Multichannel Customer Support: What, Why and How Custom AI Workflows Can Help
Learn why multichannel customer support is important for businesses and how custom AI agents along with automation can help businesses grow.
Customer Support and Service Trends for 2025
Customer expectations are evolving rapidly and the one thing that is becoming non-negotiable is proactive support and service.
But as new platforms come into play and engagement behavior changes, it’s time for businesses to re-strategize how they approach customer support and service. So in this post, we’re sharing some of the customer support and service trends for 2025 that you should be aware of!
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Emerging Customer Support Trends for 2025
Here are some of the trends we’re seeing competitive companies adopt using AI-powered custom workflow solutions like Auralis AI:
1. Omnichannel customer support
With customer journeys becoming non-linear, businesses must offer customer support across multiple channels. This will include email, live chat, social media, messaging apps, voice, SMS, and even video calls.
Engaging with customers on their preferred channels will help businesses drive higher participation in conversations, get a complete picture of their customers, reduce friction, and establish stronger relationships.
2. Localized support
As businesses go global, offering localized support will become a part of their personalized efforts for specific markets. Multi-lingual support can help companies break down language barriers, show cultural sensitivity, and build stronger relationships with international customers.
Businesses can easily scale their localization efforts with the help of AI solutions that can help with real-time translation for seamless, localized interactions.
3. Personalized customer support
Modern customers expect businesses to understand their needs and this includes going past their ‘first name’. We will see businesses focus on running more integrated communication with their support systems to personalize conversations for every individual.
This will include leveraging integrations to access data from previous interactions, purchase history, purchase patterns, and behavior. Personalization in support will also allow businesses to create upsell and cross-sell campaigns based on 360-degree context.
4. Proactive and predictive support
Customer support has mostly been a reactive approach. But with customers expecting a better understanding of their needs from businesses, proactive customer support is what will set companies apart in competitive domains.
Proactive customer support will involve identifying and addressing problems before they escalate. This will include analyzing customer behavior data, purchase patterns, and behavior, and anticipating potential issues to work towards resolving them in advance. Predictive customer support will become more common as AI systems get integrated into business operations.
5. Emotionally intelligent conversations
AI has been gaining popularity for helping businesses understand the intent of conversations with sentiment analysis. While this has been mostly used for marketing and advertising campaigns, we’re seeing its use increase in customer support workflows as well.
The trend would include using AI to understand the customer’s tone and mood, allowing agents to respond empathetically.
6. Collaboration and knowledge sharing
Customer support can no longer run in siloes. From marketing to product development, efficient customer support requires insight and depth from multiple departments.
2025 will be all about promoting cross-departmental collaboration and knowledge sharing. The integrated approach will give agents better access to data across teams, allowing them to provide accurate information that improves customer experience.
7. Self-service solutions
Customers no longer want to wait on phone calls or email reverts to get the assistance they need. With self-service becoming more popular among customers who prefer to resolve issues independently, companies will need to go beyond setting up knowledge bases, FAQs, and video tutorials.
This will include integrating solutions like AI co-pilots with self-serve support platforms to make it simpler for customers to find the solutions they need. Companies can automate responses with AI agents and co-pilots to help customers sift through information faster.
8. Community and peer forums
Online communities are becoming more popular by the day as an extension of self-service. These are platforms established by businesses to create a community that helps one another seek advice or find solutions to their questions.
Businesses would be able to not just improve their brand stickiness with communities but also leverage AI to extract insights that help them support their customers better.
9. Conversational AI
Customer support automation will go beyond the usual chatbots and leverage conversational AI for higher relevance. This will enable business chatbots to understand more complex inquiries and respond in natural, conversational tones to keep customers engaged – moving away from the traditional rigid workflows that automation followed.
Businesses will also be able to mimic human agents with advanced NLP to give their support conversations more personality – all without needing to hire large human-agent teams.
10. Generative AI in support
Gen AI is finding varied use cases across departments and customer support will be no different. In 2025, we will be seeing Gen AI used to fuel customer support co-pilots.
These co-pilots will help create responses, and FAQs and even suggest personalized solutions on-demand based on conversations. This approach will help agents respond faster and streamline content creation for support while maintaining brand consistency.
11. Customer experience focus
While automation handle the efficiency required for customer support and service, businesses will be seen focusing on customer experiences in 2025.
With the use of AI, businesses will be able to analyze conversations better and go beyond resolution rates to understand customer sentiment, iQS CSAT scores, and other key metrics that help deliver positive experiences across touchpoints.
12. Custom-built workflows
Customer support automation has been around for a while now. But with custom AI solutions, businesses will be seen building workflows tailored to their customer journeys.
This will mean ditching the ready-to-use templates to go beyond resolving common issues through chatbots and creating workflows that can automate almost 70% of the support with more natural conversations.
But before you build out custom workflows, we recommend auditing your customer support automation.
Why do businesses need to embrace customer support trends and innovations?
Yes, the status quo strategy does help businesses address customer support.
But here’s why businesses need to optimize based on changing digital interactions and customer preferences:
- Meet evolving expectations – As customers become more tech-savvy, businesses need to embrace new patterns and behaviors to drive higher engagement and build stronger relationships.
- Improve customer satisfaction – Technology and intelligence are going to help businesses provide seamless and personalized customer support, directly influencing satisfaction and retention rates.
- Boost operational efficiency – Technologies like automation and AI will help businesses set up, automate, and manage even the most complex support processes. This will help meet customer queries without adding to the costs of hiring human agents.
