How Customer Service Bots Can Help Your Live Agents

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We have spoken about the various types of chatbots in previous posts, but it’s important to understand how these bots amplify your customer service reps rather than replace them.

While chatbots are becoming more human and more intelligent over time, it’s important to remember that they’re meant to provide support to your agents, not replace them. Here’s how they can help.

• Bots help agents deal with the headaches that all customer service reps face:
  • Complicated back-end processes – The power of automation has allowed bots, like RPA bots, to take on complicated back-end processes.
  • Repetitive tasks – Bots can also simplify and streamline repetitive and tedious tasks like trigating tickets and automating notifications, freeing up space for your employees to work on other important tasks.
  • Staying on top of multiple tickets – Intelligent bots can work on simultaneous tickets and assess whether or not human assistance is needed or if the bot can solve the inquiry on its own.
  • Adhering to strict company policies – By automating certain processes and steps that are important to company policies, like sending tickets to the appropriate departments, bots can take the pressure off your agents and ensure tickets are organized correctly and in line with company policy.

Modern customer service problems

What are the current challenges and problems that customer service representatives face today? And how can AI and intelligent chatbots help to solve some of those problems or make working through them easier?

• Customer service requests and expectations are growing in both number and complexity. As companies scale, so too will their need to solve problems, answer questions, and provide support to their customers.
• With more and more shopping moving to online platforms, things like damaged products, missing items, or incorrect shipping information will continue to be an ongoing issue. And because of the downward economic swing as a result of the pandemic, difficult calls regarding billing issues or insurance coverage have seen an increase.
• Remote work (both prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and during the pandemic) has introduced a plethora of communication issues, including difficulties with meetings, collaboration, maintaining quality, and workers feeling lonely and disconnected.

These are difficult challenges, but with the help of AI, they aren’t insurmountable.

How AI bots can help customer support agents

While there are a lot of challenges presented to customer service agents today, AI and intelligent chatbots can help customer support agents in significant ways.

Chatbots can ease the workload on customer service representatives by:

• Taking the easy but plethora of requests off of live agents’s plates. A huge number of customer inquiries can be solved with a quick fix, like updating an address or cancelling an account, and many chatbots have the capacity to answer these questions and solve problems on their own.
• The more problems and issues that chat bots can handle on their own, the more time you’ll be able to free up for agents to do what agents do best – interact with customers on a personal and human level.
  • This cuts down response time and also triages the request so the right people can respond live when they have to.

• Agent assist bots can empower agents by working alongside them, decreasing their workload, and increasing their productivity.
  • Automated tasks behind the scenes get live agents responding to more requests. RPA bots can work through processes on the back-end and help automate tedious steps to various workflows.
  • Intelligent bots can keep live agents adhering to company policies by providing reminders and notifications as they work through customer issues and processes.
  • Agent assist bots can help by providing agents with continuous training and new hire onboarding. A simple way to offer refreshing training exercises at scale is through an agent assist bot. Additionally, agents can stick with new hires after the in-person onboarding process to provide valuable and ongoing feedback and assistance.
  • Advanced assist bots will be able to recommend responses to your agents based on what’s being said in the conversation. On top of helping to make agents’ lives easier, having suggestions will speed up the ticket resolution time.

Gladly has it all

Gladly believes that customer service starts with the people that matter – the customers and the agent. That’s why we’ve designed a platform that will make your agents happy and leave your customers satisfied and valued.

Gladly’s state-of-the-art solution can help bolster your customer service bot capabilities by:

• Triggering automated chat messages to your customers based on behaviors like how long they’ve spent on a page, then route them to the team best-skilled to help.
• Completing transactions within a chat through the safe and secured transfer of credit card information.
• Manually or automatically controlling the number of incoming chats based on wait time or volume to increase customer satisfaction.
• Allowing agents to move seamlessly between channels, including chat, phone, email, social medium messaging and more.

Check out our resources and features, and start thinking radically personal with Gladly today.