When a customer seeks support for a product or service, this is a crucial moment for any company. These days, making those moments count isn’t as easy as answering a phone call or replying to an email. Effective customer success depends on using best-in-class tools and technologies – including AI – to drive seamless interaction that creates real value for the customer and the business.
This smart use of technology can make the difference between a customer becoming a promoter who goes out of their way to recommend a company, or turning to a competitor.
However, a balance must also be found. The best support teams thrive on human connections because customers demand meaningful, personal interactions. Offloading too much to automated responses or self-service helpdesk platforms can lead to unintended frustrations. To generate real value and impact, support teams and their AI helpers must divide and conquer.
Head of Customer Success, EMEA, Slack.
Identifying the supporting role of AI
To get an idea of the role of AI in the support team, let’s look at some possible scenarios for an imaginary customer, Salim. He wants to renew an annual coffee subscription with a gift voucher from his aunt. In the first scenario, he calls the Quick Coffee Co and gets an automated AI response. Unfortunately, there’s no option to use a gift card over the phone, and the AI can’t connect it to a real human. He tries again online, but hits another wall with an AI chatbot. Frustration builds, and eventually he gives up and looks for his caffeine rush elsewhere.
This is what happens when AI is used to replace humans or provide shortcuts for companies that don’t consider the complexities of delivering a great support service. However, in another scenario, AI can play a crucial role behind the scenes, while the real support team provides a personalized interaction.
In this alternate scenario, Salim visits the live chat app, armed with his gift card, and is connected to a real person: Nuala. Nuala can set up his subscription on the spot, take the gift card code, and before the call ends, Salim gets a confirmation message and knows he’s ready to safely start his morning brew.
While the experience was seamless, Nuala used an AI helper behind the scenes to keep things moving. She immediately summarized the gift card process by using an AI assistant while Salim was on the phone, started an automatic workflow to create a new subscriber to the coffee package, and then shared it all on a channel with her colleague. employees who can ask AI to summarize what happened.
Instead of replacing the human interactions that make support work stand out, Nuala was able to use AI to cut through the busy work, reduce red tape, speed up processes and find the information he needed to fulfill Salim’s request to get on track. AI took on the tedious work, while Nuala stuck to the things that are not only more fun, but actually make a difference for the customer.
Building AI on a trusted foundation
Simply having an AI tool is not enough to deliver great service. For customer-facing teams to fully reap the benefits of AI, as Nuala did, AI must also be trustworthy and rooted in guidelines that keep sensitive information safe.
This is critical because today, nearly 50% of people do not trust organizations to use AI ethically. Before embracing AI, support leaders should take a closer look at the tools and ensure they have a layer of trust built in to ensure customer and company data is protected.
Only with these guarantees can customer support begin to unlock the benefits of generative AI tools. Once security is verified, AI can leverage relevant content to provide useful summaries of customer interactions, create summaries of recent challenges, automate processes related to CRM input, and much more. And as AI and automation capabilities evolve, efficiency gains for customer-facing teams will become exponential.
By taking the time to investigate how solution providers are implementing AI and working with IT partners to ensure sensitive data is protected, customer support leaders can confidently begin integrating AI into their workflows.
Keeping the spotlight on human teams
There is no doubt that the interaction between humans and AI tools will increase. But as technology continues to evolve, organizations that focus on delivering a personalized, human, and empathetic experience using tools that respect data protection and privacy will be the ones to thrive.
However, that doesn’t mean we ignore the progress and benefits AI can bring. Instead, it means applying them securely behind the scenes to drive efficiencies – such as automated processes and instant access to useful customer information – just as Nuala did in her interaction with Salim. And while that behind-the-scenes work is accelerated, support agents can stay where customers want: front and center and ready to help.
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