Customers today, especially millennials, are not interested in engaging in polite chats or interactions with customer support agents. They don't need to feel like their concerns are being dealt with or that they're making a huge impact on the success of a company. They don't even care about what's happening within the company. They are only expecting one thing: to get their problems resolved as quickly and as easily as possible.
But with the huge influx of support tickets, how can you respond to each query in real time? Which support ticket should be addressed first to ensure maximum service efficiency? Read on for some valuable insights.
Customer Support Ticket Prioritization
Responding to all customer support tickets promptly and accurately is important. Zendesk research revealed that 42 percent of B2C customers purchased more after having a good customer support experience, and 69 percent attributed their good customer support experience to fast resolution of their problems.
That said, not all support tickets have the same value. Some tickets, when not replied to immediately (such as processing a request from a high-value customer) will result in the loss of a big opportunity and possibly endure negative press. That is why you need to ensure prioritization to deliver a better customer experience.
Many support teams typically prioritize tickets based on the urgency of the problem and the impact on the business. However, this method requires support agents to manually assess each ticket based on several factors, such as the nature of the problem, the reason for the problem, how quickly the problem needs to be resolved and the number of affected users. While this method enables you to categorize tickets based on the amount of time remaining to resolve them, it's not feasible when your company receives a large number of tickets.
Prioritization becomes much more complex when your customer support becomes busy with a large number of tickets. Relying on your support team's manual capability alone won't work, as it only eats up so much time and causes response backlog. It's also prone to errors. Keep in mind that support agents are human beings too, and at times, due to a high volume of tickets, they are prone to ignore escalations and critical tickets. Also, they may not make data-driven decisions due to the sheer number of data points that must be considered.
AI: The Best Way to Prioritize Support Tickets
Recent research conducted by Gartner revealed that 55 percent of established companies today have already invested in artificial intelligence (AI) or are planning to do so by 2020.
AI mainly revolves around machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to power the job of your customer support team. Its cognitive computing capability allows your company to offer efficient services to customers.
Integrating AI into your current customer support system helps your support team to automatically triage your tickets by customer tier (VIP), priority, severity, and sentiment based on understanding the content within the ticket and not merely on rules or reading the subject line. AI-based triage removes the possibility of human error and any form of subjectivity in reading a ticket.
Businesses can also resolve customer concerns at a fraction of the time without compromising quality. AI-powered solutions, like those offered by AnswerIQ, take predictive capabilities a step further by learning to automate specific responses to tickets. For instance, AI can automatically address tickets that require immediate attention by enabling a macro response to both your customer support team and customer, ensuring that your customers' needs are being prioritized while your support team is aware of the urgency.
In addition to automating ticket prioritization, AI can automate responses without human intervention. After a period of learning from previous tickets, AI can start automatically responding to tickets. Package tracking, refunds, password resets, inventory lookups, and other common support tickets are prime for automation. Once your AI-powered customer support system has reached a predetermined confidence level (typically beyond 70 percent), it can begin automating ticket response, relieve your customer support team from repetitive tickets, and enable them to spend more time providing personalized customer support.
The Rise of AI-Powered Customer Support Systems
Consumers nowadays demand that their problems be resolved as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and the only way you can exceed their expectations is to use artificial intelligence. Leveraging the power of AI is the easiest path towards meeting these challenging expectations head on.
Ready to streamline the process of resolving valuable customer support tickets? Sign up for AnswerIQ’s 30-day trial and witness how AI can help your company deliver excellent customer service.
