Webinar Recap: Empowering Customer Support Teams with Gen AI

Customer support is now a strategic enabler for business houses in their efforts to maintain brand loyalty and guarantee customer satisfaction. The scope for technology has unlocked vast avenues of expectation among customers, where the delivery of more with less is becoming the support teams' demand. Enter Generative AI, the next big change in customer service. Given its ability to streamline workflows, offer personalized solutions, and increase accuracy, Gen AI puts the customer support team in good stead to succeed in this new era of digital interaction.

Our recent webinar, "AI-Ready Support: Equipping Your Team for the Gen AI Era." was an insightful session filled with thought leadership from our CEO Palak Dalal Bhatia and Marilyn Lin (Founding Principal, Lotus Group), as they discussed how AI is transforming customer support, its application in real world scenarios and much more.

Clay Tablets to AI: The Evolution of Customer Support

Customer support is as old as commerce itself. The first recorded complaint can be traced back to the 1750 BC days of ancient Mesopotamia, where a dissatisfied customer inscribed his frustration on a clay tablet demanding better service for the copper ingots he purchased. Fast forwarding to the present century and times, customers' demands have evolved through several technological milestones:

• Telephone Invention 1876: From then on, it was instant communication between the customer and the business. Support would finally arrive on time and be available to them.

• Call Centers, 1960s and 70s: This brought the centralization of the industry's operations and paved the way for modern support infrastructures.

• 2010s - AI and NLP: AI and NLP changed the way businesses deal with queries. AI-driven systems began to automate routine tasks, deflecting tickets, and enhancing resolution times.

Today, with generative AI, customer support is being transformed to unimaginable efficiency and personalization levels.

Innovations of Gen AI in Customer Support


This means that Gen AI can generate content dynamically based on data, patterns, and previous interactions. This is a complete game-changer for customer support. Here are the core ways Gen AI is reshaping support teams:


1. Personalized Answers: The usual responses in traditional customer support services were mainly variants of a pre-written reply. Gen AI leads customer support to the next frontier by analyzing individual customer interactions and preferences for the needs of that customer. Each response feels personalized and better related to the customer's specific needs.

Instead of just repeating the same answer to any frequently asked question, Gen AI could tailor its response to past conversations, ensuring that customers would get accurate and contextually relevant information.


2. Fastest response time is one of the major pain points for the support service. Gen AI reduces wait time by automating prompt responses for most of the questions and assists agents in quickly finding answers to more complex issues. Instant processing of queries in such a way that customers are not kept on hold or made to wait, thus resolutions are faster, and satisfaction is higher.


3. Accuracy: Gen AI provides highly accurate responses, using historical data, customer profiles, and even previous interactions. Solutions that would be provided would not only be fast but also very accurate, thus reducing the risk of miscommunication or providing the wrong solutions.


4. Seamless Customer Experience: The customer journey remains fractured as the customer is forced to explain their problem several times through different touch points. Gen AI removes this friction by keeping track of the whole customer journey. So if a customer contacts support, AI knows what has happened so far, thus creating an effortless, seamless experience.


 For example, a customer who frequently seeks help on smart home devices need no longer explain his problem anew. Gen AI can directly spot his product and previous troubleshooting steps and present personalized, preemptive solutions without pointless ping-pong.


 Current Challenges in Customer Support and How Gen AI Addresses Them

Customer support teams today will face a whole host of challenges.


 Support Costs are Very High: Support groups in a bad economy are costly. Labor and cost of resources are surging, and it becomes more challenging for companies to deliver quality support at scale. Gen AI assists by making routine tasks automated, thereby reducing the need for large support teams while maintaining quality service.

Customer Expectation of Instant Response: The customer wants instant responses. Customers expect answers just like they might get answers on a live chat. They cannot again hold for three to four hours, fill in tickets, and then wait for days before finding a response. Gen AI gives fast answers by auto-responding and directing agents to the best possible answers.


 Much of the support process is still the customer has to phone or come down to the physical store. This means inefficiencies and, more often than not, errors. Response times increase and customers get frustrated. Since Gen AI automated workflows, it reduces manual effort and accelerates resolution processes.


 - Data Overload: At present, support teams deal with huge amounts of data. Gen AI allows them to make sense of this data-analyzing customer emotions, flagging escalations, and pointing out product issues that may have to be addressed. This improves the customer experience and quality of products that are supported.


