Your customers give back when you put customers first. AI-first customer service that allows you to automate customer support is now the quickest and effective route to drive engagement, says McKinsey. Can we say that serving them in real-time and making them feel valued drives significant results?.

This is not just as good as to be true it’s what Bain claims customer experience improvements help businesses gain substantial revenue growth. The report indicates that companies that put customer first enjoy 3.2X more customer loyalty than those who don’t. 

Adding more people alone can’t help provide real-time customer service either. So, companies are turning to AI to automate customer support for consistent and personalized experiences. In an interconnected world, customer service expectations are soaring.

But there is a massive difference between tinkering with AI ambitions for customer support and driving real value. In our blog, we’ll learn about automated customer support, benefits, and best practices for driving real value.

Customer service automation is a process of automating and streamlining routine and repetitive customer queries and tasks to resolve problems at scale and boost CSAT. Automated customer support aims to ease knowledge discovery, reduce steps in optimizing workflows, and resolve issues with minimal human intervention. 

Proactive customer support automation is efficient enough to route a more complex customer query to the right human agent for strategic resolutions and elevated customer experience.

AI is at the core of automated customer service that helps deliver meaningful answers to customer questions. AI embedded in several customer support systems, such as AI assistants, chatbots, or conversational AI interfaces, generates answers based on the intent of user queries using keywords and NLP. So, when the intent is clear, AI can accurately refer to the right knowledge articles, generate answers, and help resolve problems. 

Using AI algorithms, generative AI, or more advanced AI agents, they can learn from customer interactions and solutions provided to quickly adapt to new scenarios and provide help in real time. And when not getting enough clues from the platform interactions or knowledge resources, AI can intelligently transfer the call to the helpdesk agent. 

The process goes this way,

1. User initiates a query: A user asks a question to your customer service automation channel 

2. Bot engagement: A bot greets the user and analyzes the issue 

3. Knowledge-driven resolution: The AI agent surfaces a relevant knowledge article that guides it through several steps to perform a task and resolve a problem

4. Escalation for complex queries: If the agent does not have an answer, it routes the call to the right service desk agent

One bad experience is nothing less than a massive blow to your botom line. A Qualtrics study shows that customers would walk away globally after one bad experience. Customer support automation helps address customer concerns and boost their engagement. Here’s why should you prioritize automating customer support,

Streamline simple and routine tasks 

An automated helpdesk reduces the likelihood of human agents handling repetitive questions. Customers can avoid prolonged wait times by using AI customer support, which improves knowledge search and autonomous problem solving. 

Deliver proactive responses 

AI agent-based customer-centric interfaces speed response delivery with underlying LLMs grounded in company-proprietary data. Customers get accurate, context-aware answers specific to appropriate solutions or products, and resolve their problems at scale. 

Deliver a personalized experience 

AI agents in your customer support platforms learn about user personas from past chat interactions. When they come up with a unique question, AI agents personalize conversations and recommend solutions based on their preferences to help meet their expectations.

With AI-powered customer service automation, you can drive significant business benefits. From cost reduction to support efficiency, automated customer support offers more. 

Cost reduction 

AI solutions for customer service automation remove repetitive steps from workflows for customers and agents, reducing wait times, improving MTTR, and reducing ticket volumes. With no ticket backlog, agents can save time, which is otherwise wasted with manual processes. Using AI customer support, you can save costs by 20% to 40%, allowing you to optimize other areas of your business operations. 

Omnichannel customer service 

89% of US customers expect brands to offer self-service customer support tools as they boost speed and efficiency over anything. McKinsey reports that customers expect assistance in a five-minute window. Anything that exceeds this timeframe is considered a bad experience. AI-powered omnichannel support delivers customer assistance through self-service, no matter where they are and which channel they prefer. Self-service through omnichannel support perhaps speeds up the resolution time. 

Round-the-clock service 

AI agents or chatbots for customer support are always adept at removing the challenges businesses face when implementing 24/7 customer service. Automating customer support is the simplest and most cost-effective way to efficiently provide solutions around the clock while eliminating the need for human-led customer operations. 

