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How will artificial intelligence assist customer service agents?

By Brett Grossfeld

Last updated November 3, 2021

Artificial intelligence has the capability to help organizations scale, build trust between companies and customers, and influence the latest trends, but how exactly will it help assist customer service agents? The latest innovations in artificial intelligence will showcase features with big upsides for agents, particularly in increasing agent productivity and seeing that customers are dealt with as efficiently as possible. We’ve highlighted three features of AI that will help assist customer service agents.

Artificial intelligence will assist customer service agents with…

Predictive insights and analytics

Similar to how machine learning algorithms can predict new music or movies that fit your taste, artificial intelligence will be able to make predictions about customers that benefit the agents. These predictions can provide insights to customer behaviour based on specific factors, such as the contents and timing of tickets. They’ll also power new tools for predictive analytics; for example, Zendesk’s Satisfaction Prediction can give agents a better understanding of their interactions by using AI to anticipate the customer’s satisfaction (CSAT).

Recommendations for the best next actions

Building off of the benefit of predictive insights, artificial intelligence can provide recommendations for the next best steps. Machine learning models can learn what the best response is to a particular ticket and suggest how an agent should proceed. This can be beneficial for complex products and services with lots of support options, and it can be especially handy for new agents that need the extra level of guidance.

Automated actions

Artificial intelligence can even take predictive capabilities a step further by learning to automate specific reactions to customer tickets. For example, AI can recognise tickets that need urgent attention by enabling a macro response to both a customer and an agent, ensuring that customer’s need are being prioritised while the agent is aware of the urgency. Artificial intelligence can also be used to automate responses to frequently asked questions/low-priority tickets to enhance competence in customer self-service. For example, Answer Bot can learn which help article to direct customers towards, especially if lots of customers are asking similar questions.

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