Tag: AI Customer Support

The 12 Most Important Customer Service Expectations

Written by Dylan Max  on   Jul 14, 2022

It’s no secret that customers today have high expectations when it comes to customer service. In order to keep up with the competition, businesses need to meet (or exceed) these expectations. Every business has customers, no matter what field or industry, and it’s vitally important to be aware of what they expect.

What are Customer Expectations?

Simply put, customer expectations are the standards that customers have for a product or service. These standards can be based on many factors, such as previous experiences, what they’ve heard from others, or even societal norms. And when customers don’t feel that their expectations have been met, they’re likely to take their business elsewhere.

There are a few key things to keep in mind when it comes to customer expectations:

– They’re constantly changing: What customers expect today may be different tomorrow, so it’s important to stay on top of trends and changes.

– They vary by customer: Not all customers have the same expectations, so it’s important to tailor the experience to each individual.

– They should be met or exceeded: Meeting customer expectations is the bare minimum — businesses should aim to exceed them whenever possible.

The 12 Most Important Customer Service Expectations

While customer expectations can differ depending on the company or industry, there are some common themes that businesses should be aware of. Here are 12 of the most important customer service expectations:

1. Honesty and Transparency

Customers today expect honesty and transparency from businesses. They want to know that they can trust the company, and they want to be able to easily find information about the product or service. For example, if a customer is buying a product online, they should be able to easily find shipping costs, return policies, and other important information. Companies should not try to hide this information or be vague about it.

2. Friendliness and Courteousness

It seems like it should go without saying, but sometimes it’s easy to forget about basic decency. Friendliness and courteousness are two of the most important customer service expectations. Customers want to feel like they’re valued, and they want to be treated with respect.

3. Being Understood

Customers want to feel like they’re being understood, and they want businesses to take the time to listen to their concerns. This includes everything from active listening to providing support in their language of choice. Customers want to feel like they’re being understood, and they want businesses to take the time to listen to their concerns. This includes everything from active listening to providing support in their language of choice. Active listening is a customer service technique that involves giving your full attention to the customer, paraphrasing what they’ve said, and checking for understanding. This can help to make sure that the customer feels heard and that their issues are being addressed.

4. Innovation

Innovation is one of the most important customer service expectations in today’s climate. With new technologies and platforms constantly emerging, customers expect businesses to be on the cutting-edge. They want companies to be constantly improving and adapting to change. Innovation also means being able to meet customer needs in new and unique ways, like using chatbots or artificial intelligence. Innovation should never be made at the expense of smooth function–after all, the latest and greatest technology is hardly great if it hampers your customer service agents from giving customers the best possible experience.

5. Proactivity

Customers today expect businesses to be proactive, and they want companies to anticipate their needs. This includes everything from proactively addressing problems to offering personalized recommendations. A proactive approach means identifying potential issues and taking steps to prevent them before they happen. It also involves awareness of customer needs and offering solutions or recommendations before the customer even knows they need them.

6. Speed and Efficiency

Customers today want speed and efficiency when it comes to customer service. They don’t want to wait on hold for hours, and they expect problems to be resolved quickly and efficiently. Quick reaction time from customer service is essential in today’s climate.

7. Multi-Channel Service

In order to meet customer expectations, businesses need to provide multi-channel service. This means that customers should be able to reach out through a variety of channels, such as phone, email, chat, or social media. And they should be able to receive a consistent experience no matter which channel they use. In addition to this consistent access, they also want continuity–a conversation that begins on one channel should continue on another.

8. Privacy and Security

With all of the recent data breaches in the news, it’s no surprise that privacy and security are top customer service expectations. Customers want to know that their personal information is safe, and they want businesses to take steps to protect their data. This includes everything from ensuring that data is encrypted to offering secure payment options.

9. Personalization

Customers today expect a personalized experience, and they want businesses to take the time to get to know them. This includes everything from using their name to providing tailored recommendations. Not only this,  but customers also want the feeling that they’re more than just a number. They want to be treated as individuals, and they want their customer service experiences to reflect that. 

10. Empathy

In addition to being understood, customers also want businesses to show empathy. This means that businesses need to be able to put themselves in their customers’ shoes and understand their needs. This is more than just a sympathetic ear or a kind word–it’s about being able to truly understand what the customer is going through. The Human connection is an important one and should be a cornerstone of any customer service approach. 

11. Constant Availability

With the rise of online shopping, customers now expect businesses to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This means that businesses need to have customer service representatives available around-the-clock to answer questions and resolve problems.

12. Customer Self-Service

Finally, customers today expect to be able to serve themselves. This means that businesses need to provide easy-to-use self-service options, such as FAQ pages, online chatbots, and step-by-step guides.In addition, businesses need to make sure that these self-service options are easily accessible and easy to use by their customers. Efficient and convenient self service is not only great for customers, but it’s also cost-effective for businesses. 

How to leverage AI in the quest for customer service excellence

There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights. While platforms can streamline the agent experience and can decrease resolution times, omnichannel conversational AI platforms like Netomi are now acting as the first line of defense when it comes to customer support. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries.

No matter which platform you choose to implement in your customer service operations, the Netomi AI helps you by taking the best course of action with every incoming support ticket:

  • The AI can automatically resolve common, highly repeatable tickets without having to loop in a human agent (‘auto-pilot’ mode)
  • For more complex tickets, the AI can gather information from the customer or back-end systems, and even draft a response for review, before handing off to a human agent (‘co-pilot’ mode) 
  • For the most complex tickets that require a human hand, the AI can summarize and route tickets to the most appropriate agent for the task 

By leveraging the out-of-the-box Netomi virtual agent integration, companies enhance both the agent and customer experience, while also reducing costs. Other chatbots don’t sit natively within the agent desk, but with Netomi, virtual and human agents work alongside each other, creating an efficient and ultra-powerful customer service team.

10 Ways Customer Service Automation Works Today (Updated June 2022)

Written by Emily Peck  on   Jun 29, 2022

AI is transforming customer service, making it more convenient and personal by automating high-quality resolutions on consumers’ terms and empowering human agents to work smarter. The use cases for automated customer service seem endless, so we’ve pulled together the best opportunities for leveraging the power of helpdesk AI in customer service that we see today.

How are our customers using automated support to rethink retail customer service?
Learn how Nespresso, Tommy Hilfiger, and Westjet have turned support into a difference maker.

Here are the Best Automated Customer Service Use Cases

Use Cases for Customer Support on Autopilot

  1. Constant, Direct Attention to Customers

    2. AI can respond instantly to customers, faster than any human. This instant response is available all the time, making time zones irrelevant in the first few interactions with customer service. Human attention isn’t required for every scenario, and chatbot statistics show that a chatbot operating 24 hours a day can make an enormous impact on those tenuous first steps.

  2. Automated Customer Service Responses to FAQs

    3. Use AI to respond to the repeatable, and costly, issues that consumers ask about frequently such as return/exchange policies and processes. AI can also educate customers about complex services or products, like applying for a mortgage or comparing credit cards. We worked with Aflac to create an AI Agent to help educate people during the health insurance open-enrollment season, offering support through an insurance chatbot.

