Often chatbots are used with the only goal of bringing down costs. There is a “benefit” of increasing CSAT (Customer SATisfaction) with the logic being that the customers will get faster service. Part of the misguided logic is that fewer human customer support representatives will be needed. If you already have a full team for your human support staff and this is your goal, I can assure you that you are coming at it wrong. We are a long way away from cutting humans completely out of the support loop. Conversational AI should be seen as a way to augment human support.

When properly implemented, CAI gives your support staff more time to give your customers the level of care that they deserve. It also means that they are freed up from many routine “commodity” tasks that likely bore them to pieces. Instead, they get to concentrate on problem-solving and retaining your customers. This is one of the ways that ESAT is increased, which of course helps retention and reduces the  cost of employee turnover.

It also means that when there are unforeseen events the chatbot can often scale to deal with the inundation of support calls. The latest event with Verizon being down this week is a perfect example. If you happened to walk into a Verizon phone store on Monday, September 30th of 2024 you would have periodically heard an employee shout out “If you are here because your phone is in SOS mode – Verizon is having technical issues . . . ” I’m sure their phone support was overwhelmed with people calling from their landlines. The more modern customers hopefully got their answers from the mobile app.

Tier 1 support staff can learn more and be promoted. In fact some platforms can train employees with Agent Assist to help them learn proper answers.

I’d argue that with the correct platform, you can even train some of your more technical staff to improve the logic and accuracy of your virtual assistant along with their normal support duties. Don’t underestimate the power of a good User Interface and free training!

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash, edited by author