Roughly 90% of customers expect an immediate response when they contact your business, but most small businesses can’t monitor their inbox around the clock. AI customer service tools are affordable and can cut down on your response times dramatically—here’s how you can use them to supplement your customer service.
Where AI helps most in support
AI shouldn’t be used in every aspect of customer service. Here are the areas it can be the most useful:
- Suggested replies: You can use AI to analyze incoming messages and draft suggested responses for your agents. That way, instead of having to write responses from scratch every time, your team can review and send AI-generated text. This keeps your messaging consistent, which is helpful when multiple people are managing your inbox.
- Ticket summaries: If a customer has already sent five emails about the same issue, the agent picking it up mid-thread shouldn't have to read every message to get up to speed. AI can summarize the entire conversation so your team can get up to speed and jump in quickly.
- FAQ automation: You’ve probably noticed that your business gets many of the same questions over and over again. AI chatbots can handle those answers automatically, so customers receive instant replies without involving a human at all.
- Smart routing: AI can read an incoming message, determine what it's about, and automatically send it to the right person or team. This eliminates the delay of manual sorting and ensures customers aren't bounced around unnecessarily.
How to "train" your support AI
A customer service AI is only as good as the information you give it. Most tools don't require coding or technical expertise to set up, but they do require your input on what to say and how to say it. To train AI, start by pulling up the last three months of support tickets and identifying the top 25 questions that come up most often. Write clear and specific answers for each one.
For example, let’s say one of the most common questions you receive is about your refund process. Your answer could be something like, “We process refunds within five to seven business days.”
It’s also important to decide upfront what AI should and shouldn’t handle. For example, any customer who asks to speak to a person or has a problem the AI can't resolve in two exchanges should be immediately routed to an individual. Build these rules into your platform's settings so the handoffs happen automatically.
Most tools don't require coding or technical expertise to set up, but they do require your input on what to say and how to say it.
How to launch
If your small business is drowning in customer service requests, it can be tempting to roll out these new tools quickly, but this plan can backfire. Instead, you should plan a staged rollout that allows you to catch any problems before they impact your customers.
Before going live, have employees submit test questions and review every response the AI tool generates. Look for anything that's inaccurate, off-brand, or potentially confusing for the customer. Most platforms let you run in a "preview" mode specifically for this purpose.
And rather than enabling AI across every channel at once, start with just one, like your website, and keep a close eye on the conversations it's having. For the first week, review the full chat transcripts carefully and note any areas where AI is falling short. Once you’re confident in how the AI tools are performing, you can slowly expand to other channels.
AI and safety
The biggest risk of using AI in customer service is that it may provide customers with incorrect information. To prevent wrong or overconfident answers, configure your AI to respond with something like "I'm not sure about that, but let me connect you with someone who can help" when it encounters a question outside its knowledge base. Review your knowledge base regularly to make sure it reflects your current pricing and policies.
Finally, make sure your AI tools know when to hand off the conversation to a human. Customers who are upset or requesting refunds above a certain threshold should be immediately passed off to a person. That agent should receive a full transcript of the prior conversation so the customer doesn’t have to start over from the beginning.
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