Beyond the AI Customer Service Hype: Practical Applications for Real Results

AI (artificial intelligence) customer service tools weren’t designed to replace your agents. They were designed to help your agents deliver a better customer experience.

Nothing can truly replace positive, meaningful exchanges between two people. But when the interactions between your customers and your agents are filled with repetitive questions, long holds, and awkward pauses, the human connection falls to the wayside. No matter how friendly, helpful, and professional your agent is, if your customer engagements are lengthy and repetitive, your customers aren’t going to be happy.

AI customer service tools streamline repetitive and/or time-consuming tasks and workflows so your agents can focus on what they’re best at: helping people.

To truly modernize your customer service, you don’t need to choose between AI or human involvement. You need both. Here’s how AI makes the customer experience better by streamlining the agent experience and automating operations.

 

Predictive Routing Connects Customers to the Right Agent Faster

If you aren’t using AI, guiding customers to a resolution is taking longer than it should. Without AI, customers often spend extra time navigating generic IVR (interactive voice response) menus. And when they aren’t connected to the right agent the first time, your agents have to spend valuable time redirecting calls.

AI solves this problem by routing customers to the ideal customer service solutions quickly. A customer calling to ask about store hours, for instance, may be routed to a self-service option or Virtual Agent, while more complex queries will be routed to a human agent. Using a combination of real-time responses to customer questions and historical customer data stored in your CRM (customer relationship management) tool, intelligent routing predicts customer needs to route calls appropriately.

Noon, for instance, uses this feature to route incoming calls and messages from their diverse client base. Noon provides lighting systems for both professional contractors and consumers. Their customers might reach out with bulk order requests or with simple questions about setting their new Noon home lighting system. UJET’s predictive routing directs every incoming customer service ticket to the appropriate agent the first time, so Noon’s customers don’t get passed from agent to agent, and their queries are answered quickly.

Noon smart home lighting system

No matter how diverse your clientele is or how many channels your contact center utilizes, intelligent routing sends your customers to the right agent or resource quickly and efficiently. So your agents’ time is spent resolving issues, and your customers get resolutions faster.

Automation Reduces Repetitive Tasks for Agents

Without AI and smart automations, contact center agents are responsible for an array of tedious tasks and ACW (after call work) that drive up your AHT (average handle time) and kill your efficiency. Customers suffer awkward pauses in conversation as agents flip back and forth between screens to find a customer’s membership tier or locate their most recent purchase. After a call, agents spend extra time copying notes to your CRM tool.

But AI reduces these repetitive tasks for both agents and customers—streamlining the entire customer service journey. Based on customer dialog with a Virtual Agent, AI arms agents with a complete customer profile before the human agent opens communications. So, instead of asking, “How can I help you?” your agent can say, “I see you’re having trouble with X. Would you like me to do Y?”

This automation reduces nuisance tasks throughout the agent-customer interaction. UJET’s unique CCaaS platform enables agents to quickly understand what’s going on and access additional customer details from an intuitive dashboard. Digital information such as photos, videos, screenshots, and SMS messages are automatically uploaded to the CRM record, which reduces AHT and ACW—and improves both the agent and customer experience.

Once an issue is resolved, AI completes tedious administrative tasks such as updating the CRM ticket, providing a survey, or gathering more detailed feedback. Agents move from call to call quickly and easily so they can help more customers in less time.

Agent Assist Minimizes AHT

Without AI tools, agents have to search through databases, client files, and other resources manually to find answers and important documents. These manual searches create long, awkward holds and frustrating pauses in conversation and eat away at valuable time for both your agent and your customer. But you can streamline this process with the use of AI.

Using a combination of natural language processing and real-time analytics, Agent Assist empowers human agents with continuous support during their calls and chats. Agent Assist is an AI search engine that identifies customer intent and provides real-time, step-by-step assistance to agents. Based on the context of the live call, solutions are dynamically presented to your customer service agent—without the agent needing to search for them manually.

Say, for instance, your company is an internet service provider. A customer calls in because they lost service, and their router has a blinking yellow light. Agent Assist would identify your customer’s problem and immediately surface a knowledge article to the agent explaining what the blinking light means.

Adding AI to customer service calls offers long-term benefits, too. As the AI learns and stores customer interaction data in its machine-learning database, it will begin to see call patterns that can then be used for Virtual Agent customer service scripts. Common problems can then be handled by your Virtual Agent so your human agents can focus on more complex issues.

AI Streamlines Agent Training

Instead of just relying on text and videos to train your agents, AI empowers you to offer gamification training—or interactive, game-style training courses. And this is good for two reasons:

1. Gamification keeps your agents more engaged in the training program.
2. Agents are more likely to retain information.

Replace passive lessons with dynamic training programs where your AI acts as a customer. Human agents learn how to solve customer problems effectively through a series of interactions. For security and compliance training, admins and supervisors can set up tests for specific certifications to fully test comprehension.

Experienced customer service teams can use AI to create new product training or specialized agent tasks. You can also use AI to review agent performance history, build metric reports, and reveal areas to improve performance.

AI Traffic Monitoring Improves Supervising

We’ve covered how AI helps with customer-agent interactions on an individual basis. Now, let’s look at how AI helps at a higher level.

Without AI customer service tools, contact center supervisors are responsible for numerous complex and time-consuming processes. Supervisors need to manually monitor call queues, assist agents, and wade through spreadsheets to create manual reports. But AI helps supervisors identify key information quickly so they can act faster.

Contact center AI monitors customer service traffic in real time 24 hours a day, monitoring all customer service requests, agent traffic, and overall ticket volume. If one queue gets backed up, AI is able to divert traffic or reallocate agents to reduce overall wait times and get assistance for all customers faster.

AI can also manage administrative tasks for supervisors and contact center management teams. From its holistic monitoring, AI collects, collates, and delivers deep data analytical reporting. These in-depth reports reveal nuanced information not attainable through manual reporting. AI then takes these reports and builds trend analyses so supervisors can process data and understand what’s going on in a matter of minutes.

Use UJET AI Customer Service Tools to Increase Efficiency and Boost Your CSAT Score

AI, by itself, will not magically improve customer service. But pair it with great human agents and supervisors, and you’ve got a dream team for boosting customer satisfaction.

UJET offers a range of advanced AI customer service tools designed to increase efficiency, protect customer privacy, and boost your CSAT score. Book a demo to learn more about our Virtual Agents, intelligent routing, natural language processing, and more.