  3. Facilitate Routine Actions

    4. AI can help facilitate routine actions like checking in for a WestJet flight, ordering your favorite Starbucks coffee or a Domino’s pizza. Bank of America is using AI to make everyday banking more pleasant: instead of a website search and navigation to various Web pages, a customer can check their balance, confirm due dates and pay bills via a natural language conversation with virtual assistant Erica, a banking chatbot. Customer service software and artificial intelligence can also help answer customer questions about the shipping status of their eCommerce order.

  4. Payments

    5. Sometimes a customer service human being is more than you need, and that is no more often the case than in simple transactional exchanges, like a customer paying for a product or service that your company offers. That’s where AI for customer experience comes in. Those self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores are popular for a specific subset of customers for a reason: for a fast, no-frills payment process, nothing beats DIY with AI. Chatbots can serve the same function in an e-tail setting, acting as automated cash registers when a human is best utilized elsewhere.

    Bonus: Three More Simple Use Cases for Automated Customer Support

  5. Intent Discovery

    6. The customer might not always be right, but they are rarely shy about telling you how they feel. Gauging a user’s mood, and finding out what kind of help they need, is all part of discovering customer intent. Are they mad? Probably best to get a human on the line ASAP. Are they sick of trying to get a hold of a human at other places and hope they don’t have the same issue with your company? Also, probably a good time for a human to hop on the line. Either way, it makes a lot more sense for AI to ask the question “what can I do for you?” before any valuable human time is spent doing what a machine can do.

  6. Account Information

    7. Nobody likes to put the same information repeatedly into web forms, then give that information again to customer service, and then again every time they’re routed to a new customer service agent. This is especially true when the information they’re looking for is simple customer information, like how long until their subscription ends or whether the address on file is current. Customer service chatbots are perfect for this kind of application, where the task is no more complicated than updating a database or reporting on its contents.

  7. Troubleshooting

    8. If your company offers products or services that need troubleshooting, say a TV or refrigerator, you could use AI to help customers first identify the problem and offer the steps to remedy the issue. Depending on the deployment channel, a knowledge base article, or rich video and images could be shared at optimal times to help customers more effectively help themselves. AI can also be used to proactively offer care advice. For instance, Nespresso uses AI to help customers descale their coffee machines using step-by-step tips delivered naturally via conversation.

    Our webinar with Freshworks, Practical AI to Transform Customer Service, is a great intro to learn how AI can work inside your existing CX.

    Automated Customer Service Use Cases for Service Ops

  8. Tag-team AI / Human Support

    9. AI-powered automation tools can gather key important information from a customer before bringing in human service agents, such as account number, current needs or details around the issue they are facing. AI can also be used for account verification, like confirming security questions or matching account numbers to birthdays. This will optimize the agent’s time, ultimately getting a customer’s issue resolved quicker.

  9. Ticket Routing

    10. Based on a customer’s interactions, need, profile, and loyalty status (via integration with a CRM), machine learning can route the ticket to the right agent based on their:

    • areas of expertise
    • real-time availability
    • the number of other open tickets they are currently managing

    British supermarket Ocado, for example, uses support automation AI to intelligently route its 10,000+ daily emails to the right agent taking into account the topic, sentiment and the priority needed for a response. This makes sure the frustrated customer who had an issue with their online order is treated differently than someone who is providing positive feedback on the website.

  10. AI Recommended Replies to Agents

    11. Once the ticket is in the right human hands, automated customer service can still help get tickets resolved quicker. AI can suggest replies or actions based on various contextual factors, the customer’s profile, information the AI gleaned from an earlier exchange to enable the human agent to easily select the best response or update the response if needed. Sprint, for instance, is launching AI in its call center to analyze a topic and recommend real-time solutions to agents in real-time.

Conclusion on AI and Customer Service Automation

AI is now a member of the workforce, enabling companies to create customer satisfaction for high-quality, fast support. Working in tandem with human agents to deliver exceptional customer experience. AI today is best used in highly repeatable, simple scenarios like live chat, but in the future, AI will be able to manage more complex situations, playing an even greater role within an organization’s support team.

Find out what your ROI will be if you automate customer support with an AI chatbot platform. Try our free chatbot ROI calculator today.

For more information on AI and customer service, visit:

The Ultimate Guide to Delivering Exceptional Customer Support in 2023

Written by Amy Wallace  on   Jun 8, 2022

Many of us have experience interacting with customer support agents in various contexts, from streaming service subscriptions and car rental bookings, to online clothing purchases.

For businesses worldwide, offering timely support across multiple channels and touchpoints is critical in today’s highly competitive and digital-first world.

A strong customer experience strategy is a defining feature that sets companies apart – yet what do customer service and customer support truly mean? Why is delivering quality customer support so essential, and how can companies begin doing so? Fundamentally, how can businesses keep customers happy? Here, we break down the meanings behind the terms, and several key best practices to consider weaving into your customer support strategy.

We’ll answer the following questions, so jump directly to a specific section or scroll to read the post in its entirety:

  1. What is customer support?
  2. How does customer support differ from customer service?
  3. What are the most important qualities of customer support?
  4. Why is customer support essential for any business?
  5. What are some tips for boosting customer support?

What is customer support?

Customer support: the team of individuals who provide assistance when customers have questions about a product or service, or experience issues.

How does customer support differ from customer service?

Although the two are often used interchangeably, customer support is not synonymous with customer service. The latter is an umbrella term for all interactions that encompass the overall customer experience and help shape a person’s relationship with the company.

Customer ServiceCustomer Support
Focuses on creating positive, hassle-free customer transactionsFocuses on how the customer interacts with a product
Attends to customer needs throughout every interaction with the productSolves one specific need at a time
Does not always include customer supportAlways requires customer service
Proactive to customer needs and reactive to issuesReactive to specific customer issues
Agents use soft skills oftenAgents rarely need soft skills
Not inherently technicalOften very technical

Customer service, the broader umbrella term, typically refers to all types of customer-facing activities, those that often are non-technical in nature. An essential part of improving customer success is the sales process for many products.

Customer service is directly related to the customer experience, and is comprised of roles such as a sales associate at a department store, or a barista at a cafe. Successful customer service teams often employ customer-centric soft skills. Great customer support requires attention to detail and an overall positive approach in order to keep existing customers. Customer service is all about adding value by helping customers to make the most of a business’ products or services, and support is just one subset of this.

What are the most important qualities?

Good support is more than just installation and troubleshooting – it is about making the customer feel heard, about collecting data and using that to better the customer experience. It is about investing in personal conversations, demonstrating sound product knowledge and empathy, and devising creative and customized solutions to customer issues. Good customer support involves meeting, as well as exceeding customer expectations – what do customers themselves want? What types of experiences do they expect, and what will keep them coming back for more?

A survey from Zendesk discovered that the key customer service principles revolve around empathy, convenience and speed. Customers favor, above all, speedy resolutions to their problems, 24/7 access to support, and interacting with friendly agents.

For customers today, a seamless omnichannel experience is also critical. This allows them to switch devices and fluidly maneuver between multiple channels, carrying forward context with each interaction. For instance, if one day an individual received support via telephone, they want to log into their web browsers to continue the conversation on a separate occasion. Consistency is key – 71% of consumers desire a consistent experience across all channels, yet only 29% say they actually receive this. Investing in omnichannel experiences plays a big part in customer loyalty. Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies enjoy 91% higher customer retention rates year-over-year, compared to businesses that don’t.

