Buyers continue to have high customer service expectations, and support agents simply can’t do it all. If businesses hope to meet modern customer expectations, then the time has come to embrace artificial intelligence in customer service.
Real-time agent assist technology can significantly support a human agent in their moment of need and help enhance your business’s overall CX. In this blog, we’re discussing what AI agent assist is and why it’s beneficial.
What is Agent Assist?
Real-time agent assist is software that uses AI to help customer support agents better serve their customers. During live customer interactions, agent assist AI can provide suggestions to CS agents based on the data your company already has uploaded on the client.
Although multitasking is a valuable skill for all employees to have, it’s simply unrealistic for your team to be everywhere all at once all the time. As your human agent gives your client their full attention, the AI agent assistant can simultaneously pull a variety of important information for them: from the customer’s purchase history, to current product availability and more.
Benefits of AI Agent Assist
Real-time agent assistance is not intended to replace CS agents. In fact, AI bots alone cannot solve customer problems. The true purpose of the feature is to combine human and artificial intelligence to create the most successful CX.
By working together, agents and AI can reduce errors, resolve customer complaints quicker, and boost sales. Let’s dive into a few of the many benefits of AI agent assist:
- Accurate Customer Information
Integrated AI can instantly and accurately retrieve a customer’s information when a support team agent needs it, which frees them up to deal directly with the human side of customer service. For example, if a customer calls about a recent product purchase they made, the AI agent can pull that purchase history for the human agent. Without having to put the customer on hold while they go digging for the details of the purchase, the employee is ready to get straight to helping them with their issue.
Users of Kustomer’s AI-powered CRM know that it stands out among customer service solutions for the comprehensiveness of available customer data. AI agent assist can quickly and accurately pull information from Kustomer’s deep data lake and deliver it to the human agent the moment they need it. And it doesn’t stop at just individual customer information.
- Data-Driven Insights
AI data-driven insights go far beyond retrieving customer information for the agent. From keeping tabs on which employees are currently free to take a customer call to knowing the most up-to-date product availability, real-time AI agents eliminate a lot of guesswork for your support team.
The AI agent is self-learning and recommends the best responses and actions to agents based on historical conversation data. For example, it can understand which agents may handle a specific client issue best. Let’s say a customer reaches out to your company via email about purchasing a broken product. The AI agent is able to pull the product history and finds that this issue has come up a few times before with this specific item, because it’s an innovative product that works differently than most people expect it to (and they’re not reading the directions carefully).
The AI instantly sees the pattern of client interactions and understands when they ended in a positive resolution. Maybe that pattern shows a specific agent was always the one whose calls did not result in a return of the product. This customer can now be directly routed to that agent who clearly knows how best to explain the product.
Of course it’s likely that any one of your support agents could have effectively handled the issue. But using AI to maximize the data you already have can consistently drive faster resolutions for your customers.
- Streamlined 360-Degree View
The AI technology in Kustomer’s CRM provides a single view of the entire customer journey across all channels through a unified dashboard, providing everything agents need all in one place. Having customer data easily accessible allows businesses to effortlessly deliver a personalized customer experience.
A unified data environment doesn’t just bring your customers’ information all to one place. It’s also designed to connect seamlessly with your other data sources and business intelligence tools, while taking the place of your support platform, contact center routing software and process management solution.
When all departments and agents are able to access all data in a streamlined 360-degree view and have that data retrieved by an AI assistant, you create an environment where everyone is equally prepared to give customers the same high-level experience every time.
- Build Customer Loyalty
It’s important to understand how to leverage AI for CS without losing the human touch. As businesses begin to lean into the power of AI customer service, it will become apparent that the technology is not here to replace humans — it’s here to make customer service agents’ jobs less time-consuming and more fulfilling.
One of many results of agent assist AI is that human agents are freed up to do the human work of CS, specifically building customer loyalty. Now, support teams can spend more time building brand equity and customer relationships while the AI does the knitty-gritty data work.
As low level, repetitive tasks become the job of AI, the role of customer service agents will shift into a hugely important job: building lifelong relationships with customers. This change is how AI is transforming the future of CS.
Get AI Agent Assist Through Kustomer’s CRM
Interested in real-time AI assist for your business? Get access to this technology through a robust, modern CRM like Kustomer’s. Our newly introduced AI Labs app offers two new agent assistance features: text enhancement and conversation summaries.
AI Text Enhancement gives agents a toolkit of one-click actions, including the ability to expand short messages to more formal or friendlier responses and tidy up their spelling and grammar.
The Conversation Summaries feature helps with the friction that can occur when customer handoffs are made, whether from chatbot to agent, or agent to another agent. Rather than the receiving party having to comb through long chat threads to catch up, this new feature leverages OpenAI to summarize the essential information.
Request a live, personalized demo of the AI features within the top-rated modern CRM for customer service.
