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 01:47 PM
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Sep 16, 2024
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ai-first-customer-support-setting-your-ai-objectives
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While it may be ‘sexy’ to jump on the AI bandwagon or be seduced by a Zendesk salesperson, before getting into bed with a tool you may later regret it is sensible to outline what you are trying to achieve with your new AI support agent.
Different tools have different strengths and AI agents will impact different businesses in different ways so make sure you are clear on what you want to get out of your AI agent and, ideally, the cost associated with that improvement.
What are you trying to achieve with your AI agent?
Here are a few ideas for AI agent objectives you might want to consider:
- Reducing costs
- Reducing time spent on support
- Spending more time elsewhere (not on reactive support)
- Improving response times
- Enhancing customer experience
- Increasing resolution rate
- Gathering customer insights
- Ensuring scalability
All very reasonable (and achievable) objectives when deploying an AI agent.
The next step is then to try and turn these objectives into quantitative, specific goals, using readily measurable metrics, such as improving new AI metrics like:
- AI Resolution or Deflection rate (what % of support interactions are resolved solely by the AI agent)
- Bot Engagement rate (what % of support interactions is the bot used for)
Or more well-known customer support metrics like:
- Average Handling Time (AHT)
- First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Ticket Volume
- Response Time
- Resolution Time TTC
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Cost per Contact
- Escalation Rate
- Abandonment Rate
- Agent Utilization
Start by getting your benchmark metrics today over a reasonable period for your business. These can then be used as your baseline metrics for when you introduce your AI agent.
They will also be handy for presenting to vendors, you can ask them if they have examples of case studies from their clients and how they impacted the metrics that matter most to you and your business.
