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How AI can catapult you ahead with ...

How AI can catapult you ahead with your 3 most important customer service goals

6 min read

9th March 2023

Natalie Smithson
AI enthusiast | Tea addict | Focused on using AI assistants to win the working week
Customer service success with AI

Did you know, when you use AI to improve customer support and experience, you’re 2.1 times more likely to be a high-performing service organisation? Even the most advanced AI assistants are now easy to launch and affordable to help fulfil your customer service goals quickly. Let’s talk about the three goals you can start working on today and why they’ll have the biggest impact on your service.

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AI is set to help millions of businesses achieve their goals, despite tough economic conditions Customer service goals are crucial to the success of any business Customer service teams already have a head start when it comes to AI The 3 key goals to focus on and how AI can immediately impact your results Don’t let tooling hold you back – it's time to upgrade the traditional bots Making AI your next big customer service goal could give you a big competitive advantage

AI is set to help millions of businesses achieve their goals, despite tough economic conditions

Customer service leaders everywhere are having to keep costs lean and maximise savings for the foreseeable future. After the covid crisis, 86% of business leaders told PWC they’d “accelerated their AI adoption plans” and AI had fast become a “mainstream technology”. Customers are responding well to the transformation. There are now an estimated 22 billion interactions with retail AI chatbots, up from 3 billion just a few years ago. And by 2027, Juniper Research predicts up to 90% of customer queries will be handled by AI.

If you’re working towards improving customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty, which in turn leads to business growth, it’s not only crucial to set your team objectives, but find new ways of meeting them too. AI is proving to be one of the most affordable ways to start reaching precise goals fast.

Customer service goals are crucial to the success of any business

Goal-setting for customer service sits within the wider objectives for your organisation. Your role as customer service leader is key to making the right choices, since greater customer satisfaction will lead to short- and long-term success for the business overall ― happier customers tend to buy more and stay loyal. This can feel like a lot of pressure, so how do you manage it all?

The answer: You consistently measure results.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Peter Drucker, one of the world’s greatest business thinkers, and there’s such a lot resting on the shoulders of your customer service team:

  • Be timely and helpful in answering customer questions
  • Show empathy and transparency in resolving support issues
  • Be easily reachable, offering support on multiple channels
  • Help build credibility for the business overall
  • Enhance personal productivity and team efficiency
  • Aim to reduce the number of abandoned baskets
  • Nurture strong relationships with customers by increasing customer engagement
  • Help improve customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty
  • Encourage positive ratings and reviews, and foster brand advocates

To add to the pressure your customer service teams already face, there’s often only one opportunity for them to make a good impression on customers new and old. Speed and efficiency in handling, positive language, good communication, being professional and willing to help is expected of every customer support agent to help you win new business and stop current customers moving to your competition.

Having goals gives your team a clear direction on where you want them to invest their efforts, so you can work towards a common business goal. By setting clear objectives, you can measure the success of your team and make better decisions on how you might improve your customer experience to attract more buyers, make more sales, and keep people loyal to your brand. AI can help you do that.

Customer service teams already have a head start when it comes to AI

Next-generation AI assistants are already in the process of displacing traditional chatbots because of their speed, low cost and accuracy. These days, you can launch one in less than 15 minutes and immediately start:

No wait times, no email backlog, no call queues, no passing between agents or departments ― all things that help keep your customers happy, engaged, and loyal to your brand.

Now, LLMs like GPT-3 are here to put rocket fuel in your AI process too, helping you do things like train your AI assistant faster than ever before.

AI automation helps refine your processes and improve customer service efficiency, but it also frees up your customer service teams to focus on solving more sensitive or unusual customer enquiries. Within days of launching, this can lead to improved customer service and transform your customer satisfaction and loyalty goals.

The 3 key goals to focus on and how AI can immediately impact your results

Ultimately, what you really want for your customers is greater happiness. When customers are happy, they buy more, talk about you in a positive way, and stick around for longer ― sometimes, forever. When you introduce customer service goals, OKRs, KPIs or whatever framework you choose, keep happiness as your North Star and focus on these three goals to get far ahead quickly:

1. Increase customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the most significant indicator of customer happiness and key to the success of any business ― surveys are a great way to track it. Use them to find out how contented people are with your service by measuring the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), usually on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is most satisfied.

A higher score can increase trust, which can lead to more sales and higher profits. Additionally, happy customers are more likely to refer you to others, leading to an increase in customer numbers and business growth at scale.

AI bonus: Use an AI assistant to get in-the-moment feedback from every customer, every time they interact with it to measure CSAT in real time.

2. Maintain speed and efficiently in resolving queries

A faster service helps to create a positive impression of your company and can lead to an increase in customer satisfaction. Customers who get their problems solved quickly are more likely to come back to you because of that positive experience.  
 
To measure the speed of your service, monitor the average First Contact Resolution (FCR) ― the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first attempt, and the First Response Time (FRT). This is how long it takes for a customer to receive a response from your customer service team, starting from the moment you first receive their enquiry. To calculate your average FRT, take the sum of all your response times and divide it by the total number of enquiries you received in a given space of time. 
 
AI bonus: An AI assistant gives instant answers to queries 24 hours a day, which improves FRT. Your team members then have more time to focus on improving overall customer experience and satisfaction to improve FCR.  

3. Measure your costs on an individual basis

Increasing satisfaction and efficiency leads to reduced customer service costs, so you’ll have more budget to better your customer experience, increase loyalty and retention.

We recommend you measure expenditure using Cost Per Resolution (CPR). To work this out take the total cost of your customer service operation (including employee salaries, software and equipment) and divide it by the number of enquiries successfully resolved during a specific time frame.

Use AI to help improve CSAT, FRT and FCR and every enquiry will start to cost you less money, so you also improve CPR. You can quickly calculate your likely Return on Investment (ROI) before you launch an AI assistant using our handy online savings calculator.

Barking & Dagenham Council achieved 533% ROI in a matter of months.

Don’t let tooling hold you back – it's time to upgrade the traditional bots

Launching a next-gen AI assistant is accessible and affordable for customer service professionals on any budget. It’ll give your team more time to do their best work, save you money, and make sure your customers have a happier experience whenever they need help or information.

You can use an AI assistant simultaneously on multiple channels, including your website, social media channels, messaging services like WhatsApp, smart speakers and SMS to serve your customers from wherever they are.

The most advanced AI assistants have:

  • NLP (natural language processing), so your assistant can recognise what your customers ask for
  • Easy integrations, so your AI assistant can do more for you over time by connecting to the business systems you use to manage customer relations
  • A human in the loop to make the most of the data your AI assistant will give you to inform every business growth decision

The most advanced AI assistants like ours are quick to set up, easy to use, cost-effective to maintain, and you don’t need any technical expertise to use one.

Making AI your next big customer service goal could give you a big competitive advantage

The needs and preferences of your customers are ever evolving and using AI can help you satisfy them. Whether you’re launching your first chatbot or reinventing an old one, you couldn’t have chosen a better time.

Using one of today’s advanced AI assistants, Barking & Dagenham Council were able to automate 6% of customer service calls from day one. This alone saved them the cost of 10,000 customer enquiries in their first six months.

Want to join them in their success and start using AI?

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