Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
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Sep 16, 2024 01:36 PM
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Sep 16, 2024
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ai-first-customer-support-evaluate-your-set-up
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The first question you should be asking yourself before moving to AI-first support is:
“What does my current set-up look like?”
Before finding out where you are going, we first need to understand where you are.
Let’s break this question down into a few further questions to make it easier:
Where does the majority of your support volume come from?
You already have existing support tickets but where do the majority come to you from? Is it:
- Calls
- A combination of the above?
Different AI tools specialise or offer integrations with different channels and platforms.
While some vendors offer the option to build custom integrationsas part of Enterprise plans, most won’t, so be sure that the vendors you choose work with your current support setup. Unless…
You may also want to take this as good an opportunity as any to switch support channels.
Maybe you have been using email primarily for the last decade but now think it is the time to finally shift to live chat tools.
It might sound drastic, but start by considering what would be the best set-up for your customers and work backwards.
It might have been when you decided on your current channels that you did so partly so you were able to cope with the increasing volume of tickets you were receiving as you scaled.
But withAI agentsit may mean you can scale your support further, providing more instant responses with live chat or AI calls.
What types of questions do you get today?
You know your inbox as well as anyone but it still never harms to dive in and take a sample to check you still have your finger on the pulse.
Take a typical, day, week or month and randomly pick a few hundred tickets and copy the conversations into a spreadsheet.
For each ticket ask yourself “Could this have been answered…”:
- Soley using your currently available documentation
- Using documentation you could practically write (but haven’t)
- With access to other business knowledge (account details etc)
Tickets in buckets a. and b. are very good candidates for AI agents and the proportion of tickets in a. overall will give you a good idea of the % of tickets you might be aiming for as being ‘resolved’ by an AI agent without human input required.
Where is your business knowledge? (and is it ready?)
Your AI agent’s performance will depend considerably on the information (and the quality of that information) you provide to it for ‘training’.
The more it knows about your business the better it will likely be able to answer your customer’s questions.
As a general rule of thumb, the easier it is for a person to understand and read your documentation, the better an AI will be able to understand it.
Different AI agent tools have differing abilities to ingest information from different sources so this should definitely be a consideration upfront and also for future training (you may not use some sources right now, but this could change).
Common knowledge sources can include:
- Websites(check for how often these are updated and whether new pages are added)
- Knowledge tools (Google Drive,Notion,Dropbox, Coda,Confluence,SharePointetc)
- Ticketing platforms* (Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk)
- Communication tools* (Gmail, Slack, Outlook)
With each of these, you may also want to consider:
- Whichfile typesis my knowledge stored in?
- How often are theyupdated and are new items synced automatically?
This is also a very good time to take a good hard look at your documentation and consider whether it is ‘ready’ for an AI agent.
Luckily, most tools provide ways of identifying ways to improve your documentation over time as questions come in but they will at least needsomeup-to-date documentation to start with.
*A word of caution
While on paper it sounds like a fantastic idea to upload all of your previous tickets or internal conversations as ‘training’ data to your AI agent, in practice this is often not quite so good an idea. Not only does the large volume of tickets often make it difficult to manage, the quality or responses across agents can vary considerably and it is incredibly difficult to manage dated information. I would generally advocate for using a ‘source of truth’ for your AI agent’s knowledge - one that is easily accessible and updateable by members of your team.
What does your current tool or platform let you do?
Before going looking around for your fancy new AI agent, it is also always worth finding out what your current provider can offer as a benchmark for pricing and features.
Some of the bigger companies in the space have some excellent AI offerings already, although bear in mind the larger companies with the best offerings are usually priced as such and you can often get the vast majority of benefits and features by looking elsewhere.
