Dive Brief:
- Just over half — 53% — of customer support teams say faster response and resolution times is one of the top benefits of AI, according to a survey of more than 2,400 global customer support professionals by AI customer support vendor Intercom.
- Other major benefits reported by customer support teams included 24/7 support coverage, scaling support without growing head count, and reduced cost to serve, according to the survey.
- The top use cases of AI agents in customer support were to automate manual work, assist with proactive engagement and perform customer tasks.
Dive Insight:
Many customer support teams see the time freed up by AI as one of the primary avenues to produce a return on investments.
The more mature the AI deployment, the more teams see efficiency gains. Nearly three-quarters of respondents with mature AI deployment say time freed up is one of their primary measurements of ROI, according to the survey. That figure drops to 64% among teams that are scaling their AI investment and 59% among teams that are still in their initial deployment.
Customer support teams that want to make the most of AI’s time savings need to look beyond the basics like automated password resets, according to Julie Geller, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
“The most impactful thing AI does is strip away the administrative drag; the manual call summarization, ticket tagging, and post-interaction data entry that create distractions for agents,” Geller said in an email. “It can also handle the heavy lifting of knowledge retrieval, where instead of an agent digging through PDFs or internal wikis while a customer waits, the AI surfaces the exact policy or technical spec instantly.”
AI can handle these mundane tasks to stop customer service agents from acting like data entry clerks, according to Geller. Instead, they can focus on more important jobs that help retain customers and grow the company.
Companies with more AI experience are more likely to realize this potential in their operations, Intercom found. More than half — 56% — of teams with mature AI deployment say they are using freed up time to focus on revenue-generating activities, compared to about one-thirds of teams in their initial deployment.
Though the report did not include questions about potential downsides of AI in customer support, past research has found that customers still have concerns about AI in customer support, including the technology replacing customers ability to talk to a human.
