If your team is struggling to save money on customer support and boost CSAT at the same time, you’re not alone. Businesses today are under enormous pressure to satisfy their customers, but time and especially budget can be huge obstacles.
Customer support is expensive. On-demand support is even pricier. Let’s take a look at the average costs of support:
- One-third of organizations spend more than $50,000 on all customer support channels, from tickets to phone calls and email.
- Nearly half of organizations spend more than $100 per hour on support.
Despite the expense, support is crucial to building trust and loyalty with customers. Negative customer experiences lead over half of American consumers to cancel a transaction—risking 9.5% of annual revenue.
Luckily, new tools like AI and automation can help organizations offer on-demand support for less. Here are 3 ways to save money on customer support with AI:
#1: Offer Instant Level-0 Support with Self-Service
Gone are the days of chatbots that can’t actually answer questions.
Sophisticated new AI enables some chatbots to answer over 90% of questions within just 2 seconds—deflecting the vast majority of tickets from your team. This frees up time for support agents to focus on higher-level, more nuanced work.
Plus, self-service doesn’t just mean chatbots. If your organization gets a lot of phone calls, tools like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Voice Biometrics eliminate guesswork over the phone and improve the experience for both agents and customers.
For example, ASR can recognize multiple languages and dialects, then transcribe the audio. This means customers don’t have to repeat themselves and agents get what they need faster. With ASR, calls can move more smoothly towards a resolution.
Voice Biometrics tools save even more time. Advanced AI can authenticate callers just from their voice. Just like a fingerprint, no two voices sound the same. Instant authentication makes phone support easier for both customers and agents because they can get started right away on reaching a resolution.
Ultimately, when it comes to support, time is money. These tools empower agents to reduce the time they spend on each ticket or call, allowing them to move through queues faster. That way, it’s easier than ever to save money on customer support.
#2: Reduce Response and Resolution Times with Generative AI
Since the release of ChatGPT, generative AI has taken the world by storm. While this technology is still new, it has the potential to assist agents in customer support transactions.
One type of tool that can help businesses save money on customer support is Capacity’s Autopilot, which uses generative AI to respond to incoming emails and tickets. Using your company’s existing knowledge base, Autopilot generates complete, accurate, and professional responses—before you ever have to open an email.
All your team has to do? Approve the AI-written responses, or set them to send automatically. With less repetitive, distracting work, your team can focus on what actually matters: customers that need more personalized assistance, or projects that contribute to company growth.
Plus, Autopilot can dramatically reduce the time customers spend waiting for an answer or solving their problem. A faster, more streamlined support experience goes a long way towards gaining and keeping customers for life.
And what happens if a support question is more nuanced? Generative AI can still help. Tools like Suggestions assist agents with email responses, either by suggesting responses, improving them, listing action items, or summarizing the entire thread. This assistive tool helps agents focus more on the issue at hand, rather than phrasing or punctuation.
By assisting agents with repetitive and mundane work, generative AI is making it easier to create top-notch customer experiences—and it’s a great way to save money on customer support.
#3: Streamline Backend Processes with Automation
It costs time and money to maintain systems of record, stay up-to-date with projects, and monitor inboxes. But automation can help.
On the backend, automation helps businesses save money on customer support by making repetitive, time-consuming processes a lot faster and simpler. For example, automation can automatically escalate and assign new tickets depending on availability, specialty, and more.
It’s also possible to build complex automations with multiple steps, such as client onboarding or scheduled system health checkups. In the right system, it’s easy to customize action triggers, conditions, and schedules.
With automations executing these backend processes, teams are more empowered to get the information they need to work, accomplish more on projects, and connect more deeply with customers.
Automations are a great way to reduce time spent on previously manual processes, and they make the support process smoother for everyone.
Ready to cut expenses with AI?
These are only three ways to save money on customer support with AI, but new advancements in AI capabilities come out every day.
For more insights on the different applications of AI at work, a framework for getting started, our key AI trends in 2024, and more, read our free guidebook, The State of Support Automation.
