9 min read Delivering a great customer experience is essential for businesses across all industries. According to HubSpot’s State of Customer Service and Customer Experience 2024 report, 95% of consumers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand when they receive excellent customer service.
However, simply deploying more customer support agents is no longer enough in today’s fast-paced business environment. Customers now expect personalized, efficient, and around-the-clock service.
This is where AI co-pilots step in to enhance support.
Companies that integrate AI and automation alongside human agents have successfully built robust customer support systems. HubSpot’s 2024 Consumer Survey Trends report reveals that 92% of respondents believe AI has improved resolution times.
Additionally, AI co-pilots can positively impact key performance indicators (KPIs) like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
In this article, we’ll explore how AI co-pilots can boost customer support efficiency.
Table of Contents
What are AI co-pilots for customer support?
AI co-pilots are AI-powered tools that help human agents deliver efficient customer support. These AI co-pilot tools are like virtual agents that work alongside human agents to improve customer support and extend better service to customers. Co-pilot tools are backed by powerful AI technologies like natural language processing ( NLP) and machine learning to augment human performance.
What are the key functions of AI co-pilots for customer support?
Some of the key functions that AI co-pilots can serve for delivering efficient customer support include:
1. Real-time assistance
AI co-pilots can offer real-time suggestions to human agents during their customer interactions. For example, they can highlight relevant product information, knowledge bases, and product recommendations to help the human agent better answer customer queries. AI co-pilots can also be trained to suggest the best possible actions to human agents.
2. Automating repetitive tasks
AI co-pilots can perform routine tasks like providing FAQ answers, filling in customer details, updating product delivery status, registering a complaint, and initiating a process, while human agents can focus on more critical issues that require empathy and demand logical resolution.
3. Improve response accuracy
AI co-pilots can analyze past customer interactions and ensure that the subsequent responses are consistent and accurate. This helps improve response accuracy and reduce human errors.
4. Personalized customer interactions
AI co-pilots can analyze customer history and offer personalized responses, thus adding a ‘delight’ factor to their interactions.
5. Learning and improvement
AI co-pilots continuously learn from past interactions and improve, thus aligning with evolving customer demands.
Why are the benefits of AI copilots for customer support?
Here’s why leading businesses can be seen setting up AI co-pilots in their customer support processes:
- Increased efficiency – AI co-pilots can significantly reduce the time human agents spend on each interaction by automating repetitive tasks. This helps to improve overall efficiency and ensure better customer support.
- Reduced agent workload – As co-pilots perform repetitive tasks, they heavy-lift a significant portion of the agent’s workload. Human agents can reduce their cognitive loads and spend more time processing more complex queries.
- Higher customer satisfaction – With AI co-pilots on the job, customers can expect personalized and faster responses that can boost overall experience and satisfaction rates.
- Scalability – As AI co-pilots work alongside human agents, it is easy to scale operations without increasing human resources. This helps companies manage a heavy influx of customer queries, especially during peak times ( think of seasonal sales). AI co-pilots also come in handy during a company’s growth phase.
How do AI co-pilots bring efficiency to customer support?
We have already discussed how co-pilots can improve performance and overall customer operations. Let’s see how they actually do that:
1. Automating routine tasks
AI co-pilots are good at managing repetitive tasks traditionally managed by human agents. Some of the routine tasks that AI co-pilots can conduct without minimal human interventions are:
- Data Entry and Retrieval: AI co-pilots can enter customer information, retrieve account information in real time during a customer conversation, and access a customer’s past transaction history without a human agent intervening.
- Query Classification: AI co-pilots can automatically analyze incoming queries and categorize them by topic, urgency, or complexity. This ensures that every query is correctly classified and routed to the right agent or department.
- Response Suggestions: AI co-pilots work well creating pre-written response templates or suggesting relevant answers based on the customer’s question. This allows the agents to review and send responses quickly.
2. Improving response times
AI co-pilots help reduce human agents’ response time, thus facilitating faster and better responses.
- Quick Information Access: AI co-pilots can extract relevant information from the knowledge base, enabling agents to respond faster to queries.
- Real-Time Insights: The real-time insights that the co-pilots can fetch during every interaction help human agents address customer queries quickly. They empower agents to resolve issues on the spot, thus delighting the customer.