Why is customer support essential for businesses?

Amid a shifting global landscape (new and emerging technologies, new ways of working), consumer expectations are shifting along with it. In Netomi’s The State of Customer Service in 2022 Report, more than 65% of those surveyed report they have higher expectations for customer service today than they did 3-5 years ago. What’s more, the report found these higher expectations are not being sufficiently met, with 51% believing that customer service has not improved over the past 12 months.

Uncover Customer Expectations in The 2022 State of Customer Service Report

Put simply, support, delivered in a timely manner, drives customer satisfaction, and conclusively impacts customer retention, customer lifetime value, and brand reputation. Our report also revealed that 77% of U.S. consumers believe that good customer service is crucial to earning loyalty as well as business. Such findings emphasize that there is a tremendous opportunity for companies to put such strategies into place, to go above and beyond to elevate the overall customer experience. Good customer support is expected – it is sought-after and highly regarded.

What are some tips for boosting customer support?

Support your support team with AI-powered chatbots

In the demanding and always-on economy of today, many contact centers are feeling the pressure – with 74% of them at risk for burnout. Moreover, turnover rates hover between 30 and 45%, among the highest of any industry. Companies using AI chatbots for customer service can create a more cost-effective and streamlined approach to drastically improve the experience of agents themselves. This helps to make them feel more fulfilled and engaged in their roles.

A February 2022 survey from Salesforce found that 71% of service agents have considered leaving their job in the past six months, while 69% are considering leaving customer service roles entirely. Working with outdated technology systems and a lack of access to career development opportunities are among the challenges faced by agents. According to the survey, 81% of service agents say they do not have new and advanced technology/tools at their current jobs.

AI-powered chatbots have come to the forefront as a means to meet consumer preferences for 24/7, instantaneous support in real-time. Interest and usage of these tools is burgeoning, and not just among SaaS (Software as a Service) companies. Insider Intelligence predicts that, by 2024, consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion – a jump from just $2.8 billion in 2019.

By providing immediate resolutions to the most common and repeatable of queries, chatbots help to drastically cut down on customer service tickets. They can also assist customers with no human intervention (How do I pause my gym membership? How can I select my seat?) Agents, as a result, can dedicate their time and energy to more complex, high-touch and creative tasks. Advanced technologies such as chatbots serve as the all-important key to supporting overworked employees, helping them to complete their jobs more efficiently.

Customer Support Example - WestJet

Be proactive

Today, 27% percent of customers expect customer service to be proactive – for companies to anticipate their needs and wants. How can you preemptively intervene, before an issue exacerbates, or even turns into an issue? Informing customers that a software update is available, or they will soon be eligible for a cell phone upgrade takes your customer support strategy one notch higher, and signifies to customers that you are looking out for them.

Take Your Customer Experience to the Next Level

Make it personalized

How can we harness customer data that is at our disposal to better tailor and curate the experience? This can be as simple as greeting customers by name or asking for feedback in Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

A customer, for instance, may have previously ordered several pairs of jeans from an online retailer. After being sold out for some time, these best-selling jeans are now back in stock – and are also now available in several colors. Might the customer want to purchase another pair or two?

According to research from Accenture, 83% of consumers are inclined to share their data with companies, to enable a more personalized experience for them. This is true so long as businesses are transparent about how they plan to use that data and that customers have control over it, however. Moreover, almost 70% of consumers want companies to personalize their communications, and 65% of customers report that personalization influences their brand loyalty.

Meet your customers where they are

Allowing for multi-channel customer service, chatbots enable businesses to deploy their customer strategy across social media, email, chat, voice, and phone – scaling support across every channel of their – and their customer’s – choosing. Support delivered via live chat has grown to become a must-have. This is the preferred channel for consumers between the ages of 18 and 49, nearly 70% of consumers expect live chat support. Some matters may be better suited to one channel over others, depending on the situation and degree of urgency. Customers typically do not have one single channel that they choose to use 100% of the time.

"Good customer support is ensuring that the customer's experience is positive and memorable..."

Make it easy for customers to assist themselves

In line with the ‘DIY’ culture of today, customer preference for self-service is growing. A 2022 report from Gartner points to several categorical shifts in customer service – among them, customer’s growing preference for self-service. 59% of customers, the report found, prefer to resolve their issues without reaching out to a customer service rep. However, only 13% of customers feel that they are successfully contained within self-service.

Meanwhile, Zendesk’s CX Trends 2022 report found that 70% of customers say that they expect a company to have a self-service portal or content available to them.

How can we reimagine the customer journey, guiding customers to the best fit path? The key then, is to coordinate the self-service journey all the way from search through to resolution, from directing customers to relevant self-service options on a company’s website, to routing them to a human agent, if and when needed.

Leveraging curated FAQ pages and robust online knowledge bases (or Help Centers) can help users easily find answers, and enhance the customer self-service experience. The ultimate combo, however, is a knowledge base, used in parallel with AI-powered chatbot software. This offers content that is most relevant to each individual customer, and delivers it at the exact moment-of-need. To determine the appropriate next steps, chatbots should first diagnose and triage the customer issue. Can the customer find the necessary information within an article in the company’s knowledge base, or does the situation warrant an interaction with an agent? With AI chatbot platforms sitting at the center and human agents stepping in only when needed, this also relieves a bit of the pressure on the agents themselves, significantly reducing their workloads.

Track KPIs, and determine where they can evolve

It is important to employ metrics and KPIs in order to gauge performance of support efforts, for businesses to track the performance of their support agents and identify areas for improvement. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), volume by channel and total tickets are among the KPIs that can be measured. How does ticket volume fluctuate based on the time of day? On which channels are customers reaching out for support?

It is also advantageous to regularly review KPIs to determine where they can evolve. The relevance and efficacy of KPIs that were initially selected will change over time, as a business grows and customer expectations and preferences shift.

Final thoughts

Customer support, as part of a great customer service approach, can add tremendous value to a business’ product or service, improve multiple business bottom lines, increase customer retention, and build trust and loyalty. It can offer an experience that is in line with today’s digitally-savvy customers, and keep them coming back for more.

Get in touch with us at Netomi to chat about leveraging conversational AI to supercharge your customer support strategy, and boost overall customer experience!  

To learn more about improving the customer experience, visit:

How Ticket Triage AI Can Revolutionize Customer Service

Written by Amy Wallace  on   Apr 26, 2022

Customer support tickets come in various shapes and forms, and from multiple channels – webforms, email, messaging and live chat. When a ticket enters a support team’s inbox, many companies triage it, tagging it based on the topic or urgency, and route it to the appropriate agent or team. This process helps streamline workflows, ensuring the right eyes are on the right ticket, and issues are resolved as quickly and accurately as possible.

A query related to a warranty on a recently purchased laptop computer may be tagged ‘warranty’, while a ticket received in French would be sent to a team member who speaks that language and is able to translate. Historically, this was a fairly manual and time-consuming process, but companies are now leveraging technologies such as AI to streamline ticket triaging.

In this article, we’ll share a bit of insider scoop on the technological transformation that is occurring behind-the-scenes including:

What is Ticket Triage AI?

