Leading the Future: Navigating AI Integration in Customer Support

A couple years ago, we realized that AI and similar technologies were going to expand to working with people in the future. It felt inevitable, so we started research and development on integrating AI into customer support. 

We understood that cooperation between humans and technology would make companies like ours more efficient and competitive.

Because of that, AI has become one of the key focuses of interest for  SupportYourApp in recent years. I am the CEO and a Managing Partner at this group of companies, and we’ve grown to become champions of the opportunities AI presents for this industry.

Industry leaders have already integrated AI into customer support

I know it sounds like a distant future. We’re used to thinking of customer support as a human-to-human interaction designed to win thanks to empathy and connection. 

But the truth is, successful cases of AI integration in our industry have been so seamless that it’s becoming harder and harder to spot.

Imagine getting stuck at the airport with a connecting flight delayed, and most of the luggage somewhere up in the sky. You were looking forward to that decisive meeting with partners, but now everything is hanging in the air.

You reach out to AirHelp, a company that helps passengers with flight disruptions. Their AI powered conversational chatbot picks up the details of your situation quickly, and soon you’re transferred to a human support agent.

When that has been solved, you want to make sure the baggage delay won’t leave you without chargers to necessary devices. You open Amazon and order duplicates to stay on the safe side.

Its personalized AI-driven chatbot guides you through the process smoothly, reducing the stress you’re already under.

Finally, when everything is under control, you only need to stay awake until the replacement flight. You run Netflix on the phone and trust the algorithm to help you kill time.

Because the AI has been analyzing your viewing habits, the wait and stress are no longer excruciating and you can feel excitement for that upcoming meeting again.

See, the whole day went by, powered by AI in customer support, but you were too engaged in consumption to even notice.

Trends show that businesses use AI to automate the most simple and repetitive tasks

Now that we’re on the same page about the inevitability of integrating AI into customer support, it’s time for a key question: where do we begin? At SupportYourApp we started by identifying the most common and repetitive tasks we wanted to get rid of (or better — to optimize). 

We started R&D projects to see what AI we could develop on our own and what approach would work best for our needs. (Note that it was well before ChatGPT 3.5, Google Gemini and Meta’s Llama).

Since we are PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, we needed to check with legal and security departments to make sure any new technology is within the regulations and policies. 

Eventually, we started running pilots with several AI companies within SupportYourApp to see what we could optimize and use to increase efficiency and speed, especially when we were resolving common issues.

We have been observing trends showing that businesses have already automated

the most simple requests and tasks using AI and chatbots powered with AI. The tendency is that more and more complex tasks and requests are left for humans. 

The next important step was to describe what exactly we wanted the AI to do.  Even though you can potentially get rid of all those level-one requests, it’s also important to set a very specific goal.

At SupportYourApp we don’t just use AI across the company, but explore opportunities for it in every department. For instance, if the legal department needs something for simplifying the process of checking agreements, we check if there is an AI solution, run the pilot and then integrate it.

Eventually, we decided that one head of the department would take the ownership of the AI integration task. He does the research, checks with the security and legal departments on whether it’s possible to use and whether it’s secure, and oversees implementation of the solution within departments.

And finally, it’s important to use AI wisely. I believe that if left unattended, AI in customer support could easily turn vicious. Imagine how much damage can cause a support chatbot that was taught wrong about safety and danger.

Let’s say a teenager is suffering from high fever and turns to such a chatbot for advice. The chatbot recommends jumping from the 20th floor, because indeed the body temperature would then drop significantly. 

This advice is too far from a desired solution — a common sense answer would be taking pills to decrease body temperature. But AI doesn’t have life experience; it only preaches what it had been taught.

When creating chatbots with AI, it's important to ensure that they can be regularly updated with new information, rules, or improvements. This involves continually fine-tuning the AI models or systems to incorporate fresh data and maintain their relevance, ensuring they stay up-to-date with changes over time.

After all, this is about the level of trustworthiness. I’m sure no business would want a virtual helper that has a huge damage potential.

Integrating AI for the clients means providing options

In the process of R&D for integrating AI into our own support services, we came to the point where we understood that we needed to implement AI services for our clients as well.

This became a part of the service at SupportYourApp where we have also started integrating best LLMs and AI services into our in-house products. 

Whether it’s Euphoric.ai or Quidget, our products already include the AI module. It’s an option for clients or potential clients to use our services along with all the features that our system has.

However, sometimes our clients prefer to use AI of their own, so here we can help with integration and implementation (for instance, finding the right CRM system, researching and providing the best solutions on the market, and integrating them to work together in perfect harmony).

Thanks to this experience, we learned about some truly inventive areas of integrating AI into customer support. Those are employing AI on the customer’s side of the support process, on the support agent’s side, and as a business insights analysis tool. 

AI creates opportunities for inventive integration in customer support

First, it’s using AI on the customer’s side. If you are a user writing to customer support live chat with AI, the technology will generate a very specific answer without links to the website’s FAQ or knowledge base.

Because the AI knows the website and knowledge base so well, it has the capacity to return a complete and concrete response that won’t feel ready-made. Only in case live chat with AI can’t find the answer on the website and knowledge base, it will transfer the conversation to a human customer support representative. 

You can check how it works at CoSupport AI, where I play a CoAdvisor and CoFounder role. CoSupport Customer is an autonomous AI that handles customer service interactions in real-time and provides accurate responses to 100% of routine queries without human intervention.

Thanks to access to external databases, the responses are up-to-date, while human support representatives can focus on queries where significant business profits are at stake.

The second inventive area to integrate AI into is on the support consultant’s side. Instead of writing replies from scratch, consultants can use drafts generated by AI in less than one second. 

Such suggested answers would be based on FAQs, knowledge base, and previous correspondence. The consultant will choose whether to send this reply or rewrite it to add something else. 

This reduces wait times and significantly enhances customer satisfaction. Last year, 53% of American businesses who were using AI reported decreasing response times. (As reported in a survey commissioned by Forbes Advisor and conducted by market research company OnePol).

We’ve implemented it into Euphoric.ai, our AI-powered CRM software. Its AI Suggested Reply feature will jump with smart suggestions for support consultants’ responses, making this communication faster and more efficient. 

Thanks to the internal knowledge base, supporters no longer need to toggle between windows and can complete queries within seconds. So while this virtual assistant surfaces the needed information, our consultants can focus on crafting the best possible response.

When integrating AI with knowledge bases, businesses can prioritize continuous updates to ensure the tool remains in line with the evolving needs and queries of their customer base. 

And the third inventive area where AI can be implemented in customer support is business intelligence. Customer support processes generate high volumes of precious and specific customer related data.

AI is there to collect, analyze and provide insights. I think many companies can’t even hear the customer's voice because the data coming from support interactions is unstructured. Because of this, businesses can underestimate the potential of such revelations.

There are AI-driven CRM systems such as Oracle CX Cloud that provide real-time customer insights. These findings go beyond historical data and offer a dynamic understanding of customer behavior and preferences. With this, businesses can make informed decisions at the next level.

On the other hand, AI-powered predictive analysis can anticipate customer needs. Powered by AI, BigCommerce analyzes historical data to facilitate proactive decision-making and optimize inventory management for a customer-centric approach. 

This predictive capability allows businesses to stay ahead of customer demands, ensuring a more responsive and satisfying customer experience.

Integration of AI into customer support is already taking place and looks inevitable for the businesses who haven’t yet started. Those who will step up leading these processes, will enhance growth internally and win over competition.