- Stay competitive – The more personalized customer support and service a business provides, the higher its chances to stand out in competitive markets. Adopting innovative methods to address customer queries can help achieve market distinction.
- In-depth insights – Customer support conversations are a goldmine for market insights. Businesses leveraging these insights can help improve product/ service offerings and refine growth strategies with a more data-driven approach.
Conclusion
As customer support expectations evolve, businesses must remain agile and responsive to changing preferences. And the best way to do so is to use a support solution that stays ahead of innovation.
Auralis AI is building the next wave of automation using real intelligence that helps businesses tailor the experiences their support can deliver.
To know more, book a demo today.
Must Have Integrations for Customer Support AI Agents
AI-powered customer support automation is changing the way businesses tackle customer interactions. But what makes these tools more efficient and effective is how seamlessly they are integrated into your support processes and the access they have to information that can help them respond to queries with more context.
Now this is where customer support AI integrations come in.
In this post, we’re going to share the must-have integrations we recommend to customers at Auralis AI to set up custom AI workflows for support.
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List of integrations to set up customer support AI agents and automation
While AI customer support solutions can integrate with several tools and technologies, here are the ones that have the maximum impact on efficiency:
1. CRM (customer relationship management) integration
A good CRM is a repository of customer information including interaction history, purchase behavior, preferences, demographics, and service requests. This integration helps customer support AI agents and co-pilots access this information to understand consumers better, recommend additional products or services, and offer a more personalized interaction.
The integration can also help with seamless hand-offs to human agents. AI co-pilots can consolidate customer data from the CRM to help agents quickly catch up on context to resolve complex queries faster.
Insight: Auralis AI can be integrated with HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce CRMs.
Also read: Why and how to integrate your CRM system and AI chatbots
2. Marketing tools integration
Integrating marketing tools with your customer support tool can help AI agents access customer engagement data and analyze their journeys with your business. This helps ensure that the support responses remain aligned with their customer journey stage, ongoing campaigns, and promotions.
AI co-pilots can also use marketing data to detect signs of customer churn and proactively run engagement campaigns – be it offering assistance, incentives, or upselling and cross-selling from other products/ services available.
Insight: Auralis AI integrates seamlessly with ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, MailChimp, and WhatsApp.
3. Analytics tool integration
Integration with analytics tools can help customer support AI agents improve responses based on real-time insights on behavior and trends. This also helps monitor the impact of AI-powered automation to measure business impact and identify areas of improvement.
The integration has helped Auralis AI users monitor which types of responses or resolutions are the most effective, identify common issues, and track KPIs like resolution time and customer satisfaction rate more accurately.
4. Knowledge base integration
A company knowledge base serves as a repository of all business-related information across departments. This includes product details, troubleshooting guides, frequently asked questions, case studies, testimonials, how-to guides, and more.
When you integrate customer support AI agents with the knowledge base, you reduce the need for human intervention. The agents can direct customers to self-service solutions, provide detailed troubleshooting steps, and even share up-to-date information on products/ services. This can help improve first-contact resolution rates.
Insight: Auralis AI agents can integrate with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Kayako, Shopify, and Zoho Desk.
5. Service desk integration
When you integrate customer support AI agents with your service desk, you get to effectively manage, route, and track requests/ queries. Service desk platforms centralize support tickets and streamline issue resolution workflows. When integrated with customer support AI agents, you can log, update, and monitor the status of requests in real-time, and also improve the workflows set up for faster resolution.
Apart from automated ticket creation and status updates, the integration can help optimize escalation triggers and create a more methodical approach to incident reporting.
Insight: Auralis AI integrates with Jira Service Desk, ServiceNow, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Gorgias, and Intercom.
Why is it important to integrate support AI agents with your tech stack?
While it may not feel as important or would require additional resources, here’s why these integrations are important:
- Increased efficiency – Automating data transfer and retrieval from multiple tools enables AI agents to respond to support queries faster.
- Improved personalization – Integrations with CRM and marketing tools can help AI agents provide contextual responses that address individual needs.
- Data-driven improvements – Analytics tools provide insights into the support performance of both human and AI agents; this helps with continuous optimization.
- Consistent service quality – With integrations to up-to-date documentation on products/ services, AI agents can provide accurate and consistent responses across channels.
- Scalability – Setting up cross-department integrations can enable AI agents to handle high volumes of queries without compromising on response quality.
Best practices for setting up customer support AI integrations
For the integrations to do their job, you need to also follow a few best practices:
- Integrate with only the tools and technologies that are absolutely necessary or value-add to support functions
- Regularly update both the AI customer support and other integrated tools
- Ensure each integration adheres to data security and privacy regulations
- Offer comprehensive training to support teams on using AI tools
- Choose solutions that can scale without breaking the functionality or efficiency of support functions
- Create detailed documentation on automated workflows and custom AI agents in support
- Set up a defined customer support automation audit cycle to identify gaps and opportunities
- Look for solutions like Auralis AI that can also help you set up custom integrations when required
- Secure AI integrations across multi-channel support workflows
Also read: Best practices for implementing AI-powered customer support automation
Conclusion
Setting up integrations is like creating a connected workflow that helps your customer support functions align with other teams.
It helps them not just serve customers better with personalized interactions, but also understand them better to run campaigns that add value to the bottom line of the business.
Solutions like Auralis AI integrate with the best tools across all integration categories. This makes it possible for businesses to create custom support workflows and set up AI co-pilots that bring efficiency and effectiveness into every interaction!
Want to create an integrated customer support automation workflow? Book a demo of Auralis AI today.
