3 Ways You Aren’t Using AI for Customer Support (And You Should Be)
Time is money, and there is perhaps no more expensive time than that spent on customer support. And if you’re not using artificial intelligence to help with customer support, you’re spending far more than you should supporting your customers.
No happy customer contacts your support team. The customer calls support when something is wrong, and the longer it takes to fix — and the more frustrating the support experience — the more customer good will you exhaust. This is before you calculate the actual cost of paying support staff to deal with those unhappy customers.
The more support cases you endure, and the longer it takes to close them, the more money you set on fire for no real benefit. Artificial intelligence can help you close support cases faster and, in many instances, AI can close case without an expensive human support rep getting involved. Here’s how.
1. Build better FAQs
Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) lists give customers answers to support questions before they’re even asked. But maintaining an accurate, up-to-date FAQ list is a daunting task, as solutions evolve, and new support issues are constantly discovered. Often, critical solutions and advice aren’t added to your support knowledge base, which forces customers to ask a human support rep — and wait on a human response.
An A.I. agent can monitor support tickets and flag common, unanswered requests for development into formal FAQs. That same agent can preemptively review your support knowledge base for obviously missing data and suggest topics before customer ever need them. Most usefully, an A.I. assistant can note when FAQs fall out of date and flag them for editing.
With the help of an A.I. assistant, your FAQs will maintain maximum effectiveness, deflect the maximum number of support cases, and keep customer unhappiness to a minimum.
2. Deploy “Tier 0” support
No matter how proactive your FAQ list, there will always be customers who will contact your support desk rather than search for answers on their own. But there’s no reason that the first person that customers communicates with must be a human support rep. An A.I. agent can act as “Tier 0” support, skimming of the easiest support cases — the ones where a rep just points a customer at the FAQ to find a known, easy-to-follow resolution — in the same way the Apple’s Siri processes your iPhone questions.
If you want to go the extra mile, that same A.I. agent can walk a customer through a known solution step by step, sparing a support rep the tedious task of reading an FAQ page to a customer who needs extra hand-holding.
And if a known solution isn’t on file, your A.I. support rep can collect the standard information for a support ticket and then hand the customer over to a human that is armed with this basic data. Best of all, when an A.I. agent does this ticket creation, it can immediately flag this new issue for inclusion in your support knowledge base, so no critical support info is every left uncaptured.
3. Improve human support reps
If and when a support issue is escalated to your human support staff need as much help as possible to close that support ticket quickly and successfully. An A.I. assistant can help your support staff search your knowledge base for relevant data, direct support staff to the appropriate subject matter experts to answer the issue at hand and assist with the rote documentation and follow-up tasks needed to formally close a support ticket.
By handling and accelerating the tedious administrative work of support, an A.I. assistant can ensure your human support staff focuses on providing actual support, so ticket get closed faster and customers are satisfied as soon as possible.
Bottom line: if you’re not using A.I. for customer support, your support team is working too hard, your support tickets are closing too slowly, and your support costs are higher than they should be.
Talla is building the A.I. support agent you need to minimize your support costs and maximize customer satisfaction. If you’d like to learn how artificial intelligence can make your support team the best it can be, contact Talla today.