In the world of AI, ticket triage refers to the automatic pre-processing of tickets by AI-powered virtual assistants. With a little help from this dynamic technology, tickets can be enriched with actionable insights, such as urgency/severity, and the category of the issue. By leveraging Natural Language Processing, these virtual assistants can grasp a customer’s true intent in order to properly prioritize tickets and route them to the right agent.

How Does Ticket Triage AI Work? 

However, modern AI platforms such as Netomi’s, are taking ticket triaging one step further. They can identify if there is information needed from a customer that has not yet been provided, and request that information before looping in a human agent. If a customer is inquiring about upgrades on an upcoming flight but hasn’t yet provided their flight confirmation number, for instance, an AI agent can ask for this background information. This ultimately means the human agent doesn’t need to spend as much time closing the ticket.

A second form of ticket triaging occurs when AI agents gather information and contextual data from back-end systems such as order management or CRM platforms on behalf of an agent. So, even if a virtual agent is not completely resolving a ticket, it can significantly reduce resolution time by doing a lot of the groundwork for agents. Like an investigative journalist, AI is first conducting research and gathering evidence prior to composing the story. This will all be collected prior to passing the ticket to a human agent, so that the agent will have the required information to make an informed decision.

A robust, well-trained AI can figure out what a customer is looking for when they first engage with the customer service department of a business, playing a key role in live human handoff, to dramatically accelerate response times. This is a critical step in the process – when it is not confident in its ability to understand a user’s intent, the Netomi AI takes the best course of action, escalating a customer to a human agent to minimize their frustration, rather than offer them an incorrect or irrelevant response.

With native integration into agent desks such as Zendesk and Gladly, the Netomi chatbot sits right within the platform to transfer chats to specific departments or agents. Once the intent is understood, the ticket would then be tagged for tracking purposes (such as refund or delivery status). The ticket may be prioritized based on certain customer attributes, such as the length of time for which the customer has been with a business, and the class to which they belong (if a customer is considered part of a VIP category, for instance, they would escalated directly to a human agent to receive specialized treatment).

Also on the agent side, as a fourth type of triage, AI offers support to preserve their overall sanity with sentiment routing. By monitoring agent conversations, AI agents are able to identify which human agent is having more difficult customers based on customer sentiment as well as the nature of the issue, while also taking into account factors such as the conversation length – is it dragging on for too long? The AI can then anticipate agent stress level and the micro-impact that closing a specific ticket will have on their immediate well-being, and reroute the ticket to a different agent if needed. This avoids situations in which one agent is consecutively assigned exasperated customers, which takes a great toll on their job satisfaction. Potential crisis, averted!

Additionally, with ‘Agent Assist’ or ‘Co-Pilot’ mode, suitable replies are recommended by the AI and help agents work faster, taking a bit of work off their plate. For instance, a customer reaches out to a support team via email to inquire about her order status. This request is then sent to an agent for review, along with a suggested response, which the agent could then accept and send, edit, or reject and compose their own response. This ‘review mode’ is like ‘semi-auto pilot mode,’ one in which the AI and the agent work in tandem.

Not all tickets are suited for automation, however – begin with automating the right kind of queries – those that are basic and repeatable, such as ‘what is your refund policy?’ A complicated issue such as ‘software failure’ might be classified as a ‘high priority issue,’ as it has a large impact on a large customer base, and would likely require some advanced technical expertise and assistance from a human agent with knowledge in this area.

What are the Benefits of Ticket Triaging?

A tremendous time saver, the ticket triage AI process is beneficial for both:

Customers, by offering speedy resolution times, for superior customer service.

Businesses, by enabling them to help their customer support teams. According to a 2022 report from Freshworks, 1 in 3 leaders believe that building new generation digital platforms to help customer-facing teams work better stands as a top priority, when it comes to digital investments. What’s more, features that allow for greater efficiency, like AI-based ticket classification and the automatic routing of incoming customer contacts to the right agent, can save agents up to 1.2 hours per day. That’s a lot of valuable time that can be saved!

Ticket Triage for Customer Support - Harry Rosen

Agents, by enabling them to work on more interesting and high-value tickets. Agents today are overworked, and many are feeling undervalued and a lack of empowerment – 74% of call center agents are at risk for burnout, and turnover rates sit between 30% and 45%, among the highest of any industry.

A 2022 Zendesk report revealed that only 15% of agents are extremely satisfied with their overall workloads. With AI helping to sift through, categorize and disperse tickets, agents are free to tackle other challenges and concentrate on tasks that require more creativity and critical thinking – skills and competencies which only a human can provide, and are oh-so-essential to hone.

How Can My Business Implement AI-based Ticket Triage?

AI-based ticket triage is a joint effort – it is a combination of people, tools and processes. By working with a trusted partner to automate a large part of the process, businesses can bring AI into the equation.

Ticket Triage Demo

As ticket volumes continue to increase, the answer lies in AI-powered solutions. With the right tools and processes in place, customer service departments can operate like well-oiled machines, streamlining their workflows while also improving the agent experience, and, in turn, the overall experience for their customers.  

Tell Us How You Really Feel: The Frustrating Reality of Customer Support in 2022

Written by Can Ozdoruk  on   Apr 14, 2022

What are the most dreaded customer service calls to make? Do customers enjoy making small talk with support agents, or prefer to get straight to the point? We polled more than 1,200 consumers across the United States to get a pulse on how they are feeling today, when it comes to interacting with customer support teams. We discovered that, in the fast-paced world of today, customer expectations are not being met, frustrations are high, and patience is wearing thin. 

Download Netomi’s complete The State of Customer Service Report!

Our Top 5 Findings from The State of Customer Service Report 

  • Emotional outbursts are common: 14% of customers report having screamed at and 19% have sworn at a company’s representative, while, out of frustration, 61% of people have hung up the phone mid-conversation. This is true on both sides of the equation, as…
  • Stress is taking its toll on agents: 73% of consumers have had instances of an agent being rude to them, and 44% have experienced an agent grow agitated
  • The desire for instant gratification is real: 39% of consumers have less patience today than they did prior to the pandemic
  • Small talk is not necessary: Only 27% of respondents value situations when customer service agents engage in small talk when assisting them, while 73% find no value in such friendly banter, preferring agents to focus on the issue at hand
  • Many issues are left unresolved, after a single interaction: 65% of consumers have needed to follow up more than once to get their question resolved, and 25% of respondents reported needing to contact a company three or more times in order to resolve an issue

The bottom line: What does all of this signify?

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted consumer behaviors, preferences and expectations, businesses need to evolve amid the changing landscape to meet the needs of the modern consumer. In today’s fast-paced world, the pressure to deliver superior customer experiences is on, big time.

AI-powered chatbots can have an enormous impact on support organizations, and greatly elevate the experience of agents and the customers that they serve, by:

  • Swiftly resolving customers’ queries, across channels (such as email, chat, and SMS), for enhanced customer satisfaction and happiness
  • Surfacing relevant answers and links to the agents during support calls, transforming them from agents to super-agents
  • Automatically resolving repetitive, everyday tickets, offloading mundane work from agents and allowing them to concentrate more on complex tasks
  • Working around-the-clock with 24/7 availability, so there are no frustrating hold times for customers

What else do customers have to say? View more insights in Netomi’s The State of Customer Service Report!

