Imagine you have a problem with your product or service.

Performing a call only to find yourself moving through several steps before connecting to an agent utterly feels frustrating on IVR.

The first thing that comes to mind for a solution to this is to connect with a digital self-service as a first point of contact.

McKinsey also confirmed the same fact.

As per the state of AI in customer service in 2023 by HubSpot, 84% of respondents believe that AI chatbot automation is vital to improving customer experience.

With that, Generative AI rises to superpower as a medium to transform customer experiences with its expandable capability to instantly create new conversations based on prompts and create new outputs.

With the customers’ rising expectations, Generative AI, when integrated with CX platforms or interfaces, can deliver personalization or tailored responses, reduce response time, and deliver exceptional user experiences — and many more CX benefits for business leaders or SMBs.

As we’ve seen, the year 2023 dominated the Generative AI discussions, and the best business function to adopt GenAI is customer support.

In this article, we’ll explore how Generative AI facilitates customer support efficiency for SMBs.

ChatGPT, trained with 175 billion parameters, excels in providing answers to almost anything.

The AI race has been on the spur since. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies come up with their LLM offerings.

The latest is Grok, trained with 33 billion data parameters from the X platform.

These chat interfaces are built to offer more humanized conversation experiences — while Grok provides a slightly better edge with its real-time information and some humor.

The ability to communicate more like humans and answer any queries shows astounding promises for transforming customer support.

77% of consumers are more likely to prefer more personalized and organized answers that Generative AI delivers to a list of results suggested by search engines, reported Zendesk CX Trends 2023.

• 6 out of 10 believe Generative AI will improve customer service experiences.

• 75% that already interacted with GenAI want companies to implement GenAI so that agents can create better experiences.

• 2 in 3 consumers believe Generative AI will be the sole tool for information discovery for consumers.

Know that one single bad experience would result in your customers going to your competitors.

Who knows if that bad experience would stem from your customer support?

If you want to make information readily available, provide a real-time solution to customer queries, and prevent customer churn, Generative AI is the go-to tool for your customer support.

Generative AI, being the next frontier in AI, can simulate NLP queries to automate mundane tasks, give answers to solve problems and create anything with text-based inputs.

Here’s how Generative AI provides rewarding experiences for customer support.

Provide multilingual responses to your global users.

Type a sentence in English and ask any LLM-powered chatbot to translate it into your preferred language. It will do instantly.

By leveraging the power of language translation, SMBs can put this phenomenal feature into their customer support platform and enable language translation to any language their users would prefer.

Customers and employees would benefit from this feature as they interact and find or deliver the correct answers without worrying about language proficiency.

Suppose you have a German customer, and your agent only understands English. Using language understanding, your platform can deliver text in languages your users understand and provide appropriate responses.

Build a reimagined self-service for customer support.

The effectiveness of self-service works as you create and automate flows.

Self-service on chatbot, however, can feel rudimentary at one point.

Say your customer comes to your support complaining about the wrong size. If you have flows inconsistent with the customer query, your bot will give vague answers or end the conversations.

Thousands of questions and thousands of flows — who has that time to work around use cases, capture data, build workflows, and update the bot?

Generative AI can answer pretty much everything by applying intent or suggestion detection. Besides, this AI technology can exceptionally generate new content.

Even if the flow or predefined template is not there, self-service powered by Generative AI can alleviate your pain from anticipating situations and creating new content for responses.

• Real-time Response: Generative AI searches through knowledge articles in the backend and provides consolidated answers that suggest the right solution to your problem.

• Domain-specific Knowledge: Users can use work-related knowledge easily as Generative AI provides answers by adapting to changing scenarios and generating answers by observing patterns of user questions.

• Faster Knowledge Discovery: Team members can find answers faster without reading lengthy or irrelevant content.

Real-time responses through automated ticket routing

Your self-service can now become a tool to triage incidents at speed without having to require a person to detect what’s necessary to perform to minimize the impact of customer grievances.

Suppose your customer connects with the Generative AI bot regarding an issue with a new desktop system.

The generative AI model can understand that the problem only needs live help rather than predefined suggestions from knowledge-base articles.

By routing the ticket to the right team automatically, Generative AI elevates customer experiences.

AI-driven knowledge management

Self-service only provides effectiveness when it can fetch the latest, unique, yet accurate answers to questions.

It means knowledge has to be in its latest form and accurate. Periodic knowledge revisions help in maintaining knowledge accuracy and relevancy.

Again, agents or knowledge experts rarely get the time amidst their other responsibilities to make changes or revisions to the articles whenever a unique solution to a case appears.

Generative AI, however, makes creating helpful knowledge articles or updating existing content easy for them.

By providing keywords based on customer cases, your team can reduce effort in creating content or knowledge articles while also conforming to business tone and style.

Personalized services with surveys

It is pretty common to have customers’ feedback after interactions with an agent.

• An attached survey flow powered by Generative AI can ask relevant questions, not predefined common questions.

• Generative AI goes further to refine questions, ask what resonates with their personas, and capture the proper contexts.

• Gen AI tools can be more adaptive or intuitive for customers to provide their views either by using voice or text.

Based on customer feedback captured, customer support can work on customer insights and offer personalized services specific to their needs.

Also, note that Generative replies demonstrate a friendly or playful persona to keep customers engaged and prevent them from feeling frustrated while interacting with a bot or an agent.

