Service experts everywhere are realizing humans and artificial intelligence (AI) are two sides of the same coin. They need to work together to provide the intelligent service modern consumers and businesses demand.
The new consensus on AI is that it won’t be outmoding human beings anytime soon. In fact, it’s positioning agents to take on more meaningful and rewarding roles. Just as it’s making their work better, it’s opening doors for your agents to do more for customers — in ways only humans can do.
Let’s talk about how they can collaborate as part of your next-generation service strategy.
Urgency and Emotion in Customer Service Interactions
Forbes points out that there are two dimensions to customer support interactions: urgency and emotion. New AI tools provide excellent support for common high-urgency interactions when customers need routine information and action right away.
Customer support has an "80/20" rule: 80% of traffic comes from 20% of issues, most of them repetitive and routine. This remains true even with high-urgency cases. Why waste agents’ time repeating historical responses? Why subject them to high-stress interactions that AI can quickly solve?
AI can negotiate those intense or repetitive issues through intelligent automation, reducing ticket volume by at least 20% and leaving agents available for more meaningful challenges — interactions where only an empathetic touch will bring about desirable results.
Automating Ticket Triage for Humans and AI
Your customers don’t have insight into your ticketing process — they expect you to spring into action the moment they hit Send. But poor ticket triage and response can slow down your average handle time (AHT), creating concerns among customers and stakeholders alike.
Automated ticket triage is already helping companies prevent "fire drills" that waste resources, compromise customer satisfaction, and tarnish your team’s reputation. Now, automation can determine which tickets are best handled by humans or by AI. You can optimize responses to an influx of redundant tickets alongside a handful of escalated issues. Leave those redundant tickets to AI to automate while your team performs due diligence on more complex service priorities. Team members can use tools like recommended response to streamline their communications with customers, pulling from a handful of "most accurate" responses and customizing the content before deploying. After all, humans don't ask simple questions all the time. There is often a "nest" of questions that require multiple data sources to derive a fully formed response. Recommended response can present the answer that combines multiple questions. For instance, a ticket that identifies a hacked account may require two answers: one answer involving account suspension and the second answer involving a refund on the transactions that were not made by the customer. The agent can conjoin macros and provide the most useful response to the customer.
This keeps your AHT at a minimum, even as your team develops nuanced approaches to those unique customer issues. Your team will reach higher levels of satisfaction knowing they face less redundancy and more fulfilling service experiences.
How Hybrid Teams Drive Universal Happiness
Customers want to be delighted, and agents want to do meaningful work. Gartner predicts 85% of customer interactions will involve a 1-to-1 conversation with AI by 2020. How will that contribute to customer happiness and that of your agents? Well, quite a lot.
Different degrees of needs exist in customer support. AI is perfectly "happy" providing fast, accurate responses to customers with simple and immediate needs. Your agents aren’t missing out on satisfaction there. But those customers are thrilled with your AI’s timely and thorough response.
Now your agents are free to work with mission-critical tickets that could otherwise get buried or go without proper attention. This is the rewarding work your agents want and many customers need, but rarely get.
More than ever, customer care is a key driver for business performance. As people lose faith in mass marketing and advertising, they are measuring value based on their direct experiences with companies they are considering. With a diversified team, all players involved will become happier as a result.
Get Ahead of the AI Curve
At AnswerIQ, it’s our business to develop creative AI solutions that drive value and happiness in your support environment. That’s why our system relieves organizations from using valuable agent bandwidth for repetitive and unnecessarily intense service interactions.
We found limitations in current CXM systems, so we developed an AI solution that integrates directly with them. The system goes straight to work identifying patterns in your closed tickets, then studying all of their details to identify a golden set of resolutions. Our AI can leverage that data to resolve common issues and develop resolutions to new ones.
When you combine this technology with automated ticket triage, automated response, and recommended response, you’ve got a cutting-edge, end-to-end solution — and support team — beyond those of your competitors. That’s when something incredible happens: innovation. Agents are free to explore new resolutions to complex customer emotions. They can leverage those experiences to drive better outcomes for customers, the organization, and themselves.
Experience the value of pairing AI and your agents. Sign up for the AnswerIQ free 30-day demo and discover why AI is becoming a new standard within customer support systems.