The 15 Best Knowledge Base Software Platforms & Tips for Selecting the Right One

Written by Amy Wallace  on   Mar 2, 2022

We are living in an information age, with instant access to information and knowledge available at the click of a button. Yet, many spend a large majority of their time combing through a cluttered market of content, as there is just so much out there. 

On the customer support front, customer preference for self-service is growing (we see this with online banking, or customers choosing self-serve baggage drop-off kiosks at airports). In fact, recent research from Gartner revealed that 59% of customers prefer to resolve their issues without contacting a customer service rep. Finding ways of providing options for customers to easily assist themselves will continue to be critical, and one of the primary ways that companies offer self-service is with online help centers, or knowledge bases. Here, we provide some tips on how to select the right knowledge base software for your needs, and key features to watch out for.

What Is a Knowledge Base?

They say that knowledge is power. And, there is power to be found in knowledge bases. 

Serving as centralized hubs, these dedicated spaces house all of a company’s most essential resources – information around recurring topics, issues and themes. Not solely a collection of help center and how-to-articles, however, knowledge bases can also include case studies, video tutorials and user forums – essentially, any content that helps customers better understand and make use of a company’s products or services. A key allure of knowledge bases is that they save customer support agents time from repeatedly answering the same questions, while also catering to the modern customers’ desire for self-service. Additionally, their 24/7 availability enables users to source information at any time of day.

What Does Knowledge Base Software Do?

On the surface, the general concept of knowledge bases seems quite intuitive. Organizing content all in one place = productive and efficient employees, and satisfied customers. Yet when creating knowledge bases, there is a need to go about it in a strategic manner. That is, just filling a knowledge base with content is not enough. How can it be customized and configured, harnessing its full capabilities, to make the most impact to both your customers and internal team members? For instance, is content organization and categorization top of mind? Ensuring that all important company notices are received and read by employees? Scaling your customer support? Consider what your goals and priorities are, and structure your knowledge base around this.   

Before constructing your knowledge base, it is first necessary to invest in the right software tool for your specific needs. This is where knowledge base software, aka knowledge management software, comes into play). These are a set of tools that allow companies to compile, house and share all company and product-specific information, all in one place. 

Such tools support different forms of knowledge bases, which can either be external (customer facing), or internal (for employees). While the former provides self-service options, the latter makes all aspects of a business operate in an efficient manner – human resources departments can use the knowledge base to keep employees informed, while product development teams can use it to track feature requests. 

How Do You Select The Right Knowledge Base Software?

Knowledge is also power when it comes to selecting the right knowledge base software for your specific needs. Each tool has its own features, to provide seamless navigability and help teams get the most out of their knowledge bases. A few essential features to watch out for include content management, AI and machine learning, a self-service portal, as well as feedback and analytics. 

To guide you in the selection process, we break down the key features of our picks for the top 15 knowledge base software solutions on the market today.

1. Zendesk

Offering the option of either self-service or hands-on assistance, Zendesk is ideal for teams looking to expand their customer support efforts around one central knowledge base. One of the earliest but still popular customer service software solutions on the market, Zendesk boasts AI-powered search and chatbots that immediately and automatically deliver relevant information from knowledge bases, so employees and customers get the information they need in a snap. Arguably, its most attractive feature is its numerous integrations, as it integrates with 1000+ prebuilt apps through the Zendesk marketplace. 

Zendesk’s Key Features

  • Content management and administration tools 
  • Customizable branding
  • Customer feedback
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Support across email, voice and live chat

Zendesk Pricing

  • Suite Growth: Starts at $79/month per agent
  • Suite Professional: Starts at $99/month per agent

* both options include AI-powered knowledge management

  • Suite Enterprise: Starts at $150/month per agent (also includes Advanced Knowledge Management)

2. Gladly

Gladly, a comprehensive Zendesk alternative, offers a “single knowledge base that scales.” By proactively suggesting standardized answers to popular questions that are configurable for various responses and lengths, the platform is a time-saver for agents.  

Gladly’s Key Features 

  • Placeholders to ensure that important information is always added before it is sent, such as a customer’s name and confirmation number
  • Localized answers to display relevant answers to customers within public FAQs, based on their locality and presumed language preference 
  • ‘Author once, publish anywhere’ capability, allowing for information to be published across every channel, for increased productivity 

Gladly Pricing

  • Support Hero: Starts at $150/month per user (for support agents who communicate directly with customers​)

+

  • Task user: Starts at $38/month per user (for team members who execute on assigned tasks, only available with Support Hero subscription) 
  • Free user: $0 (for team members who manage teams and operations, only available with Support Hero subscription) 

*All options include access to a unified answers database for customer self service and help center

3. HubSpot Service Hub

With its all-in-one approach, cloud-based CRM HubSpot knows the ins-and-outs of customer support. Service Hub enables businesses to scale their customer support, unify their front-office teams and offer proactive customer service. A fully integrated CRM enables businesses to track user engagement, customer details and their interactions with a business. 

HubSpot Service Hub’s Key Features

  • A secure customer portal keeps conversations flowing between customers and their reps
  • A knowledge base to “help customers help themselves,” and reduce the volume of support requests 
  • Customer feedback surveys to gather feedback which can be used to enhance the customer experience 
  • Reporting dashboards to surface actionable data and enable better decision making 
  • Integration with thousands of third-party apps via HubSpot App Collections

HubSpot Service Hub Pricing

  • Professional: Starts at $360/month per user (5 paid users included, $72/month per additional user)
  • Enterprise: Starts at $1,200/month per user ​​(10 paid users included, $120/month per additional user)

*Knowledge base tool not included in Starter package

4. ServiceNow

ServiceNow offers three versions of its Knowledge Management software – Customer Service Management, IT Service Management and HR Service Delivery – and each tool is available as part of the platform’s larger software suite. For each version, strong emphasis is placed on capturing, structuring, reusing and improving knowledge. ServiceNow’s comprehensive solution enables knowledge managers and other team members to take new data and information as it becomes available, use it to enhance their current knowledge, and, in turn, make improvements to their overall operations. 

ServiceNow’s Key Features

  • Integration with Microsoft Word Online 
  • Machine learning-powered reporting to automatically detect and visualize any knowledge gaps 
  • Knowledge blocks allowing for all related knowledge to be closely tied together, while also reducing redundant content 
  • Knowledge harvesting to allow teams to convert solutions from conversations into knowledge articles
  • Feedback management to quickly and easily act on feedback from customers and internal users 
  • Knowledge subscription to disseminate relevant articles to both customers and employees

*As all software packages are priced on an individual basis, contact ServiceNow for information on pricing, and to get a custom quote.

5. Confluence by Atlasssian

With an emphasis on collaborative knowledge content creation, Confluence enables teams to work together in real-time using real-time editing, commenting, and notifications, ensuring that everyone is kept in the loop. 