For example, if your premier customer has a service delivery issue, your AI-generated messages demonstrate the proper empathy and handle the situation.

Further, it can understand contexts and offer a gift card to improve your CSAT score.

[How you can enhance CSAT and other metrics for our ITSM. Read our article here to know more.]

Not all customers can have the same issue. So, your offers must vary per problem statement. Generative AI helps you capture the right insights and offer real-time personalized services.

Autogenerated response with suggestions from Generative AI

Interacting with a customer means having enough knowledge to write quickly and accurately.

Critical questions can take time for your agent to think and then write.

Generative AI, when integrated with your customer support channel or customer experience platform, makes coordination and communications relatively easy.

Your agent can easily exchange auto-generated responses with customers by editing or setting the right tone.

Review handling with ease

While at customer support service, handling reviews also makes sense to improve brand advocacy and customer loyalty.

What was your side of action to act on negative reviews?

Inaction sometimes costs you brand value and causes customers to visit your rival brand.

Using Generative AI tools, you can track where negative reviews are and how fast you can respond to them nicely.

By crafting pleasant replies, you can win back your customers.

Drive customer insights.

Generative AI is an effective tool to create a predictive model and capture customer insights.

By looking at conversation history or listening to customers live, you can fetch details about customer complaints about specific products, services, or solutions. These insights are good enough to suggest the best way to satisfy customers’ needs.

In addition to this, you can also provide the correct answers by having appropriate contexts and solving a problem.

Readily craft call summary.

Summarizing calls is essential to let stakeholders know what went wrong and how a better solution was delivered.

To save your agents’ time and allow them to enjoy less work, Generative AI can help you create contextual and relevant call summaries just by staying in the loop of conversations.

There’s no need to think and write a call summary that would otherwise eat the agent’s bulk productive time, even if the customer experience platform uses typical AI tools.

Get the manager’s approval for customer experience.

Agents often need approval to assign a gift card or other offers.

With generative AI allowing the creation of follow-up workflows, agents do not need to craft an email or any other message.

That is automated; the manager gets a message, and approval is done.

Small and medium businesses can have transformative business gains as they have customer support powered by Generative AI.

Based on the ‘Current State of AI in CX Research’ from Qualtrics, 61% of customer experience leaders believe that integrating AI into customer support platforms or channels will help businesses gain a competitive advantage.

• Increase customer support and loyalty.

Capgemini’s report says that of those who have implemented AI, 73% of people surveyed observed a 10-point gain in net promoter score. This core metric helps measure customer loyalty and improves brand advocacy. Also, this reduces customer churn by minimizing customer complaints.

With Generative AI-integrated customer support, customers tend to receive solutions instantly and gain the brand’s trust.

• Improve agent response and productivity.

Trige is easy with Generative AI’s predictive model. Agents can spend less time crafting responses and gain real-time contexts to solve customers’ problems.

Agents become highly productive and efficient while interacting with customers, thus providing them with contextual answers and keeping them engaged.

With that, Forrester also suggests that GenAI will free up as much as 50% more time for employees and allow them to focus on creative problem-solving.

This prediction perfectly aligns with what customer support aims to achieve.

• Enhance cost efficiency for support.

Agents are more independent as they use a Generative AI-backed support system. With less effort and time needed to address and solve a ticket, Generative AI helps customer support save money and time, thus increasing business cost efficiency.

• Reduce agent attrition.

With a transformative change across agent interaction touchpoints, agents can experience more time being saved to focus on strategic work and handle fewer repetitive tasks.

While self-service helps users get most of the answers for common customer support issues, agents remain less fatigued and retain the energy to work at their own pace.

Work flexibility allows them to love their work, stay loyal, and help businesses improve agent experience and build long-term agent relationships.

• ROI benefits

Agents need less time to be creative to type a response. That’s the time saved on communications and delivery of the right solution. As a result, businesses can reduce the backlog volume, eliminating the need for more agent time to work with the backlog.

This gives more monetary benefits and the best returns on your investment in Generative AI-backed customer support.

• Improved self-service

Consolidated or synthesized responses and no further need to go through an entire lengthy article to discover knowledge nudge users’ higher intent to use self-service and discard formal communication channels such as emails or voice calls.

A higher rate of correct responses and accurate solutions drive users to use self-service and allow them to solve problems autonomously.

• Resolve questions on first contact.

Agents can fetch details with ease. So, users get resolutions on first contact, improving customer satisfaction and elevating brand advocacy.

Workativ has a proven competency of delivering FCR up to 90% for internal employees with its Generative AI-based self-service.

All you achieve with Generative AI for your customer support can easily translate into robust support for internal users or employees.

Workativ, with its conversational AI chatbot, allows you to apply Generative AI properties to your support flows.

With the power of NLU, NLP, and AI/ML features, Generative AI improves communications and coordination for internal users.

This highly benefits internal users to automate repetitive tasks and knowledge search.

With a Generative AI engine embedded inside Workativ, known as Knowledge AI, users can quickly fetch answers at scale and solve problems.

Knowledge AI is effective in addressing issues for HR and IT support.

If you want to improve user experience with automated workflows to handle employee onboarding, PTO management, password management, account unlock, etc, Workativ gives you multiple ways to work with your use cases and elevate support efficiency.

To learn more ways to apply customer support efficiency in your HR or IT support, use Workativ to craft your use cases and build custom workflows.

Schedule a demo today.