Braving busy holidays: Reduce customer service stress with automation and AI

The holidays are coming, and for consumer-facing businesses, that often results in a huge tide of shoppers turning to your support team for help. How can you get on top of high conversation volumes, and still provide speedy, personal support during the busiest times of the year?

It’s an easy answer: bring in AI. In the space of a year, we’ve come a long way with this remarkable technology. Providing exceptional (read: personal, efficient) support no longer means needing to add extra headcount or face burnout. Working hand-in-hand with an AI agent, like Fin 2, our latest next-generation release, your human team can now resolve support queries proactively and automatically.

Here are our top tips for making the most of an AI agent like Fin and providing world-class support in a considerably easier way.

Tip 1: Avoid burnout and still provide 24/7 support with an AI agent

No matter how dedicated your support team is, they can’t (and shouldn’t have to) work around the clock during busy holiday periods, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The good news? AI agents like Fin can provide instant responses and accurately resolve queries 24/7.

“AI bots will provide speedy, spot-on answers even when your team is out of office or otherwise engaged”

If you have a knowledge base, you can set up your AI agent and point it at your help content in minutes. Then when a customer asks a question, your bot will provide speedy, spot-on answers to queries even when your team is out of office or otherwise engaged.

The best part is you have 100% control over how you use this automated support. Being able to properly switch off is crucial for avoiding burnout during this time of year, so make use of an AI agent in whatever way best suits your team. Some folks might like to have AI completely take over answering certain questions, while others might like to toggle between automated and human support – with the AI agent being turned on during certain hours and human team members taking over when they’re online. It’s completely up to you.

Tip 2: Automatically answer holiday FAQs in a way that feels personal

Answering the same questions over and over again can feel like running on an endless treadmill for your team. This is especially true during the holiday season when customers have more questions about shipping, delivery times, and holiday discounts and deals.

Luckily, that’s a thing of the past with support from AI agents that can instantly resolve FAQs and reduce your conversation volume. Fin is excellent at this – straight out of the box, it can resolve up to 51% of all queries with 99.9% accuracy. Just in time for the holidays, we’ve put a bow on this level of efficiency and launched a few new sparkly features to ensure Fin not only clears your queue in record time, but makes it a merry experience:

• Fin’s advanced Knowledge Hub helps it maintain up-to-date information about your products and services, ensuring accurate responses throughout the holiday season without requiring constant updates from your team.
• New behavior features allow you to customize Fin’s tone of voice to match your brand’s holiday communication style, choosing from five preset tones or adjusting between concise and conversational responses to maintain consistency across all customer interactions.
• The ability to communicate fluently in 45 languages, ensuring all your customers across the world receive the same high-quality support.

Sounds great, but wondering which questions are best to automate? We recommend digging into data from previous years and identifying patterns in what simple, frequent queries are eating into your team’s bandwidth most.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here’s a list of common questions our customers leave to Fin:

• What are your shipping options, prices, and timelines?
• What is the shipping process for international orders?
• What are your holiday return and exchange policies?
• How do I apply the promo code?
• What’s the deadline for placing an order to guarantee delivery before Christmas?

With Intercom, you can also create Custom Answers to ensure Fin serves the right customers with the right tailored solutions and suggested actions at the right time. For example, if a customer asks about modifying a holiday order, Fin can connect to your order management system, pull in the exact order details, and help them make changes – all within the Messenger.

These kinds of personal touches speed up resolutions, enhance satisfaction, and build strong customer loyalty for your brand.

Tip 3: Set customer expectations around response times

What’s one of the fastest ways to frustrate a customer? Failing to set expectations or deliver on your promises. Again, this is something teams no longer have to worry about, with an AI agent on hand to instantly solve simpler queries while the humans deal with more complex conversations.

“Customers can then plan their next move based on real-time information, instead of waiting around for a response”

If there is any reason that customers might have to wait longer during the holiday rush, build trust and goodwill by proactively communicating response times. Customers can then plan their next move based on real-time information, instead of waiting around for a response that might take a few hours.

With Intercom’s Messenger, you can set clear expectations for holiday shoppers. First, tailor the Messenger intro to share your team’s availability or other important customer service issues. Second, if you’re providing extended holiday hours, you can adjust your team’s office hours and expected response times.

To bring even more visibility to your team’s availability, you can set Fin up to let your customers know what your office hours are and when your team will be back online if they’re looking to speak with a human.

Tip 4: Route complex issues to the right team ASAP

People getting stressed out during the holiday season is inevitable. With all sorts of things happening behind the scenes, it’s important to go into this period with understanding and patience – for your customers and your support team. With that in mind, answers to some questions, such as emotionally charged and complex queries, are probably best handled by a human.

We’re working on a “Category Detection” feature for Fin to help ease the pressure around resolving stressful scenarios quickly. This new feature will analyze language used and automatically identify customer frustration or urgent issues in real-time.

Whether someone is experiencing a technical issue or is understandably angry about a misplaced holiday delivery, Fin can route their conversation to the right team immediately. This intelligent routing works seamlessly across all channels – chat, email, and WhatsApp – ensuring consistent support no matter how customers reach out.

Another helpful thing we did ourselves was set up both Slack and PagerDuty integrations with our Messenger to trigger emergency out of hours notifications for certain scenarios. This ensured we never missed anything critical and could use the most effective option to help our customers, regardless of when they experienced an issue.

Tip 5: Beat your customers to it by being proactive

What’s even better than automatically resolving frequent questions? Proactively solving issues and resolving queries before they ever become problems!

Use banners, automated pop-up messages, or whatever jumps out to your customers on your website or within your product, to provide answers to your top 10 holiday questions. Whether it’s delivery cut-off dates or return policies, make the most important information visible so customers can self-serve.

“By transparently informing your customers of issues, you can help them to make more informed choices and manage their expectations”

It’s also a good idea to use your AI agent or other attention-grabbing features, like a banner or targeted message, to proactively communicate any known issues to customers. By transparently informing your customers of processing times, website bugs, or shipping delays before they make their order, you can help them make more informed choices and avoid unnecessary confusion or frustration.

Tip 6: Empower customers to resolve their own issues

Today’s customers overwhelmingly prefer self-service. So much so, that by 2030, Gartner estimates that a billion service tickets will be raised automatically by customer-led automation. In turn, providing a seamless self-service experience lets you reduce time spent on simple issues and improve your holiday bottom line.

Fin 2 takes self-service to the next level by accessing customer data to provide personalized responses. For example, when a customer asks about their holiday order status, Fin can access their specific order information and provide real-time updates. Using action templates, Fin can even help customers make simple changes to their orders, such as updating shipping addresses or modifying gift options, without requiring human intervention.

As we mentioned before, Fin is fluent in 45 languages. It can automatically detect a customer’s language and serve them relevant answers in that language, providing a great global customer service experience. What’s more, when you integrate third-party apps, like Stripe and Shopify, with Fin, your customers can go beyond just chatting to complete actual transactions.

Tip 7: Proactively help customers break past friction

The average cart abandonment rate in 2024 is a significant 70.19% according to a recent study. Cart abandonment rates typically peak during busy shopping periods, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. One of the best ways to help customers complete their order is by triggering a targeted, automated proactive message on the checkout page to preemptively answer their questions.

For example, if customers are on the shipping page for a few minutes, they might have questions about your shipping times, returns policy, or something else. You can trigger an outbound message that links to your top FAQs related to purchasing so they get the relevant information upfront without needing to reach out for support.

Stay on top of your holiday customer service

The holidays are a huge opportunity to attract more customers and drive revenue, and in the past that came with extra demands on your support team. Now, AI has truly revolutionized customer service – so much so that you can genuinely handle the holiday season just like any other time of year.

With a helping hand from cutting-edge support tools like Fin, your human team can spend more time focusing on the more meaningful, emotional parts of the job that they enjoy. The dual ability to meet demands quickly and efficiently, and also connect deeply with people when it counts means you’ll win the hearts and minds of customers and they’ll keep choosing your business again and again.