There has never been more demand for exceptional interactions between businesses and consumers than there is today: 80% of customers say their experience with companies is as important as their products or services. But the public’s definition of exceptional has also increased.
Businesses have a one-hour window to resolve customer service tickets if they want to meet their customers’ quality expectations. According to HubSpot’s State of Customer Service 2024 report, 21% of customers expect their ticket to be resolved immediately, while 23% expect it to be resolved within an hour.
Agents must find ways to respond to an average of 17,630 support requests each month — roughly a hundred tickets per hour for a standard 9-to-5 worker. AI chatbot support is easing the burden by automating low-complexity tickets, analyzing customer sentiment, and generating personalized responses — all with oversight from experienced customer service staff.
Let’s explore three key benefits of how AI-powered live support can improve customer experience.
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Customer service bots perform better than agents when they are faster and more accurate, meaning customers prioritize speed of resolution over human interaction. The answer, then, is to find tasks that chatbots can accurately solve.
Low-complexity tasks that save customer service agents hours of work include:
Automate note-taking and post-call processingg: Transcripts and call summaries recorded in customer profiles allow agents to keep track of customer interactions with the company, avoid repeating information, and ensure that all key information is available to resolve the issue at hand. Agents can also give the customer their full attention during the call without worrying about writing down information.
Helping agents while they writePredictive typing and automatic response generation are made possible by large language models (LLMs). These chatbots can digest written and audible context and suggest appropriate responses for the agent to review, accept, or edit.
Self-service options:AI can provide immediate answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) and guide customers through troubleshooting steps, allowing them to independently resolve issues at any time of day.
By investing in LLM and developing service bot capabilities, businesses can speed up response times, increase satisfaction, and improve user experiences.
Personalized customer experiences
Using AI in live chat allows you to offer personalized interactions with your customers and provide a more consistent level of quality care.
Let’s say a disgruntled customer types a frustrated or voice message to a customer service rep: My package isn’t here, AGAIN. LLMs, honed with sentiment analysis tools, can identify the use of capitalized and negative adverbs to recognize the tone of the message. Within seconds, they can flag an automated check to investigate past interactions with the customer and their brand loyalty and make an executive decision to offer an apology, replacement delivery, or discount.
Depending on the context of the message, AI can offer personalized solutions to customer queries and adapt its language and tone to match the customer’s preferences and communication style.
Customer support agents can also program chatbots to instantly respond with on-hold messages and rate sentiment severity based on internal values. For example, if a particular customer had multiple issues, high severity could prompt the bot to connect the customer directly to an agent.
Anticipate customer needs
The more agents know about their customers, the better and more proactive their support can be. AI helps agents extract insights from every conversation, and the more customers interact with chatbots, the more businesses can meet their needs.
Let’s say an online customer has viewed several pairs of jeans and added one to their cart, but hasn’t made a purchase. Based on this behavior, the chatbot could anticipate the customer’s potential needs and offer proactive assistance, such as, “Looking for the perfect t-shirt to pair with those jeans? Check out our new products!” or “Need help finding the right size? Our sizing chart can help!” If the customer has purchased similar items in the past, the chatbot can better match the items to their style or even coordinate the new items with previous purchases. If the customer responds, for example, “Hey, I like the blue one, do you have more like that?” These preferences can be saved for future interactions.
By better understanding customer needs with AI, businesses can improve response accuracy, take on more complex tasks, and even predict what customers need before raising a ticket.
Customer support teams must deal with overwhelming volumes of tickets every hour while still delivering the same patience and high-quality care. AI-powered live support offers a much-needed solution by automating routine tasks, improving agent efficiency, and delivering data-driven insights. Agents freed from mundane responsibilities can prioritize delivering quality customer interactions. Plus, as AI capabilities expand and data collection grows, the potential for hyper-personalized and predictive customer support becomes increasingly attainable.
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