Want to keep your customers? AI can help
Do you want to be the company making your customers relive the old days of support, or the one delighting them with a futuristic support experience?
If you’re still the person thinking, “I’ll just wait and see how all of this AI stuff plays out,” it’s time to reconsider.
According to our Customer Service Trends Report 2024, 87% of support teams have seen an increase in their customers’ expectations over the last year, and 68% of those believe that expectations have been directly influenced by AI.
If you’re not ready to adopt AI just yet, there’s a good chance your competitors are – and that means customers are already experiencing a new style of support.
As our Director of Customer Support Operations, Anthony Lopez, put it:
“If for the last 10 months, you’ve been getting responses in less than 30 seconds and you see a company that’s not doing that, then you’re going to have a miscalibration with your expectations.”
So, the question is: do you want to be the company making your customers relive the old days of support, or the company delighting them with a futuristic support experience?
Aim high or say goodbye
Our survey showed that 68% of C-level support execs believe it’s harder to retain customers than it was a year ago, and 43% of support teams think that’s because of increased customer expectations. With retention so closely linked to a stellar customer experience, we’re aiming to not just meet customer expectations, but exceed them with the help of AI.
Over the last year, we’ve had so many conversations about what we want our support offering to look like: how we’ll measure success, how we want our customers to feel, how our teammates can maximize their skills.
We’ve come a long way, and we still have so much to learn – but here are some of the areas we’re improving with a human+AI support strategy.
Speed of response
A whopping 77% of support teams believe AI will accelerate customers’ expectations of fast response times. And it should – AI shines when it comes to speedy responses, answering common queries almost instantly. For more complex issues, AI can clarify the problem, triage the query, and set expectations. If your team’s first response time is higher than you’d like, AI and automation can help.
Speed of resolution
Time to resolution is a common metric for support teams. But is keeping this number low always the ideal outcome? Combining the power of humans and AI means our simple questions are solved near-instantly, while humans can apply their problem-solving and troubleshooting skills to more complex, difficult issues.
Availability
No business can offer 24/7 support to all regions without significant cost. Using AI to offer answers, or set expectations, and triage at any hour ensures our customers will always have somewhere to go with their problems. As our boss and VP of Customer Support, Declan Ivory, said on a recent podcast:
“With the advent of generative AI, ChatGPT … [people are] using tools that are based on these technologies day in, day out. Their whole expectation level has changed, the bar has been raised forever. People do expect instant engagement. They do expect high quality responses out of this type of technology. They do expect it to be available 24/7.”
You’ll find more industry insights and actionable advice in Intercom’s Customer Service Trends Report 2024. Find out what your peers in the industry are working on, thinking about, and preparing for over the coming year.
This article was featured in the latest edition of our customer service-focused newsletter, The Ticket. Sign up here to get unique insights delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks.