How do you use AI to personalize customer support across channels?

Personalization can be achieved at different levels in different ways, but no matter what you choose, it’s an important way to help users answer questions and solve problems. This helps build trust in your chatbot from users because it gets past surface level information and provides actionable insight. It builds trust from your coworkers because it protects your CS agents’ time for issues that require a human touch and saves the company money. Most people just want the tools to help themselves so they can get back to their lives. If you pay attention and play your cards right a chatbot can be that tool.

When it comes to customer service, AI can be incredibly powerful for personalization. For instance, if you have a common customer issue that gets handed off from your chatbot to your email queue that maybe requires extra information on your end — let’s say a customer needs to update their phone number but you need to know the new number and if it’s a VOIP or not — you can alter your email handoff to require that information before the ticket can be submitted. Now your agent has the information they need to update the user’s account without sending another email to request said information. This helps your customer feel like they’re not “doing your job for you” and lets them know that your organization can be trusted with basic operations.

I find it important to remember not to get carried away with over-engineering or becoming obsessed with a customer journey map. We used an AI tool to go from 13 touch points to 4, giving customers detailed information as they wanted it. The optimization reduced the cost of managing the map (won't say by how much because we're still figuring that out). It also had an immediate impact in shortening the sales cycle by 3 months. We're now exploring how the changes can increase conversions. At the end of the day, it's about helping the customer reach a goal quickly and effectively — be it with your product or someone else's.