Today, customer service leaders are under increasing pressure to manage costs yet scale support to support growing businesses. So, they are increasingly looking to AI and digital technology to complement their traditional customer support channels.
In a recent report, co-produced with ContactBabel, “The Inner Circle Guide to AI, Chatbots & Machine Learning,” offers a useful benchmark for how today’s customer service industry is using technology. It includes survey data from hundreds of U.S.-based contact centers as well as customers of those companies.
Here are seven key stats — and takeaways — that today’s customer experience (CX) executives and customer service professionals need to know.
Human support agents are welcoming of AI-powered virtual agents
“70% of customer support agents agree that AI will be used to support agents; 45% agree that AI will be used to replace some agents in the future.”
Understandably, some customer service professionals are concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence because they fear losing their jobs. But the survey suggests that human agents are welcoming of AI in the support center — especially as a complement to how they do their jobs.
The fastest way to resolve problems wins.
“70% of customer support agents believe that customers would be OK engaging with AI-powered agents because they want to solve their problems as soon as possible. Only 25% of agents believe that some customers always prefer human support.”
If there was one metric that matters (OMTM) which could be applied to the entire customer service industry, it would probably be how quickly support cases are resolved. The fastest way to solve customer support cases always wins — for businesses and customers. From a customer point of view, it doesn’t matter if a human or AI agent solves the issue. They just want their problem solved now. And for businesses, solving support issues quickly means less money spent.
For automated support to work, your helpdesk content must be robust
“80% of agents say customers abandoned self-service support because it didn’t provide the information they needed.”
One of the biggest challenges that halts any attempt at automated support — including AI-powered options — is a lack of good content. It’s difficult for any internal team to generate the breadth and depth of digital content needed to answer the majority of questions customers may have, especially for a growing company. And that’s exactly why we designed our platform to enable companies to tap their community of expert users, who can provide answers at scale.
AI can help surface hard-to-find answers
“62% of agents said that customers were unable to find information in self-service even though it was available.”
Even when companies have a lot of great support information for customers, there’s another challenge: presenting it in a way that’s easy for people to find. From FAQs to search, users will only invest so much time before they opt for other support options like email or phone. This is where AI can be particularly effective. As our report concluded, “AI can assist with some of these issues, especially assisting the customer to find the right information through conversation and questions.”
Telephony self-service is better at filtering callers than solving issues
“Of companies using telephone self-service, just 31% of calls were handled entirely by self-service.”
Businesses that use IVR (interactive voice response) technology have found that it can be useful in filtering calls to the right agent or department. However, the survey found that IVR systems are generally ineffective at completely solving problems. Less than one-third of calls are successfully resolved without requiring an agent. Worse, many of these systems don’t offer a clear path to a live operator, which given the success rate, is a mistake. As stated in the report, “If businesses don’t offer a live agent option to an irate and frustrated caller, they won’t need to worry about providing customer service to them in the future.”
Education for agents and customers is crucial for support automation
“31% of support agents state that fewer than 10% of customers have tried to resolve issues online before calling the contact center, and15% of agents whose companies offer web self-service do not have any idea of its success from the customers’ perspective.”
Offering great online customer support, particularly automated self-service tools, takes a mix of great technology and content. But there’s one more crucial piece: education. Customers need to know it exists and (human) support agents need to understand how it is used so they can better serve the customers that end up using phone support. As the stat above indicates, there’s a lack of understanding with some call center agents about available web self-service materials — and a lack of awareness from customers about online resources that might help.
2019 expected to be big year for AI/ML in customer support
“16% of all companies plan to implement artificial intelligence/machine learning solutions for customer support within the next year, more than doubling the current installed base. 27% of large contact centers (200+ agents) expect to implement AI/ML within one year, which means more than 50% will have AI/ML in place by 2020.”
Artificial technology and machine learning are maturing quickly. IDC recently forecast that spending on AI systems will exceed $35 billion this year. The practical applications in customer support are growing quickly. This is especially true in large operations and the outsourcing, finance, and insurance sectors. As AI works most effectively with very large pools of data to learn from, large contact centers are naturally at the forefront of implementation. These operations are most likely to have large numbers of self-service sessions that can be optimized through AI solutions like Directly.
Download the full report today
Trying to learn more about what’s really happening in customer support today? Make sure to download the full report here. And if you’re interested in seeing how AI might fit into your company’s customer service, contact us to set up a demo.
