June Success Spotlight: Using Bots to Improve your Overall Support Experience

This month’s Success Spotlight features Helpshift Customer Success Manager, Mckenna Morey, on simple ways to start adding AI and Bots into support workflows without losing the human element.

1. Why do you think support teams fear adding AI & bots into their workflows?

When companies hear the words “chatbots” and “support” in the same sentence, it’s easy to start thinking about previous support interactions with bots that involved long phone calls and wait times, repetitive conversations, and barriers from contacting an actual human.

Because of these negative experiences in the past, teams sometimes assume that chatbots cannot be used in support without somehow breaking or limiting the user experience. In an era where the quality of support can either be a brand differentiator or a brand deterrent, these are all valid concerns. As customer success managers, it’s our goal to show clients how they can leverage these technologies without sacrificing the quality of service.

2. How is the way that Helpshift is thinking about AI different?

Helpshift understands these concerns and has built (and is continuing to build) our AI & bot feature set with the end user in mind. Customers often come to our team with the goal of improving ticket deflection, enhancing agent efficiency, or limiting the need to hire additional support agents.

Because of the way that Helpshift’s suite of AI & bots function and work together, it’s easy to show customers that they can achieve these goals while also improving the user experience rather than detracting from it.

3. In what ways can AI and bots improve the support experience for users?

Helpshift bots don’t function solely as a gate that prevents users from contacting an agent. Instead, while our technology does improve accessibility to self-service, it also helps guide users to the correct agent or team without requiring the user to fill out a form.

Rather than fill out a form with complex drop downs that may or may not go to the right team, users just need to describe their problem in a message. The user interface is conversational and more personal. Based on the content of the message, bots can ask for more information rather than waiting around for an agent to do so. By the time the ticket gets to an agent, agents have the info they need to solve the ticket, leading to a decreased resolution time.

Finally, the AI engine can route tickets based on priority. Time-sensitive issues will be answered first, leading to an overall better experience for users!

4. In what ways can AI and bots improve ticket deflection?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are the best and easiest way to help users self-serve without agent interaction. As a customer success manager, I’m always being asked how to promote FAQs and how to eliminate support issues that could be answered with an existing FAQ.

Helpshift’s QuickSearch Bot has been the perfect solution for my clients because it uses Natural Language Processing to suggest relevant FAQs within the conversation. FAQs are suggested based on the content of the users’ first message before the ticket is even created. QuickSearch Bot not only helps to deflect tickets, but it maintains a positive user experience by making it simple and easy to submit a ticket if a question is not adequately answered through an FAQ.

5. In what ways can AI and bots improve the agent experience and efficiency?

Helpshift believes that an agent’s job should be to solve complex problems, not collect data. On the success team, we’re always hearing questions about how we can help eliminate repetitive questions from agents’ daily work. By first eliminating simple questions with QuickSearch Bot and by then automating the collection of data from users, agents’ daily work inherently becomes more complex, challenging, and interesting.

Interested in learning more about Helpshift’s suite of turnkey AI & bots? Request a demo here.