8 min read Customer service leaders are now at a critical juncture. On the one hand, they need to constantly surpass the growing customer demands and delight them, while on the other hand, they need to ensure constant revenue generation for the company.
They’re constantly juggling multiple priorities—customer experience, improving overall operations, enabling technology, and revenue generation, to name a few.
A McKinsey survey revealed that customer service leaders need to excel in service across multiple channels. This becomes more challenging when the budget is limited. At the same time, they also understand that delighting the customer is one of their top priorities.
While many businesses try to handle the large call volumes through digital self-service solutions, one financial service company reported that Gen Z customers are 30 to 40 percent more likely to call than millennials. This clearly indicates that digital services can’t completely replace human agents.
These findings further indicate that customer service leaders must strike a balance between human agents and AI-supported technologies to offer optimal customer service.
But how do you determine when to use human agents and when to use AI? In this article, we will explore how to balance AI and human agents for the best customer service experience.
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AI Vs Human Agents for Optimal Service
AI is quickly becoming popular as a means of offering customer service around the clock. In fact, 79% of customers say they remain loyal to companies with faster customer service.
At the same time, 69% of human agents say they struggle to keep up with the speed and volume of calls they receive on a daily basis.
In such a scenario, embracing AI seems the right choice for companies.
Yet, it is surprising that customers reject the ubiquitous tech.
As a Gartner report mentions, 88% of customers mentioned having ‘major concerns’ with using AI in customer service, while 64% stated that they would still prefer companies to have human agents.
How to strike a balance between AI and human agents for customer support
AI and human agents are not exclusive. Rather, they need to work together to offer optimal customer service.
Here’s how:
1. Understand the role of AI and human agents
To begin with, customer service leaders need to understand that AI and human agents have certain strengths and limitations. Once that’s decoded, it can be easy to assign tasks accordingly.
For example, AI tools work best when:
- a business has to provide instant responses
- handle high volumes of requests (think of seasonal sales)
- operate 24/7
- have limited resources and budget
On the other hand, human agents are best suited when:
- there is a complex problem that AI cannot solve
- the customer is frustrated, and the business needs to respond with empathy ( think of a customer whose flight is canceled at short notice and the customer is calling customer service for an update)
So, AI and human agents can complement each other depending on the situation’s complexity, creating a seamless support experience when used together effectively.
2. Identify the right task for AI and human agents
To utilize both AI and human resources optimally, leaders must outline specific tasks ideal for AI.
For example:
- Answering FAQs is a routine task that can be done with AI tools.
- Similarly, processing simple transactions and providing customers with real-time purchase updates can be done with AI.
- Answering routine queries can be managed well with AI tools ( for example, automated calls to quickly answer a query instead of waiting for a human agent to respond).
Certain tasks AI can do much faster. For example, they can quickly sort through customer queries and either answer them or direct them to a human agent.
Although AI comes in handy in many situations, it has not yet evolved to understand human emotions or offer an empathetic response. Human agents can be involved in complex tasks that an AI tool cannot solve or answer.
Situations that demand empathy, where customer emotions are evolved, should always be assigned to human agents. Human beings have a deep understanding, so complex and multi-layered situations must be assigned to human agents.
Hence, leaders need to provide criteria or guidelines for determining which tasks should be handled by AI and which should be left to human agents, depending on the situation’s sensitivity, complexity, and context.
For example, a human agent can get involved when dealing with a complex billing issue. Or, when a customer is highly agitated, a human agent can understand the emotional cue and tweak their responses accordingly.
3. Design a seamless hand-off between AI and agents
A Hiver survey has found that a significant section of customers (42%) appreciate when AI and human agents work simultaneously. To achieve a more balanced human-led and AI-assisted service, businesses need to design a seamless handoff between the two.
For example, businesses can set triggers for handoffs that prompt AI to transfer an interaction to a human agent when the tool cannot answer the query itself or detect that the customer is frustrated.
Additionally, businesses can set a “talk to a person” chat button in their chat support system to enable customers to transition from an AI chatbot to a human representative. While doing so, an effective plan should be in place to share the context with the agent for a smooth handoff.
Businesses must also regularly analyze and evaluate their approach’s effectiveness to ensure customers receive optimal services.
Businesses may also scrutinize specific tasks done by AI and human agents to understand the effectiveness and promptness of the resolution and the customer satisfaction achieved.
4. Leverage AI as a co-pilot for agents
While embracing AI, customer service leaders must understand that AI is not a replacement for human agents. Rather, AI should be treated as a co-pilot, assisting the agents to provide better customer satisfaction with speed.
While human agents bring empathy and the ability to solve complex problems, AI can assist them with real-time customer information and automate routine aspects of interactions so the agents can focus on more complex problems.
AI not only offers support to human agents but also helps to improve their operational efficiencies and overall productivity.
For example, with Auralis’s live chat assistant, your website customers can easily get information and solutions around the clock, which can help reduce the cognitive load of the human agents while speeding up the response time with better accuracy.
Similarly, Auralis’s in-app messaging service can provide customers with context-driven support within your website or apps, freeing up human agents for more complex tasks.
5. Train human agents to work with AI
To enable human agents to work effectively with AI tools, leaders must plan training programs for the agents to understand the limitations and capabilities of the tools and how they can ease their lives.
Continuous learning and development should be implemented to help agents adapt to evolving AI technologies and customer expectations.
Apart from skill development, leaders must also focus on developing soft skills like emotional intelligence, empathy, and active listening, which are crucial for improving customer satisfaction and experience.
6. Monitor and optimize the balance
Whether you’re using AI co-pilot tools, human agents, or both, it’s crucial to identify key performance metrics and monitor them regularly.
Track various customer metrics like net promoter scores, churn rate, customer lifetime value, conversion rate, retention rate, average session rate, etc. to understand the pulse of the customer, their experience with AI interactions, and their satisfaction level.
Feedback loops can also be useful, where agents can report AI inefficiencies and suggest improvements based on their experience and customer interactions.
Finally, conducting regular audits is the key to assessing the balance and identifying gaps for improvement.
Ready to deliver an optimal customer service experience?
Customer experience is your backbone if you’re a customer-centric organization. As the report mentions, brands that invest in customer service see 1.7 times faster revenue growth while improving their average customer lifetime value by 2.3X.
If you want to see similar results for your business, it’s high time you introduce human-powered and AI-supported services to your customers.
By partnering with Auralis you can leverage its AI capabilities and implement exceptional customer service experiences. Auralis boasts of its AI capabilities that can handle up to 70% of your customer requests while being functional round the clock.
If you’re ready to improve customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing operational costs, then it’s your cue to strike a balance between your human agents and Auralis’s AI capabilities, such as in-app messaging, neural navigator, live chat assistant, and helpdesk agent assist.
