How to keep agent assistance as the foundation for customer support

Harmonizing AI and human expertise

In today's customer support ecosystem, the harmonization of AI and human expertise isn't just beneficial; it's essential. This fusion brings together the best of both worlds – the efficiency and scalability of AI with the empathy and adaptability of human agents.

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Streamlining Workflow with AI-Driven Insights

AI agent assistance empowers support teams with data-driven insights, enabling them to understand customer patterns and preferences. This information helps in tailoring the support strategy, ensuring that agents are well-equipped to handle complex queries more effectively. By using AI to handle routine tasks, agents can focus their efforts on areas where human intervention is most valuable.

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Enhanced Personalization Through AI

‍One of the biggest strengths of AI in customer support is its ability to personalize interactions at scale. AI algorithms analyze customer data to offer tailored recommendations and solutions. When human agents are brought into the loop, they're already armed with a comprehensive understanding of the customer's history, preferences, and needs, allowing for more meaningful and impactful interactions.

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Real-Time Assistance and Collaboration

‍In a fast-paced support environment, AI can provide real-time assistance to agents. For instance, AI-powered tools can suggest responses or relevant information to agents during live interactions with customers. This not only speeds up the resolution process but also ensures that the information provided is accurate and consistent.

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Threado AI for agent assistance

Threado AI is a customer support agent co-pilot that helps companies reduce support handle time, improves response quality, and makes it easy for agents to find the right resolution instantly thus enhancing the customer experience. For customers, the Threado AI bot makes self-service easily deliverable to customers because it can be trained on multiple data sources including multiple integrations, making the bot smart enough to extensively answer customer concerns without having to speak to an agent.

You can train Threado AI on past customer tickets, product documentation, SOPs, or any structured or unstructured data and assist agents where they need it in real-time to help them respond to customer queries.

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What does the product do to assist customer support agents?

• Threado agent assist: A Chrome extension that sits on top of any helpdesk or ticketing platform uses AI to summarize customer tickets or conversations. The bot is also capable of auto-suggesting responses based on customer questions and the agent can ask the bot to auto-improve responses to fit the tone, sentiment, and intent of the customer.
• Omnichannel support: Apart from providing agent assistance for ticketing platforms, the bot can be installed as a chat widget within the product, embedded on the website, and installed on Slack or Discord to auto-respond to agent queries. Threado is the only support tool that offers support on Slack.
• Improve knowledge base: Agents can leverage the bot to get well-formulated answers to customer queries and fill in the gaps of the unanswered queries by improving the knowledge base aka data on which the bot has been trained.

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What are its advantages for support agents?

• Faster resolution time: With Threado agent assist, agents can respond through auto-suggestions which significantly improves resolution time.
• Intelligent personalization: The bot understands customer sentiments, intent, and urgency to be able to auto-suggest personalized responses to agents.
• Higher customer satisfaction: Faster resolution time with better answer accuracy can lead to higher customer satisfaction.
• Lower ticket volume: The bot also functions as the first line of defense, therefore answering a lot of customer queries on its own and reducing tickets.

Prioritize agent experience

It’s now easy to hire new staff every few months and train them to get in tune with the ins and outs of how support functions at your company. This is extremely resource-intensive, particularly time, labor, and money, apart from the toll it takes on customer support itself leading to less than satisfactory experiences leading to higher churn.

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Give space to grow

Employee retention in itself should be a priority for organizations and to do that it’s important to prioritize agent experience. One of the key factors in improving employee turnover rates is to give them the space and resources necessary to improve their skills. In most cases, higher enablement of staff can lead to innovative strategies that benefit the company in terms of revenue itself.

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Tools that are agent-first

As we’ve already talked about this before, including tools that are specifically and explicitly designed to boost agent productivity should be an indispensable part of your AI support tech stack. Tools that can provide agents with the ability to summarize tickets, suggest responses, provide quality assurance by checking their answers and suggesting improvements, and be easily accessible through omnichannel sources, are increasingly becoming detrimental to crafting lasting customer support experiences in the AI age.

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Agent satisfaction is paramount

So you’re doing everything for your support agents but there also has to be a system that keeps a healthy work environment that focuses on the human side of team building. Your employees should feel comfortable enough to speak about what their expectations are from work and how can they improve what they do. Give your employees chances to share feedback or have scheduled feedback forms to constantly evaluate how your employees are feeling and what can be done about it.

Great customer support comes from great agent assistance

A lot of emphasis is being given to customer support and rightfully so. But in all this, it can be easy to overlook the fact that after all, customer support is a result of a strong team of agents. And this is a fact. You cannot run customer support simply on AI. This is where investing the right resources into building a commendable team becomes a priority. Not just that, having the right process and tech stacks builds the right foundation for all future upgrades that can thereafter be done seamlessly. Constructing the right synergy between AI and human agents is truly the step forward and the sooner organizations can realize that, the better.