behind ChatGPT — makes it possible to scale your support without compromising on quality or hiring and training legions of new agents to do so. It’ll help future-proof your operations no matter what challenges may arise — from seasonal spikes to recessions to global pandemics. This article walks you through how to make the most of automation to optimize your support operations, making your agents’ lives easier and your customers happier.
Provide 24/7 support
With automation, gone are the days of customers waiting hours or even days to get an answer to their queries. And their expectations are rising in step with these new technological capabilities. In fact, according to a Salesforce survey, 72% of consumers say that they’ll stay loyal to the companies that can provide the fastest customer service. So particularly in industries like finserv or travel where time is of the essence on resolving concerns quickly, a chatbot can work around the clock so your customers can get help instantly no matter the time of day.
Plus, with a chatbot that harnesses the power of generative AI, you can still ensure your customers receive answers in a natural, conversational way that closely mimics the quality of support they’d receive from a human agent.
Automate workflows and improve agent efficiency
Optimizing your support through AI is not limited to customer-facing interactions. In fact, those are only the tip of the iceberg on what this groundbreaking tech can do to enhance your support offering. That’s because AI is highly effective in making your agents’ jobs easier behind the scenes, too. For example, it can help to triage and route your tickets to the right departments should they get escalated. Generative AI also enables your chatbot to provide summaries of queries so that your agents are primed to hit the ground running as soon as they receive a ticket.
You’ll be able to clear your ticket backlog by improving agent efficiency and reducing handle times — all while improving agents’ job experience by getting rid of those mundane administrative tasks.
Offer multilingual support
One of the biggest marvels of generative AI for support is that, if you choose the right provider, it can instantly speak any language at native level fluency — right down to regional dialect. This is a game changer, especially considering that 60% of customers now expect to receive support in their native language.
With generative AI your bot can translate your monolingual knowledge source — say, your help center, FAQs page, or product catalog — into whatever language it receives a query in. This not only saves tons of human time and effort on localization but also rapidly improves the speed at which you can launch a bot across different language markets because you no longer need to train it in each individual language.
Improve customer service through analytics
Finally, a good automation provider will also come with comprehensive analytics features that enable you to monitor conversations and tweak your dialogue flows as needed. This will allow you to continually improve the performance of your bot in particular, but also offer better insight into your customers’ questions and queries more generally. This information can then be used to update your knowledge base and even identify areas for improvement in your brand messaging, product onboarding, and more.
The best approach for getting started with automation
But beyond the impulse to immediately begin using AI for your support, as an automation provider, we’d like to conclude with some advice about the best approach to get started. We recommend taking a gradual, hybrid approach to automation. That means that while generative AI gets a lot of the praise for enabling you to start automating quickly, don’t sleep on more traditional conversation design. Combining the ease and speed of getting started that comes with gen AI and combining it with the precision and control of conversation design will allow you to reach +60% automation rates and ensure you’re really getting the most out of these tools.
A final word on optimizing your support operations with AI
These are just a few of the ways that AI can optimize your support, and it’s likely we’re only scratching the surface on what this tech can do in the context of improving your CX and beyond. With customer service giants like Zendesk integrating this tech into the core of their offering, it’s safe to say that automation is quickly becoming the future of support. If you’re ready to take your support operations to the next level, start optimizing your support with AI today.