Confluence’s Key Features

  • Best practice template libraries, where users can choose from over 75 customizable templates, or create their own 
  • Advanced search and hierarchical page trees, for content that is well-organized and easy to find
  • Page versioning to track and change page history, and compare different versions
  • Integration with Jira’s helpdesk software, Atlasssian’s software suite and dozens of other tools 

 Confluence Pricing

  • Free: Up to 10 users, 2GB of storage, and basic documentation features
  • Standard: Starts at $5.50/month per user, up to 20,000 users, 250GB of storage
  • Premium: Starts at $10.50/month per user, up to 20,000 users, unlimited storage
  • Enterprise: Contact for pricing details

6. Bloomfire

In the remote and distributed world of work today, collaboration and maintaining connection between team members is more important than ever. Bloomfire is focused on keeping teams aligned and working towards the same goals, wherever they may be located. One of the platform’s key attributes is promoting self-sufficiency by removing information hierarchies, affording everyone access to the same knowledge, no matter their department, location or role. 

Bloomfire’s Key Features

  • Curation tools to identify duplicate content, schedule content reviews, and flag posts for review
  • AI-powered search engine that deep indexes each word in each file, and transcribes words spoken in videos
  • Integration with other apps such as Chrome, Slack, Dropbox, Salesforce and Microsoft Teams 

Bloomfire Pricing

  • Basic: Starts at $25/month per user
  • Enterprise: Contact for pricing details

7. Document360

“Engineered for growing companies,” with its wide range of collaboration features, Document360 is ideal for larger teams. The platform offers both a knowledge base portal for editors and reviewers (content producers), as well as a knowledge base site for customers and employees (content consumers).  

Document360’s Key Features

  • A category manager to create and organize categories and subcategories, and display similar groups of topics 
  • Two different editor styles: markdown and WYSIWYG, allowing creators to add images, links, videos and code blocks
  • Analytics, affording insights into where knowledge base traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with its content 
  • The ability to create a multilingual language base to support global customers 

Document360 Pricing

  • Startup: Starts at $119/month per project, billed monthly (Knowledge Base Version – $39/month per additional version)
  • Business: Starts at $359/month per project, billed monthly (2 Knowledge Base Versions – $99/month per additional version)
  • Enterprise: Starts at $599/month, billed monthly (2 Knowledge Base Versions – $199/mo per additional version)
  • Enterprise Plus: Contact for pricing details

8. Guru

A “work wiki that people actually love,” Guru captures knowledge from Slack and elsewhere on the internet via a browser extension, and then converts that information into “cards” that are easily accessible by all team members. A powerful tool for internal communications, perhaps the software’s most unique feature is an AI that proactively suggests experts from teams to verify any new and updated knowledge.  

Guru’s Key Features

  • Knowledge alerts that notify team members of a company’s most critical updates and ensure that they are received by all 
  • Intelligent duplicate detection to find and flag any duplicated content 
  • Collections, boards, groups and cards, allowing for smart organization of content 
  • Verification to ensure that product information is always kept up-to-date, and has been verified by the appropriate subject matter expert 
  • Knowledge triggers that allow for teams to intelligently push relevant knowledge to the rest of their team, at the right moments 

Guru Pricing

  • Starter: free for teams with up to 3 core users/ Starts at $6 month per user for teams that need more core users
  • Builder: Starts at $12/month per user, billed monthly
  • Expert: Starts at $24/month per user, billed monthly

9. HelpCrunch

For this top-rated customer communication platform, all emphasis is on customer support, and providing 24/7 customer self-service. Also offering live chat, a help desk, email marketing, and pop-ups, the knowledge base tool is included in all of HelpCrunch’s subscription plans. 

HelpCrunch’s Key Features

  • Powerful search capabilities that automatically suggest relevant articles based on the keywords that a user typed in 
  • Live chat widget integration, to provide all-around user support
  • A powerful visual editor tool, allowing customer support teams to easily create and edit help articles 
  • SEO-focused metadata editing that lets companies optimize their help content for social media and search engines 

HelpCrunch Pricing

  • Basic: Starts at $15/month per user, billed monthly 
  • Pro: Starts at $25/month per user, billed monthly

             *both options include knowledge base functionality  

  • Enterprise: Contact for pricing details  

10. Help Scout

A “knowledge base software built for discovery,” Help Scout is designed for customer self-service. Allowing for maximum visibility and “answers anywhere,” knowledge base articles can be embedded onto any web page, so they look and feel like part of a company’s website.  

Help Scout’s Key Features

  • A Docs Report that offers valuable insights, helping companies understand what their customers are searching for, and if they are finding answers to their questions 
  • Access to Beacon, allowing customers to view knowledge base articles from anywhere on a website 
  • The ability to create private collections that hold internal information for teams

Help Scout Pricing

  • Standard: Starts at $20/month per user, billed annually
  • Plus: Starts at $35/month per user, billed annually
  • Company: Starts at $60/month per user, billed annually

11. Helpjuice

Helpjuice is a popular choice for teams with limited developer support, as it offers numerous pre-made themes to choose from (as well as free expert customization). The cloud-based solution was designed to help businesses scale their customer support and collaborate more effectively with their teams. 

Helpjuice’s Key Features

  • Easy content and author formatting that allows creators to work with multiple versions of the same article, and easily switch between them
  • Intelligent analytics to measure the impact of articles, see what users are searching for, and increase the productivity of users/groups
  • AI-powered, Google-like search for easy search functionality   
  • Integrates directly with a number of other tools such as Slack, Google Chrome, Freshdesk, and Microsoft Teams 

Helpjuice Pricing

  • Starter: Starts at $120/month for up to 4 users
  • Run-Up: Starts at $200/month for up to 16 users
  • Premium Limited: Starts at $289/month for up to 60 users
  • Premium Unlimited: Starts at $499/month for unlimited users

12. KnowledgeOwl

This feature-rich knowledge base software is suited for internal and external usage, empowering both internal teams and their customers to find the answers they are looking for. The convenient tool includes a built-in contextual help widget, custom branding and robust search features. 

KnowledgeOwl’s Key Features

  • Feedback features such as comments and ratings (stars and thumbs), allowing companies to determine the usefulness of their articles 
  • A Glossary option that enables companies to create a glossary of all company-specific terms and insert on-hover definitions for the first-10 occurrences of a term 
  • A dedicated file library that includes global file management and file labeling 
  • Advanced user and reader management that grants specific permissions to different users and readers based on their individual tasks and needs

KnowledgeOwl Pricing

  • Flex: from $79/month
  • Business: from $299/month
  • Enterprise: from $999/month

*all plans include 1 knowledge base, additional knowledge bases can be added for $40/month

13. LiveAgent

With its combination of live chat, automation and ticketing, LiveAgent’s all-in-one help desk software enables teams to answer more tickets. Advantageous for companies that sell several products, brands or services, a single account gives them the opportunity to create unlimited knowledge bases, each of them with its own unique design, settings, and content.

LiveAgent’s Key Features 

  • Forums that serve as a space for knowledge sharing between customers, allowing them to interact and help each other troubleshoot their problems
  • Highly customizable and easy-to-use feedback buttons prompt visitors to provide feedback and suggestions
  • Customizable search widgets allow for customers to find information quickly and easily  

LiveAgent Pricing

  • Ticket: Starts at $15/month per user
  • Ticket + Chat: Starts at $29/month per user
  • All-Inclusive: Starts at $49/month per user

14. livepro

Although designed and built for the contact center, with livepro’s smart integrations and self-serve options, entire organizations can benefit from the solution (such as IT departments, marketing and compliance). The platform’s Knowledge Management Software has been designed to maximize customer experience, and empower workforces to boost customer service satisfaction ratings.

livepro’s Key Features 

  • The Rocket – an intuitive answer-bot that eliminates errors and ambiguity, while significantly reducing response and training times
  • Integration with other customer-facing channels such as Salesforce, WordPress, Genesys Pure Cloud, and Slack, so customer support systems can be managed from one portal
  • Custom reporting dashboards and analytics that enable companies to discover unique customer insights and trending searches 

livepro Pricing

Pricing is tailored to individual needs, contact for pricing details.