- Proactive Support: AI co-pilots have the superpower to analyze any ongoing conversion and can send alert messages to human agents with proactive solutions that help resolve the issue faster. Since these predictions are mostly accurate, agents can provide the right solution, thus minimizing the need for follow-ups.
3. Enhancing accuracy and consistency
AI co-pilots improve efficiency and accuracy while helping the customer service team stay consistent in their efforts.
- Standardizing Responses: For example, AI co-pilots can help maintain consistency in the quality and tone of responses, ensuring that all customers receive accurate information that aligns with brand guidelines.
- Minimize Human Errors: AI co-pilots minimize human errors. The co-pilot tool automates the data retrieval process, thus eliminating the risk of incorrect data entry or misinterpretation.
- Bridge Knowledge Gaps: Co-pilots help agents fill knowledge gaps by delivering optimal responses from historical data and AI-driven insights.
4. Personalizing customer interactions
AI co-pilots are great for helping human agents offer personalized customer interaction experiences.
- Customer Context Awareness: For example, AI co-pilots can access customer profiles, purchase history, and past interactions. They allow human agents to personalize their responses based on the customer’s past purchase behavior.
- Dynamic Recommendations: AI co-pilots not only help human agents customize their responses, but they can also help with dynamic product recommendations based on past purchase history. For example, if the customer has previously purchased shoes, the AI co-pilot can recommend more varieties of shoes or relevant accessories, thus helping human agents upsell.
- Adaptive Learning: The adaptive learning technology trains the AI co-pilots from past interactions so that the tools can learn from each interaction and offer hyper-personalized recommendations.
5. Improving agent productivity and morale
AI co-pilots help improve the productivity of human agents by sharing the workload with them. The AI co-pilots conduct repetitive tasks, thus reducing the cognitive load of the employees.
- Reducing Workload: As human agents receive real-time support from AI tools, they are better poised to focus on more complex tasks that involve problem-solving, high-value interactions, human judgment, and empathy.
- Quick Onboarding: With the AI co-pilots working with them, agents can quickly learn the job and get on board, reducing the learning curve significantly.
- Reduced Stress: As AI co-pilots can manage most repetitive tasks, human agents have more time to do productive work with minimal stress.
6. Scaling support efforts
AI co-pilots come in handy to support human agents when processing a huge volume of calls across various channels.
- Managing High-Volume Responses: For example, with the support of AI co-pilots, human agents can help customer service teams easily manage high-volume calls during peak times.
- Multichannel Support: Whether it’s chat, email, phone, or social media, AI co-pilots can effortlessly operate across channels and manage consistent service across multiple channels.
- Round-the-clock Availability: Co-pilot tools can help customer support teams function round-the-clock by addressing customer queries outside standard working hours and reducing wait times.
7. Continuous improvement and optimization
AI co-pilot tools not only help reduce agent loads or respond to customer queries around the clock, but they also help continuously improve and optimize the whole customer service process.
- Learning from Interactions: AI co-pilots are trained to constantly learn from previous interactions and improve their performance accuracy. This helps businesses stay on top of their customer service game and constantly exceed customer expectations.
- Feedback Loops: Human agents can create feedback loops and provide feedback on AI suggestions, which can further enhance the tool’s efficiency.
- Performance Analytics: AI co-pilots offer insights and analytics on support interactions, helping managers identify trends, common issues, and areas for improvement in the customer support process.
Challenges of using AI co-pilots for customer support
While AI co-pilots for customer support offer several benefits, here are some benefits we recommend taking into account:
- Maintaining Human Touch: Human agents are indispensable when dealing with complex issues, where deep human judgment and empathy are needed.
- Data Privacy and Security: Data is a key point to consider when working with AI co-pilots, as these tools are constantly fed customer data. So, careful handling of customer data is non-negotiable to ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
- Continuous Monitoring and Updates: AI co-pilots must be constantly monitored and trained to adapt to customer behaviors, ongoing trends, and the changing business landscape to work better.
Conclusion
Providing a superior, consistent, and round-the-clock support experience is no longer an option but a necessity in today’s competitive landscape.
By partnering with Auralis AI, you can leverage its AI support co-pilot, where your customers and agents can engage with your product. Auralis’s AI co-pilot handles 70% of customer inquiries accurately. It’s available 24/7 and offers a consistent brand voice and tone.
Are you ready to improve customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing operational costs?
