How AI Innovations at Gladly Are Propelling Brands Forward

During our recent webinar, The AI Advantage, the Gladly leadership team discussed how AI innovations at Gladly are being used to optimize the customer experience. With today’s customers demonstrating sky-high expectations and displaying little patience for anything less than exceptional service, it’s imperative that brands who implement AI innovations across their customer journey do so wisely.

We’re breaking down the latest AI innovations from Gladly, sharing the early successes our customers have had since implementing them, and recommending where brands can use AI to streamline operations and exceed expectations in their customer service and CX.

Breaking Down AI Innovations at Gladly

What Is Glady Hero?

Gladly Hero — formerly known as Gladly — is our flagship customer service product. It’s a ticket-free, customer-centric platform that includes all channels out-of-the-box, alongside all of the features needed by modern CX teams. With Gladly Hero, ecommerce and “phygital” brands can deliver personalized, concierge-style service at scale which empowers customer service agents and elevates them to customer service heroes.

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AI Innovations in Gladly Hero

The latest Gladly Hero innovations powered by AI are Hero AI Authoring and Hero AI Summaries.

Hero AI Authoring: Allows customer service heroes to create higher-quality answers, even faster. Hero AI Authoring works with Gladly Answers to provide one-click writing suggestions that match a company’s brand tone, are error-free, and drive alignment between the response and an individual shopper’s service scenario.

Hero AI Summaries: Hero AI Summaries assist heroes once a conversation with a customer has ended. With a single click, AI reviews the history of a previous customer conversation and provides a context-rich summary. This not only ensures a clean handoff from hero to hero, but also provides a digital paper trail for future teammates to refer to and use.

Gladly Sidekick

Our no-code self-service platform, Gladly Sidekick, uses AI to analyze customer conversations and resolve customer inquiries without agent intervention. Like Hero AI Authoring, Sidekick is driven by Answers and can be handed off to a support hero with full context.

Help customers help themselves with personalized self-service by Gladly

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Using Gladly AI Innovations Across the Customer Experience

At first glance, AI may appear to be a silver bullet for scaling customer service — just plug in a chatbot and watch efficiency skyrocket. But no customer-centric company wants to leave customers feeling “deflected” or like just another case number. In other words, AI should help augment the work of customer support agents, not serve as a replacement for valuable human interactions.

1. Gladly Hero AI Boosts Productivity

Many companies are facing intense pressure to cut costs and improve efficiency in anticipation of a potential economic downturn. A Bain study found that over half of CX leaders have already seen increased staff attrition, with 62% expecting to have to implement major cost reductions in 2023.

“Brands navigate this tension between saving money with AI while still delivering world-class experiences for consumers,” said Gladly Chief Marketing Officer Jason Finkelstein. “It’s not just about cutting costs, but it’s about value, too, and navigating both sides of the equation.”

During a time when companies are looking to do more with less, AI can help power human-assisted service and boost productivity.

2. Empower Customers to Help Themselves

With AI, you can level up your self-service options by delivering automated customer service across digital channels.

But despite all the advances we’ve seen in the AI space, customers can often tell when they are interacting with a bot versus a person, and companies relying solely on AI risk frustrating customers with impersonal interactions. “If we’re just doing automation, it feels like deflection where you’re just pushing someone away,” Finkelstein said. “And if you’re thinking about the fundamental architecture, you’re running into issues where you don’t have a way to understand who that person is.”

Here’s where a tool like Gladly Sidekick comes in. While Gladly Sidekick is automated, it’s not an AI black box, and the chatbot doesn’t just make up an answer. Instead, all of its responses are based on customer information, the conversation history, and your company’s CX playbooks.

The best part? Beyond delivering conversational answers to customers’ routine questions, Gladly Sidekick can assist with tasks and resolve requests like managing returns, changing flights, and processing exchanges.

3. Unify the Entire Customer Experience

Too often, self-service and human assistance are disjointed experiences. Customers get frustrated re-explaining issues as they bounce between FAQs, chatbots, and customer service agents.

In The AI Advantage webinar, our speakers emphasized that in order to deliver VIP service at scale, companies need to understand that customers want to communicate with brands, not channels, and building a unified experience across self-service and assisted service is key. This means AI must understand full conversation histories before engaging, then seamlessly hand interactions over to agents when needed.

That’s why we designed Gladly Hero and Gladly Sidekick to work hand-in-hand. By combining human-assisted services through Gladly Hero and AI-powered self-service automations through Gladly Sidekick, companies can track conversation histories across channels and successfully deliver personalized experiences with efficiency.

Agents + Gladly Hero AI = The Winning Combo

While advanced AI and automation solutions can empower brands to meet rising customer expectations, human service will not disappear. The future of customer service is one where humans and technology collaborate and play to the unique strengths of one another. With the right strategy and tools, this symbiotic approach allows businesses to deliver radically personal customer service profitably, and at scale.

Watch the full webinar from Gladly to learn more about using AI to optimize customer experiences and meet shoppers’ rising expectations.