Productivity and efficiency boost 

AI agents are considered the best tools for automating customer support, through which you can reduce steps in simple or complex workflows of repetitive tasks. While customer service automation allows your employees and service desk agents to boost the speed of task completion, it also reduces error-prone activities. 

CX improvements

 Customer service automation tools such as chatbots and AI assistants enable automated customer behavior analytics, including the ease of collecting feedback through built-in forms or survey kits at each step of the self-service process. Customer feedback alongside native user analytics helps create effective customer services and boost customer experiences.

Any digital transformation initiative can be challenging. Implementing customer service automation is a similar feat. McKinsey says that less than 30% of digital transformations successfully achieve their goals. While implementing your customer service automation, your digital initiative can be at stake too.

• Change management issues: People are reluctant to adapt to new technology, as they feel more comfortable with traditional systems like emails and phone calls. Therefore, it becomes difficult to move them to a new platform. 

• Data management challenges: Personalized customer support can only work when your data is appropriately managed. The real pain is that most companies lack appropriate developer resources and expertise in this area. 

• Legacy tool integration: Legacy systems are rigid and difficult to integrate with API-led tools for seamless data management and interactions. Not being scalable, companies can struggle to gain faster time to market. 

But let’s not forget that no-code development is the way ahead. AI customer support built with a no-code platform is easy to implement and drive success as it eliminates the challenges of codified integrations. 

Are you afraid you would struggle to automate your customer support? Not every business likely has similar goals of customer service automation. But, you can successfully start automating your support with these simple steps.

Determine your business needs 

Consider where support automation could unleash a business-wide impact. The tools also must align with your automation objectives. Determine the best tools for automating customer support. 

Decide automation opportunities for customer tasks 

You must figure out where your customer service teams spend time discovering high-impact, simple, and repetitive tasks. These are great opportunities to automate processes. For example, suppose you observe that customers come to ask for returns, refunds, or post-purchase queries. In that case, you can build automated FAQs-like conversational resources or automated ticketing to assist customers and reduce wait times. 

List out agent-specific tasks 

Where self-service customer support tools unleash great value for autonomous problem resolutions, some unexpected and unique customer queries require expert agent assistance. It needs you to identify customer service tasks that live agents should address. 

Choose your tools 

Get on board a high-performance AI customer support tool. The best bet is to invest in an agentic AI customer service automation tool with easy-to-deploy flexibility that allows for seamless integrations through APIs. So, CXM leaders tend to buy chatbot software for customer support that offers rapid setup and deployment. Consider AI agents for customer support that bring autonomy to your support operations and resolve multi-step problems with minimal human intervention.

Align your team 

In the beginning days, your team members may struggle to work with new customer service automation tools. Provide significant guidance and support so that they can derive maximum value from them and unleash real impact. A business also needs to ensure that team members are always ready to maintain these systems. 

Test your automation processes 

Start small at a time to avoid significant iteration challenges. Use analytics to test workflows and improve their processes before they create a chaotic experience for your customers. 

Maintain and improve 

Use customer insights to learn customer pain points and identify scopes for improvements across workflows and use cases. Also, customer feedback forms can help fetch real-time data and improve customer experience.

Depending on your business functions and processes, you can have several options. But the one that provides effectiveness and value for your money is the best for you. Here are some examples. 

AI agents: 

The next generation of advanced AI customer support bots with autonomous decision-making abilities takes your CX to the next level. pagergpt AI agents grounded in your company data can unleash exceptional potential to help manage customer interactions and boost CX. 

Automated ticketing systems: 

Top-rated automated help desk systems use advanced AI capabilities within their ticketing processes. These ticketing systems understand user intents and route tickets to the right agent to quickly resolve an issue. 

Interactive voice response tools (IVR)

Automated IVR uses pre-recorded messages to interact with customers and guide them in performing specific tasks. IVR can also handle payment processing and answer common questions.

Predictive analytics 

AI/ML algorithms in predictive analytics tools help predict upcoming challenges, customer issues, and their needs. This approach allows businesses to anticipate threats in advance and avoid friction from customer-facing solutions. 

