A million customer conversations with AI agents yielded this surprising lesson

A balanced approach, using your organization’s brains and hearts, will be key to success. The benefits are too good to pass up — for your customers, employees, business partners, and communities. The true measure of the service cycle’s success isn’t defined solely by an agent’s technical prowess or immediate problem-solving capabilities. Its core essence resides in the profound impact on the customer’s emotional experience throughout the entire interaction.

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What seemed like a nonurgent need—adopting new technology to increase efficiency—is now staring CX organizations directly in the face and preventing them from being successful. Whether it’s a similar unthinkable event that shakes the economy to its core, or simply a busy holiday shopping season overwhelming agents, organizations must be prepared to scale efficiently, at lightning speed. • First, you want to do what you can to solve the issue of the immediately affected user.

Provide Ongoing Support And Resources

It’s not exactly the most inspirational technique for fostering customer-centricity within an organization. Consider a highly sensitive and high-stakes scenario, such as a Salesforce outage — a situation that can induce significant stress and frustration for our customers. In such a critical moment, the immediate response from our agent, whether human or AI, is not to immediately dive into complex technical troubleshooting or present a list of potential fixes.

But the negative impact of long call and chat queues doesn’t stop with customers; it also extends to employees. If you’ve never sat in the customer service chair and experienced high incoming volumes yourself, suffice it to say – it’s brutal. The moment you finish one call or chat session, another one immediately gets routed to you.

How BruntWork Stays Ahead of Staffing Problems

The demographic that has historically been least likely to shop online and order for delivery, were also the most at-risk — those over the age of 65. Many older consumers were shopping online for the first time, and along with their shopping came a slew of questions directed at customer service. Seamlessly integrated with Esker’s Order Management solution, this add-on serves as a digital assistant for the customer service email inbox by classifying and routing messages to the right recipient or the right process. Omniroute is essentially a load-balancer for routing multi-channel customer inquiries. Freshworks argues that earlier customer support solutions made it hard for agents to switch between inquiry types and for managers to efficiently route traffic. Research from the Corporate Executive Board indicates that over half of incoming calls are triggered merely because customers couldn’t find what they were looking for on a company’s website.

The 360-degree view offers not only a consolidated view of the customer, it also provides your staff with access to information needed to meet customer-service demands and support Web-based customer self-service. The system can also guide your staff through processes such as cross-selling interactions, which allow you to introduce best practices into every customer interaction. The result is that customers will enjoy a consistent experience throughout your company. When the tidal wave of customer inquiries hits and service queues lengthen, there are short-term fixes that can help mitigate the negative impact on the customer experience. Technology can be leveraged (virtual queuing “call me back” capabilities, as well as dynamically calculated wait time estimates for those in queue). And, yes, customer inquiries can be deflected to automated platforms (chatbots and website self-service).

Connect where the the user is

The people who run the helpline should have good customer service skills and a level of product and technical knowledge that enables them to provide the right answer or put the customer in contact with the right specialist. They trust in your expertise when they have questions about your products and services. This trust is part of the relationship-building process, and it’s vital in your efforts not only to retain customers but to gain new ones. This formula was derived from a global survey that looked at customer satisfaction levels by industry, geography and company size. Despite its appearance, the formula above is not a traditional mathematical one. Instead, think of it as a chemical formula where a change in the quantity of one ingredient can have a dramatic impact on the end result.

Determine your bot model

Instead, a company needs to allocate resources for maintaining and updating content. A team, ranging from a few people to 10 people or more, should constantly review customer-agent-bot dialogues and fine-tune the bots for improved performance over time. The bot-assisted agent model requires a phased rollout process into the customer service organization. Human agents must feel supported, rather than threatened, by the chatbot technology. For example, start with an internal chatbot pilot with the most creative, innovative customer service representatives.

The company’s staff replacement guarantee is perhaps the most audacious promise in an industry known for overpromising and underdelivering. It is like offering a money-back guarantee on a first date, and that means either Ong is supremely confident in his company’s ability to deliver or he has overestimated his company. Corporate America has long accepted that to have a truly 24/7 customer service, someone, somewhere, must sacrifice their circadian rhythm for the almighty dollar. According to BruntWork, the remote-first outsourcing company that is making night shifts obsolete, it does not have to be so. With their distributed workforce model, they have turned the Earth’s rotation into an advantage. When New York sleeps, Manila works, and when London logs off, Buenos Aires logs on.

• It’s one thing to be able to answer product and service questions, but it’s another to have them troubleshoot and answer questions around things like return policies or billing issues.
• “We don’t want to force people into an experience that they don’t want,” Rainey added.
• Applied successfully, chatbots not only cut costs but improve customer satisfaction.

After all, 90% of customer service organizations report that customer service is more important than ever in these times of crisis. “We help empower customer service departments with more strategic, fulfilling work and at the same time provide their customers with an improved experience everyone wins.” The platform natively integrates with popular CRM and help desk tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and HubSpot, allowing companies to seamlessly enhance their customer support capabilities without disrupting current workflows. This frictionless integration enables the deployment of AI-powered features such as Generative AI Agent Co-Pilots, Conversational AI Chat Agents, and proactive insights to optimize customer interactions at every level.

It allows for a move from generic problem-solving to highly individualized and strategic customer engagement. Establish an “escalation procedure” to make sure no calls slip through the cracks. Identify critical types of helpline requests, including technical support, complaints, and breakdowns, and set target response times for such queries. Appoint a supervisor to monitor conformance to target response times, escalate to a designated manager any queries that exceed target times, and monitor the responses to escalated queries. The outsourcing industry has long been viewed as a necessary evil – a cost-cutting measure that businesses reluctantly embrace when budgets tighten.

How many calls does your helpline receive per day, per week, per month, per year? What types of call does it receive and what is the volume of each type of call? Keeping track of the answers to these questions will help you ensure that your helpline is effective.