With all the hype that ChatGPT, Google Bard, Grok, and Gen AI have created, we are truly living the Generation AI. And predictably companies have jumped on the AI bandwagon trying to outpace each other in rolling out gen AI solutions.
The enthusiasm is admirable but I always look at technology fads through a slightly more pragmatic lens.
The power that Gen AI represents is immense. But a lot of it is still to unfold with companies having deep pockets burning tons of cash to figure it out. Instead of sinking large investments into the field my take is start with the proverbial low hanging fruits, areas where Gen AI can make max impact.
One such area is your customer service. AI can be used to improve it in a few quick-fire ways. And because this area is so important for your customer experience, any improvement that AI brings can push up your CSAT score and also reduce your customer support costs.
No not recommending you fire your customer support people like some CEOs have recommended but you can sure shift the support at least for your lower margin products to AI.
Here’s What AI Can do for You
Smart Summary
We tried asking chat GPT to summarise our regular support chats and the results were great. AI converts plain text chat into a smart summary extracting things like name, contact details, purpose, product required, price and then loads them on a CRM software. It saves the time of manual entry and the errors that come with manual entry. Extrapolate the saved time over the thousands of calls, your agents have everyday and you have whopper savings.
Flag Issues
AI can be trained to flag good calls and bad calls or good chats and bad chats. In fact there is pre-trained software that has already been perfected on large language models and millions of conversations to flag awry sentiments and inefficiencies in your customer interactions. Since your business literally depends on the conversations your customer service executives are having, I think deploying this kind of monitoring AI is no longer an option, it can be life-saving for your customer service.
Identify FAQs
Your customers are asking hundreds of questions everyday. As your customer base grows, the number of customer queries your team handles everyday grows. If you have an efficient scaling model then you are probably increasing your customer service headcount to keep pace with your customers. But such linear growth models are sure margin killers in a SAAS world. Is there an alternative? There sure is. For if you sit down and analyse your customer conversations, you can see patterns and a smaller cohesive number of FAQs emerging. Your AI can help you identify these FAQs and with pre-crafted answers even reply to them.
Smart Replies
Alright once you know your customer FAQs, powering your bots to reply to them isn’t so difficult either. Gen AI-powered bots can go beyond structured Q&A to compose replies to questions or understand questions even when the language deviates from your FAQ templates.
Bot conversations of course need API calls so you can calculate your cost savings of deploying a bot by summing up API costs during a day and compare it to the per day CTC of your customer service agent. Bots are usually cheaper. But no, don’t make this as an excuse to downsize your customer reps team yet. For people still need personalised support. A better approach as I said earlier is to segment your products by margins and ARPU. Have your low-margin product support run completely on auto-pilot and upgrade anyone looking for more expensive human support.
At MyOperator and HeyoPhone, we are using AI to help businesses level up their customer experience while still keeping costs low. To start a conversation on how AI can help you manage your business goals, connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at rimjhim.ray@myoperator.com