Autoresponders 

To keep up with follow-up messages, direct responses, or emails, autoresponders work wonders. While automated tools such as email or social channel autoresponders can handle follow-up conversations, they free your agents. 

Automated notifications

Get automated notification tools, which you can use to set rules and schedule notifications for predictive events and handle customer queries seamlessly. For example, if you set up automated notifications for a user who uses your subscription, a real-time trigger can notify users of the upcoming subscription. 

Workflow automation 

There are AI-powered customer support tools, which inherently allow for automated workflows for simple to multi-step tasks. Define rules for these workflows or create them using plug-and-play canvas to automate and streamline customer interactions. 

AI knowledge bases 

All your company's knowledge can make a great hub to provide key information and solve customer problems. Using an LLM-powered search for your knowledge bases, you can turn it into an efficient self-service that helps customers in real time. 

So, AI customer support can encompass a variety of tools to help ease customer interactions and resolutions. Regardless of what you need to automate customer support, pagergpt combines a wide range of AI competencies such as automated responses, AI summaries, AI translation, and quick omnichannel support—all within its platform to deliver seamless support.

Automated customer support can be intimidating initially. Prioritize testing the performance of the tools and learning if your customers are getting the best from automation processes. Verify all the automated options and take action. 

Here's what you can do,

Review customer feedback 

Periodically review customer feedback and find areas for improvement to implement seamless service.

Track customer interactions 

Look for answers to several questions. Are your customers dropping off from your chatbot without getting an answer? Are they leaving just after a few minutes? There are more such clues you must keep track of and identify the gap in your customer experience management.

Observe key metrics 

Monitor customer interaction analytics to learn about the effectiveness of customer service automation. KPIs that include response time, average handle time, and CSS are significant enough to determine the performance of your AI customer support. 

You can evaluate these areas to monitor the performance of your customer automation services. By fine-tuning workflows and interactions, you can enhance overall customer experiences.

AI is not a wave but a universal truth that redefines your customer support experience. Referring back to the Qualtrics study, it is evident that if your customer service isn’t automated with advanced tools such as AI agents or AI-powered features and tools, you’d lose to your competition. Building a custom AI customer support solution is not a flexible choice either. 

What if you get an easy-to-build custom ChatGPT bot framework? Not only can you build a custom AI agent for your sophisticated customer needs, but you can also unleash exceptional efficiency. pagergpt allows you to create AI agents for your unique support needs.

Built with custom AI models and advanced mechanisms to generate relevant responses, pagergpt delivers high-quality customer support by intelligently routing queries to the right team or accurate knowledge sources. 

With pagergpt, you can seamlessly streamline your customer service queries and automate customer support at every touchpoint until human involvement is needed. On top of that, pagergpt offers a hassle-free deployment without the need to use developer resources, complex data management, etc. pagergpt’s no-code platform allows you to build AI agents effortlessly and foster rapid time to market for quick value realization.

To build a custom ChatGPT bot or AI agents to automate customer support and deliver an exceptional customer experience, book a demo. 

What is AI customer support?

AI in customer support refers to using AI tools and solutions to automate and streamline repetitive responses for service desks and quickly reduce MTTR for improved customer experience. 

Are AI agents the future of customer support?

AI agents are no longer a choice. They are becoming mainstream in transforming customer support automation now. With abilities like autonomy, orchestration, and independent decision making, AI agents can handle multi-step workflows seamlessly. 

How to integrate AI into customer service workflows?

The simplest way to integrate AI into customer service workflows is to use pagergpt, which allows seamless integration with knowledge articles and company data to personalize customer service. 

How does AI improve customer service efficiency?

AI in customer support uses machine learning algorithms to identify customer interaction patterns and understand intent so that AI agents can quickly fulfill service delivery, even if it is a common or unique query. That’s why AI can handle more customer queries, reduce ticket escalation, and drive efficiency. 

What are the future trends in customer support automation?

Customer support is more likely to see the proliferation of AI agents in automating repetitive and multi-step workflows. It is not generative AI, but AI Agent-led customer service is the future, as they can handle any kind of query, reduce average handle time, be available 24/7, and manage multilingual queries, etc.