The Loops Transforms Customer Support with AI-Driven Insights
From long wait times to the frustration of navigating automated systems, we’ve all experienced customer service hell at one time or another. However rapid advancements in AI are unlocking the potential for organizations to use this technology to take their customer service experience from zero to hero at head-spinning speed.
According to leading analyst firm Gartner in the next year, 80% of customer service and support organizations will be applying generative AI technology in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience, and the benefits are not one-sided. Organizations deploying AI for customer service can expect to save $80 billion in agent costs.
Somya Kapoor, the dynamic founder of TheLoops, a company transforming customer support with AI-driven insights, is in the thick of this customer service transformation wave. A former executive with ServiceNow and SAP turned startup founder, Kapoor has been able to apply her skills honed in building enterprise-scale products to building The Loops, while scratching her entrepreneurial itch.
Following startup best practices, The Loops team first did a deep dive into the problem they were solving for to ensure they could attain product-market fit.
Kapoor explains what they found.
“Examining the customer service market for SaaS, we saw that post-sales interactions were very disjointed. There was a different tool for every department and every product. Because of these disjointed processes, it was up to the customer to determine if their problem was a support issue, a sales issue, a marketing issue or a who knows what issue. And despite generating tons of data, support teams couldn’t easily analyze, share or take immediate action on that information. The setup was broken. Data required manual analysis. Teams weren’t aligned. Productivity was capped. Companies were losing money. And worst of all, customers hated “modern-day” support where they constantly had to repeat their issues.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) has existed for decades. It is only recently, however, that prompt engineering has evolved to a point where an information worker without development or data science expertise can now train an AI model using the English language. This simplification of access has unleashed a wave of AI adoption with businesses all waking up to the potential to apply AI to solve everyday problems.?
The Loops AI works alongside existing customer support ticketing systems such as Zendesk, Jira and Salesforce, bringing customer data from multiple systems of record into one platform. It helps support operations remove data silos, eliminate tedious, manual work and truly understand which customers require prioritization.
Built from the ground up complete with scoring, topic modelling, anomaly detection, trend analysis, GenAI and much more, The Loops helps elevate the customer experience by allowing support teams to predict escalations, prioritize queues, predict CSAT, improve their agent efficiency with The Loops’ Copilot, extract product feedback analysis, proactively manage services backlogs and obtain 100% QA coverage.
While it depends on the amount of data involved, The Loops aims to have a new customer up and running on its system for one use case in three to four weeks. Those customers are realizing value from the system in as little as three months.
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Says Kapoor, “For some customers, it might be a 5% productivity gain. For others, it might be the replacement of a headcount, or better time to resolve, or an improvement in customer satisfaction. The results will only get better because our system is continually learning and improving based on its inputs.”
She points to her customer Gainsight, which has saved 500 hours per manager per month in less than three months since deploying The Loops. Another customer Sauce Labs has saved eight hours per agent per month.
She asks,?“Does it require a new way of looking at the world of support?? Yes, it does. But the benefits are big and they are tangible.”
While there are still some who view AI as a threat -- a replacement for the human worker and the source of job loss — The Loops sees it differently. They believe AI gives humans doing customer support jobs today new superpowers to see the unseen, and to do things faster with a bigger impact.
“AI is connecting support processes that were traditionally siloed by people working in their zones,” explains Kapoor. “It surfaces real-time insights from the data that help you do your job and support your customers better. Just imagine, a success manager comes to you and says, “I'm going to visit a customer. Can you give me all the support tickets that were opened by that customer for the last six months?” Your answer to that has been to log into 20 different tools. With The Loops you go to Slack, ask the question and immediately get the answer. It’s right there at your fingertips.”
Thanks to advancements in natural language processing and platforms such as The Loops, support organizations can have the information they need to make decisions faster and positively impact the business and the customer experience. When customers are happy with the support they receive, they tend to stick around and rave to others about their experience.
To put a fine point on her business case, Kapoor relates a recent discussion with her customer Coho. “My customer said to me the other day, “I want to be the ‘Bot Manager,’ where my support organization consists of bots and machine agents allowing humans to do the higher value work as bot operators. In that world, I may have fewer people, but I’ll increase my volume and double my growth.” The fact that this is completely possible with our platform today is what makes AI exciting for us. I think in the very near future, there's going to be a world with The Loops where we are going to have a lot of CX bot operators.”
Somya Kapoor recently sat down with Khasm Lab’s Managing Director Jim Brisimitzis for a chat on our new podcast Innovation Unplugged. Catch the episode below: