Did you know that according to a Harvard Business Review study, the average cost of a live service interaction (phone, e-mail, or webchat) is at least $7 or more for a B2C company and more than $13 for a B2B company today? And this is set to go up further!

 

Despite the high costing, complaints about manually handled customer support channels are ubiquitous. Therefore, this is probably a great time to invest in utilising Artificial Intelligence to manage your business support channels.

 

What are some drawbacks of manually handled support channels? Primarily, it is monotonous work for your employees and customer service agents. The happiness of your customers depend deeply on how satisfied and interested your customer support employees are in their work. Employees handling support channels are very often absolutely flooded with queries coming in non-stop. Overworked and frustrated customer support employees can be disastrous for your company’s customer relations! 

 

Once they are freed up of the repetitive and time-consuming nature of manual management of support channels, your employees can utilise their expertise in other better ways! This can be so much more rewarding and interesting! 

 

Manual handling of support channels is time-consuming as well. The utilisation of artificial intelligence streamlines the query-solving procedure and therefore, reduces the real time taken to respond. This, in turn, has a direct impact on lowering expenditure on support channels! A Vonage research shows that poor and time-consuming manually managed support channels are costing businesses up to $75 billion dollars a year! Why not just switch to Artificial Intelligence powered solutions, to reduce the time spent as well as costing spent on for support channel manning! 

 

A recent Gartner report suggests that 55% of companies have started investing in the potential of artificial intelligence, or plan to do so within a year. So, what are some AI-powered alternatives to traditional manual support channel management? 

 

Social media, more than any other business, has seen the widespread utilisation of AI-powered support channels, for example, Facebook Messenger’s powerful chatbots with cognitive capabilities! Following on the footsteps of the social media industry, multiple other leading industries like fashion, aviation, e-commerce, food chains and tourism have been trying to optimise through AI-powered alternatives. 

 

The Bank of America is all set to roll out an intelligent virtual banking assistant, Erica, which will immensely boost digital banking. The Netherlands based aviation company, KLM, has opted for a DigitalGenius powered AI-based customer service solution to reduce time spent on addressing customer queries. When it comes to a human agent model, LivePerson provides a very efficient AI-based customer service platform. China Merchant Bank, the top credit card-issuing financial enterprise in China, has utilised a front-end bot powered by WeChat. This messenger handles roughly 2 million customer enquiries per day! 

 

According to a recent Tata consultancy services survey, almost 31.7% of major companies are now using AI in customer service space. So, it is time to take a smart business decision and make the switch right now!