 Applying Gen AI in Real-world Support Scenarios


There are three main means Gen AI is currently being applied to enhance customer support:


 1. AI Self-Service: Gen AI can drive chatbots and email responders, enabling self-service capabilities so that customers find and discover the answers they're seeking without involving an agent. This deflects the volume of routine ticket entries, sent into an organization's service desk, freeing up time for the agents' solving of complex issues.


 For example, when the end-user is typing in a ticket form to be filled in, AI can automatically put up possible solutions using smart search capability before submitting a query. This instant self-service capability delights customers and reduces the overall support workload.


 2. AI Co-pilot, also referred to as Agent Assist: Gen AI works not only on behalf of the customers but also enhances how well an agent does his job by acting like a co-pilot. An AI can certainly suggest the next steps. Summarize case histories. Categorize tickets automatically.


 This type of automation prevents agents from being distracted by clerical work and enables them to seek solutions to problems rather than mess. AI improves routing since it selects the best agent for a specific case depending on expertise, degree of availability, and the complexity of the problem.


 3. Workflow Automation and Analytics: Gen AI helps support teams surface unpenetrated data hidden in customer interactions. Such analyses can help the system and humans analyze sentiment associated with conversations, detect early escalation signals, and flag product quality issues. This will enable cross-functional enhancement of products and services through this data. 

 Through the help of Gen AI, support teams may be even more proactive; that is, they are geared at noticing potentially problematic issues before those issues become bigger problems that would further result in decreased overall customer satisfaction.


 Implementation Roadmap: Gen AI Adoption into Support

The value of Gen AI is undeniable. However, its implementation is overwhelming for many organizations. Here is a practical roadmap for businesses seeking integration of Gen AI into their support operations.


1. Awareness and Education: You can make the staff members aware of the advantages Gen AI can provide. Coach them on how AI could be used to increase efficiency, accuracy, and overall customer experience.


2. Assessment and Planning: Assess the existing workflows in which Gen AI could have the most impact. For example, daily and repetitive engagements with the same set of frequently asked questions or categories to be created for tickets.


3. Skill Building: Equip teams with the capability to utilize the Gen AI tool effectively. Proper training is necessary so that this transition is easy and not problematic.

4. Deployment: Deploy Gen AI tools based on the assessment strategy. Ensure they align well with the extant support structure and interrupt current work minimalistically.


5. Monitoring and Adaptation: Monitor performance metrics once the change has been implemented to trace the performance of Gen AI to the goal set for support. Make necessary corrections and adaptations based on the data.


6. Scaling and Coverage: Extend Gen AI to other areas of support or even to the other departments once initial goals have been achieved. Scaling ensures that the full potential of Gen AI is achieved across all parts of the organization.


 Key Things to Note in Choosing Your Gen AI Solution


The proper Gen AI for you leads you to winning. Businesses must avoid most tools that are advertised to have surface-level capabilities. Some of the key things to consider would be:

• Domain-Specific AI: All AI solutions are not equal; a solution that will work for an e-commerce platform won't work for a healthcare company. Ensure the AI solution is trained on domain-specific and company-specific data.

• Eliminating Hallucinations: AI solutions need to be trustworthy and provide the correct, applicable answer. Those hallucinations-mostly of incorrect or irrelevant AI-generated information further damage customer trust. Therefore, it is essential to choose a solution that presents as little risk as possible.

• Levying Data: The best AI solutions learn from unstructured data support tickets and call transcripts only from public articles or pre-programmed information. This ensures the AI solution provides relevant and context-specific answers.


 Outcomes for IrisAgent’s Customers Gen AI


 With IrisAgent's Gen AI, the benefits are quite evident. Organizations who are using Gen AI tools claim:

• Ticket volumes reduced by 40% as they get automated

• Escalations reduced by 60% -that is, unhappy customers reduced

• Faster turnaround times, higher accuracy, and improved customer satisfaction


 Customer expectations are growing daily, so companies have to keep up with the pace if they want to stay in competition. Gen AI is a very powerful solution for customer support teams - it will enable them to deliver faster and much more personalized services at scale. Indeed, Gen AI turns support from a cost center into a key driver of success through such means as routing routine tasks, delivering accurate answers, and perfecting the overall customer experience.

For all those organizations that are open to trying out customer support in the next dimension, now is the best time to explore what Gen AI can mean for changing operations and delighting customers.

Power your customer support with IrisAgent’s Gen AI solutions via booking a personalized demo here . In case you missed the webinar, check out the full video here.