15. ProProfs

Featuring wikis, FAQs and a knowledge base, ProProfs enables companies to improve both their employee training and customer support. With its Microsoft Word-like editor, team collaboration, and powerful integrations, the platform takes a one-size-fits-all-approach to offer a user-friendly experience for all. 

ProProf’s Key Features

  • Reports and analytics, allowing teams to gain detailed reports on knowledge base performance, including broken links, content effectiveness and article health 
  • Integrations with G-Suite, CRMs and ProProfs in-house tools 
  • Full branding and customization, with the option to select from 25+ pre-designed page templates, and create a custom domain that is aligned with a company’s brand 

ProProfs Pricing 

Public help center (for customers)

  • Essentials: Starts at $40/month per author, billed monthly 
  • Premium: Starts at $50/month per author, billed monthly   
  • Enterprise: Contact for pricing details 

Private knowledge base (secure access for employees and partners) 

  • Essentials: Starts at $3.50/month per user, billed monthly 
  • Premium: Starts at $4.50/month per user, billed monthly   
  • Enterprise: Contact for pricing details 

Knowledge Bases + AI-Powered Chatbots = The Ideal Combo

There are numerous knowledge base softwares available, each with their own lists of features. As your needs are unique to your team and your industry, it is important to select the one that best fits your organization.

The ultimate combination? AI-powered chatbots, used in parallel with knowledge base tools, resulting in a fully comprehensive self-service experience. This allows you to harness the extensive information in your knowledge base, along with the advanced capabilities of an AI-powered chatbot, to accurately provide your customers with the information that they need, exactly when they need it. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots help make knowledge bases even more useful, by automatically pulling in and summarizing articles that are most relevant to a customer’s question. The end result: a great customer experience, and a high resolution rate when it comes to customer service tickets. 

Now, that is power. 

To see how Netomi’s chatbot solution can integrate seamlessly with your knowledge base, get in touch to book a personalized demo!

New eBook: Transforming Customer Support with AI

Written by Can Ozdoruk  on   Jul 31, 2019

Welcome to the Relationship Economy. 

Doing business today is a lot different than it was a few years ago.  Customer service is now just as important as price, quality and brand name in determining where people spend their money and build long-term relationships. Customers have quick-rising expectations for personalized, convenient and immediate support on their channels of choice, and swiftly take their business elsewhere if they are not satisfied. 

In our latest eBook, Transforming Customer Service with AI, we explore this new era of doing business, the challenges that companies face and how helpdesk AI can accelerate a customer support organization into a customer relationship powerhouse. You’ll learn: 

  • What customers expect from companies when they have an issue 
  • How AI can impact the customer service function of businesses of all sizes 
  • Best practices to follow when implementing AI within your business 
  • How to create a continuous-learning AI that improves over time

Customer service now has a direct impact on consumer buying habits, either posing a great risk or presenting an incredible opportunity. Customer service can no longer be an after-thought; it must become a core part of the overall customer experience strategy and business focus moving forward. 

Get your free copy of your eBook here. 

For more information on customer service, visit:

Are KPIs Keeping Your Customer Support Team Down?

Written by Emily Peck  on   Mar 20, 2019

How AI-powered automation can deliver on a customer support organization’s most critical KPIs

It’s not easy being held accountable to customer support KPIs these days.

Agents are pulled in a million different directions; forced to jump between various systems to answer a single question while interacting with often frustrated customers. They’re having to do so on an increasing number of channels as well: email, chat, social, mobile and so on. It’s no wonder that the turnover rate in customer support is among the highest of any profession. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Meeting modern customer expectations is also getting harder to do; they expect quick, convenient high-quality resolutions on their terms. We live in an on-demand, personal world. Leveraging AI to automate support is a means to get there.

There has been a lot of talk on how AI customer support can be used within a support organization for years, with many organizations wondering how much of it is hype…. What impact can it really have? Will it really make a difference in what’s important to your organization and customers?

When deployed correctly, AI can have an immediate and immense impact on customer service by automating responses to expensive, repeatable tickets (usually about 50% of all tickets) and uplifting agents to do their work more efficiently. The customer support KPIs that AI can improve include:

  • First Response Time (FRT): Customers do not like to wait. It’s pretty astounding how long it takes companies to respond; the average response time is 36 hours over email, while 75% of customers expect it within 5 minutes. Leveraging AI to automate customer service responses, whether it’s providing an instantaneous resolution or acknowledging the customer’s needs and collecting necessary information before a human gets involved lets the customer know that they are being heard. The automation effect is noticeable from day 1: our customer WestJet gets back to customers in less than 1 second.
  • Average handle time (AHT): Getting back to your customers quickly is one thing, but how long it takes for you to actually resolve an issue is even more important. AI-powered automation helps in a few ways:
    • Automating resolutions to repeatable issues: Leverage AI to respond instantaneously to the high-volume, simple queries like order status and inventory checks.  Make sure your AI has the authority to resolve issues by connecting with core business systems. Set rules to minimize business risks like enabling the automation of refunds under a certain dollar amount or free upgrades based on loyalty status.
    • Empowering human agents to work faster: Use AI to gather data from any customer, such as account or order number, and pull information from other business systems like your CMS and OMS. The AI can package up all relevant data to pass along to an agent who can quickly review, make a decision and communicate with the customer.
  • Consistent Resolutions: Leveraging AI in customer support also promises to provide standardized resolutions. There is no human bias, subjectivity or bad days. A bot will review the facts and based on how it has been trained, act consistently every time. If there are any questions or uncertainties, a human agent will always be looped in.
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): According to Forrester, 73% of Americans say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good customer service. In our own consumer research, we found that quality and consistency in a company’s service and experience is key. As discussed in the points above, automation delivers on all of these.
  • Employee Satisfaction Score (ESAT): Automation allows you to give your agents back their time:  the time spent doing mundane tasks is now spent on more fulfilling and high-impact work. Agents no longer have to dig deep to find specific information needed to make a decision from various systems. AI gathers it for them before they even get involved. Agents are empowered with the information to make a quality decision quickly.
  • Cost Savings: The cost benefits of automation fall into two primary buckets:
    • Deflection from human agents:  By automating repeatable tickets, you will see a significant deflection from your call centers of tickets that are never even created.
    • Less agent turnover: With happier and more fulfilled agents, turnover will decrease resulting in savings tied to hiring and training new employees.

For further reading on KPIs, please check out our post on 15 customer service KPI metrics you need to know.

We’ve worked directly with our partners to learn the pain points companies are facing to design an automated solution that is designed to create an immediate, measurable impact. Are you ready to have a customer support organization that delivers on what customers and agents need? Let’s chat. 

