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From choosing a platform to measuring ROI â everything you need to evaluate, implement, and improve AI customer service for your business.
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AI customer service agents have well and truly landed.
Forget about all the 'AI' chatbots you have used previously.
These AI agents are a new breed, taking advantage of all the latest developments in generative AI, popularised by ChatGPT, to talk to customers just like a human agent would.
But, instead of training your human agent over weeks or months, you can train them pretty much instantly, on all your company documentation.
Forget spending hours creating chat flows and frustrating customers.
This time, it really is different.
In this guide, Iâll show you how to go from an AI novice to someone capable of making a decision for their company about which AI vendor will best fit their businessâs customer service needs.
If youâre reading this guide you are probably either:
Maybe you have been told by your CEO that âwe need to be using AI!â or maybe you are just an enterprising individual, either way, Iâll take you through the common questions and pitfalls to help you on your way to choosing your first AI agent.
AI agents can work across pretty much any industry, from healthcare to SaaS products, itâs just about finding the right one for you.
Being âAI-firstâ is about empowering your users to self-serve with AI, getting them better answers to their questions, faster so they can unlock the value of your product.
It means their first contact when they have a question will be your AI agent, trained on all your productâs knowledge, available to them 24/7 and responding in seconds.
Being âAI-firstâ doesnât mean that you will no longer be speaking to your customers.
Nor does it mean that you are âcost-cuttingâ or providing a worse experience for your customers.
AI has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years, but it still isnât at the point where you can âset it and forget itâ.
Youâll still need people to provide support to your users.
But hopefully, the support they will provide will be for the more complex issues and for the higher-value users.
Plus, as an added bonus, itâll mean they spend less time responding to the monotonous, tier 1 queries that could likely be solved by taking a look at your knowledge articles.
Weâre still in the very early stages with true AI agents, and so, understandably there are a few common objections that tend to arise (either from you or your boss), letâs talk through them:
âWeâll do it later when AI is more advanced and reliableâ
Like with most things in life, the sooner you start doing the faster you learn and the better you can make the experience for your customers.
Improvements in AI wonât fix most of the things that will cause poor AI agent performance, like gaps in your knowledge base or how your users will familiarise themselves with the AI agent.
There are lots of ways you can start passively using AI agents right now to assist your human agents, while you get things up to the standards you would be comfortable with deploying en masse.
Donât wait, just start, future you will thank you.
âAI makes things upâ/âAI canât be trustedâ
While stories of AI âhallucinationsâ telling people to eat rocks or lawyers presenting made-up cases in court populate the headlines, the reality, especially for AI agents is very different.
These stories come from general-purpose chatbots that are required to answer just about any question.
Your AI agent will likely be trained on a very specific, finite set of information you provide to it, meaning it will only answer questions using that information, nothing else.
Most AI agents will have some form of guardrails to prevent them from âhallucinatingâ, referring to competitorsâ products or answering outside of their knowledge base (if they donât you should probably look elsewhereâŚ).
Incorrect responses generally result as a consequence of unclear documentation provided to the AI, the AI agent is in effect a âmirrorâ being held up to your knowledge base, so if its answers are wrong there is a good chance a person reading them would also have misunderstood.
âOur customers wonât like itâ/âOur customers will leave usâ
A portion of people hate change, even when it benefits them.
They are also often the âloud minorityâ of customers rather than the âsilent majorityâ.
This shouldnât prevent you from doing what is in the interest of your entire customer base.
People donât hate AI agents (chatbots) they hate bad AI chatbots.
They are experiencing the hangover of 10-15 years of poorly executed, non-generative AI agents, so who can blame them?
But not utilizing AI isnât the answer, like most things you have to introduce it to them carefully and build up trust in it over time.
The longer you wait, the longer itâll take.
âWe donât have the time to set it upâ
Gone are the days of painstakingly mapping out customer queries and converting them into chatflows.
Now to set up an AI agent it is often as easy adding a URL, connecting a knowledge base and a few minutes later, asking it a few questions.
It really can be that simple to get up and running.
Over time you can improve the set-up, refine the training knowledge, increase the deflection rate, but youâll get 70-80% of the way there in less than a day.
âIt doesnât feel very personalâ
People use products to solve their problems.
People donât sign up for products or services to make friends with the people who run them.
This doesnât mean an AI agent should be impolite, or that the customer shouldnât feel listened to and be empathised with.
But it does mean people will be happy with any agent who can answer their questions, fast, and allow them to get on with their day or job.
AI agents are now much better at sounding empathetic, and reacting to customersâ frustrations.
And the time saved will allow you to focus on other ways to add that âpersonal touchâ to their user experience.
âItâll be expensiveâ
There are AI agent pricing models suited to most businesses nowadays:
to name just a few.
In almost every case, it will be cheaper than using a person to do the same task, with prices ranging from $0.05 to $1.99 per interaction depending on the AI agent you choose.
The upfront âcostâ of setup is also negligible (see 4).
Add to this that costs will likely continue to fall, and AI competence will continue to improve, making the return on investment today the worst you will likely ever experience.
An AI agent can have multiple benefits to your business, even if you are only just starting out.
Not convinced? How about these for starters:
Handle more queries, faster
One of the biggest benefits of AI customer service agents is their near-instant response times. They can theoretically respond to all your customers, simultaneously, in seconds.
Just think how many human agents you would need to do this, or even ensure a sub-minute response time to all queries.
It just wouldnât be economical.
AI agents scale up and down with demand, meaning they are there only as and when you need them, whether you suddenly get a spike in traffic or itâs a quiet holiday.
Even if your AI agent is unable to answer every question, each question it does answer is one less your human agents have to.
24/7 availability
Humans need sleep (whether you like it or not).
But customers for most software businesses can come from all over the world.
Why limit yourself to a single location because of slow support replies when you can use an AI agent that doesnât sleep?
Reduced costs
However cheap people are, technology is and will almost always be cheaper.
Instead of driving down the costs of your people, if you assume a skilled human agent can deal with 50-100 tickets per day, and, at their cheapest is c. $1,500/mo, then (assuming 21 working days/mo), their cost per ticket will be somewhere between $0.71 and $1.43.
But for this you need:
Do you see where I am going with this?
Your best*-*case, cheapest situation is somewhere around the $1 mark per ticket when using people.
This is the price of the most expensive AI.
AI agents on the market today are pretty much all somewhere between 2-10x cheaper per ticket than this.
Consistent and accurate responses
Improved customer satisfaction and experience
Freeing up human agents for more complex issues
There are some things AI agents are very good for, others it is ok at and a few things you probably should still be doing yourself:
Good
Not so good