Recent breakthroughs in predictive and generative AI are revolutionizing nearly every industry and walk of life.
Companies are using AI to solve complex business problems, process data, improve decision-making and establish themselves as trailblazers within their industries. AI also impacts our daily lives and interactions, from personalized social media feeds to auto-generated email responses.
According to a McKinsey study, AI technologies can potentially deliver up to $1 trillion in annual value—for global banking alone. A substantial amount of additional value will likely also come from an AI-driven evolution of the customer support experience within every industry.
Drive Customer Loyalty with Advanced Touchpoints
Retaining a current customer will always be less costly than acquiring a new one, making customer support a critical function for driving growth and revenue.
By integrating predictive and generative AI within CRMs and other support technologies, businesses can provide the type of exceptional experience that leads to greater customer loyalty and long-term retention.
What exactly is the difference between predictive and generative AI? Predictive AI taps into large data sets to forecast future events, while generative AI uses large data sets to create new content from scratch.
Combining predictive and generative AI technologies for customer support helps:
- Elevate the quality and consistency of every customer interaction.
- Boost the effectiveness and efficiency of customer support operations.
- Mitigate customer service challenges contributing to agent attrition and burnout, including fragmented customer data, overwhelming backlogs, and limited visibility into customer interactions.
Here are three key strategies for using predictive and generative AI to help raise the quality of every customer support experience.
Increase Observability
A staggering 74% of customer service agents report feeling at risk for burnout. The primary reasons? Issues like lack of collaboration and CRM tools, limited support from managers, and minimal customer focus within the company culture.
AI adds a layer of observability to customer interactions that can help reverse this trend.
Every customer interaction matters, and delivering a seamless support experience requires an “all hands on deck” approach. It’s a collective effort that involves engineering, product support, customer success, sales and every other customer-facing function.
Predictive AI helps make this task easier by dissecting extensive customer support data across cases, chat logs and emails and discerning patterns that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Monitoring is proactive and encompasses all systems of record and engagement, including human and virtual agents, and helps support teams avoid data migration issues when using multiple ticketing systems.
With these insights, businesses have a bird’s eye view of metrics, engagement and monitoring to predict future customer behaviors and issues—all while helping to ensure a consistent support experience.
Predict Escalations
Enhancing customer observability with AI is the most efficient way to monitor every case and resolve customer service issues before they escalate.
Escalation prediction software acts like an astute detective checking the entire case and customer history, scrutinizing indicators from recent and past support interactions to predict future escalations.
By identifying potential escalations in advance, predictive AI helps make the best use of available resources and gives agents the ability to proactively manage client inquiries rather than reactively put out fires as they happen.
Invest in Your Agents
It’s critical to give your agents the tools and resources needed to provide the best customer experience possible.
Generative AI helps:
- Enhance the agent experience and make the best use of available resources
- Streamline and improve tasks like responding to customers with the right message
- Hone soft skills and language translation, ensuring each support team member can deliver efficient and consistent service regardless of language barriers
- Synthesize large amounts of customer data and generate comprehensive case summaries, providing agents with overviews of customer activity and trends without the need to comb through case details
The Future of Customer Support
The potential impact of AI on the quality of customer support is undeniable. Predictive and generative AI will continue to transform industry norms and empower businesses to provide a previously unseen level of customer service and support.
By delivering the insights and personalization needed to improve employee retention, build stronger customer relationships, and make informed decisions, businesses that embrace AI tools for customer support will enjoy a clear competitive edge over those that rely on manual processes alone.