For more information on customer support, click here.

How to Get Executive Buy in for AI-Powered Customer Service

Written by Emily Peck  on   Mar 12, 2019

A Quick Guide to Becoming a Champion for Automated Support Within Your Organization.

AI is no longer reserved for the companies that are first-to-market; the ones that liberally trial new technologies on a whim with varying degrees of success. No… AI-powered customer support solutions are often now fundamental to a company’s success. Customer service is now a competitive differentiator on par with cost and quality, and AI-powered automation is the means to deliver the world-class experiences that your customers demand. [Read more about customer expectations here].  

Many customer service executives on the front lines of managing CX understand the value AI can bring:

  • Personally responding to repeatable issues, about ~50% of support tickets, instantaneously [Higher CSAT → Brand Loyalty]
  • Deflecting tickets from human agents by automating resolutions [Cost Savings]
  • Empowering human agents to work better – using AI integrations, such as Zoho chatbot, to recommend replies, pull relevant information, etc. [Faster resolutions → Higher CSAT]
  • Improved agent performance and job satisfaction as the day-to-day focus is on high-impact work and less mundane tasks [Less Agent Turnover → Cost Savings]

There’s often polarizing views of AI within an organization: Some are entranced with the buzz around the new shiny object, excited for the opportunity to say that their organization uses AI. Others are skeptics, wondering if it’s all just hype; if it’s affordable; if the real value will be seen or if human agents are going to be replaced with machines.

The reality is that companies can’t afford to not adopt AI-powered solutions. According to Microsoft, 95% of consumers cite customer service as important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand and 61% have switched brands due to poor customer service, with nearly half having done so in the past 12 months.

——–

“Most traditional companies don’t think of digital as being strategic to the organization. It’s often thought about as a support function. We’re thinking about how to make digital, and a culture of innovation, be part of the DNA of our company.” — Alfredo Tan, WestJet’s Chief Digital Officer. [Watch a video here]

——–

So as you champion AI within your organization, use our guidelines to ensure a successful program is introduced that the entire organization can see value in.

1) Start Small With AI-Powered Customer Service

Identify very defined use cases for customer service automation with AI, such as order status or refund requests. This will not only help keep costs down, but it will enable everyone within a customer service organization to learn the process of implementing AI and witness how it evolves over time.

2) Identify the Right Use Cases

Pinpoint where there is a lot of historical data that can be used to train AI. AI and customer service is such a great place to start, as companies have troves of historic emails, chat and social messaging data that can be used to bootstrap AI training, and new tickets are continuously being created to give your AI the ability to learn in action. Determine what to delegate to AI by identifying which queries come infrequently and don’t require human oversight.

3) Create a Game Plan for a Human Agents and AI-Powered Customer Service

AI will not – and should not – replace human workers. It will help them work more efficiently while freeing them up to work on complex and unique tickets. Outline the situations in which AI will manage autonomously, which use cases will be exclusively managed by human agents (more sensitive issues), and which queries AI can help a human agent work faster by clarifying or pulling information from various business systems.

4) Solve Real Issues and Map Out KPIs

Set a clear understanding of what success will look like and how it will be measured. You should be implementing AI to solve real pain points for the business. Many companies struggle with meeting customer expectations for immediate, personal and convenient support. Even by leveraging AI to respond to 30% of your incoming tickets at first, the impact will be felt immediately.   

We like to tell our customers to measure AI as they would an employee: How is it learning and improving? Is it doing its job (i.e. resolving tickets)? Is it having a positive impact on the customer experience? Is it working well with others?

Some of the specific KPIs that our clients use to measure the success of a customer service AI is a deflection, CSAT, cost savings and time to resolution. Set realistic goals based on where your organization is performing today and how AI should impact this in 3, 6 and 12 months.

5) Educate Your Organization About What AI is… and What it Isn’t

Ensure everyone understands the capabilities of AI. Often, there are some within an organization who have been swept up into the hype and have a very unrealistic view of the maturity of the AI market today.

Set your AI up for success by educating your colleagues on what AI can manage – tasks that are a high-volume, highly-repeatable, low business risk. Communicate how an AI learns from real-world experience and how it will get better over time. The performance on Day 1 is not what it will be on Day 30 or 60.  AI should not be expected to be creative, have empathy or manage complex or long-form queries.

The Time is Now for AI-Powered Customer Service

You cannot afford to delay adopting an AI-powered customer experience into your organization. AI Agents improve over time, in terms of accuracy in understanding questions as well as learning how your human agents respond in various situations. Your competitors have adopted AI; it will be impossible to catch up if you don’t move fast.

Are you ready to become an internal champion for AI and transform your customer support with automation? Let’s chat about AI and chatbot tools.

For more information on customer service, visit:

5 Winning AI Strategies for Customer Service

Written by Can Ozdoruk  on   Nov 17, 2018

Forrester’s Ian Jacobs recently joined Netomi’s Founder & CEO, Puneet Mehta, as a featured guest in a webinar where they unveiled how world-class companies can create real-world AI in customer service. No more buzz or hype. It’s all actionable strategies that can be used today to deploy AI that serves both your customers and employees.

Watch this video to learn Forrester’s perspective on how AI can be effective within customer service and recommendations on how you can start achieving efficiency today. Netomi’s Puneet Mehta revealed how AI allows you to create unique customer experiences in this video and Ian and Puneet together outline a Customer Service AI Roadmap here.

Puneet and Ian outlined 5 strategies for winning AI customer service:

AI Strategies, Part #1 – Automate the right support issues with AI [Watch Here]

Watch the video to learn how to:

  • Identify the right problems to delegate to AI
  • Automate issue resolution while delivering to your brand promise
  • Maintain human intelligence and use AI to empower agents

AI Strategies, Part #2 – Improve agent performance with AI [Watch Here]

Watch the video to learn:

  • How to use AI as a workforce multiplier, making work less stressful for agents
  • How to leverage AI to handle the prep work, so agents can focus on resolution
  • Different human+AI collaboration approaches and what works for your company
  • Ways to let AI triage and route issues to the right human agent for faster resolution

AI Strategies, Part #3 – Achieve high CSAT with AI [Watch Here]

Watch the video to learn how to:

  • Build an AI so you can avoid a “50 First Dates” moment with your valued customers
  • Design AI experiences that work for your customers—respectful, friendly, accurate
  • Leverage AI the right way: speedy resolution at times, and more empathetic, deeper connections for others

AI Strategy, Part #4 – Measure AI as if it were your employee [Watch Here]

Watch the video to learn how to:

  • The shift from technology KPIs to measuring the business impact of AI
  • Evaluate AI’s ability to resolve, learn, work with others, and be proactive
  • Go beyond surveys and take a holistic approach when analyzing CSAT

AI Strategy, Part #5 – The new approach for customer service [Watch Here]

Watch the video to learn about:

  • Real-life scenarios where the predictive and proactive resolution will soon be a reality
  • How AI can help you identify signals to anticipate customer needs
  • How you can reduce support tickets by resolving issues before customers reach out

This was a captivating discussion on the current state of AI in customer service. If you’re thinking about modernizing your customer service operation without disrupting current agent processes, don’t miss these highlights!

For more information on customer service, check out everything you need to know about the omnichannel experience for customers in 2022.