When you deliver top-notch experience during service, repeat customers often act as brand advocates. In the long run, this can spread positive word-of-mouth and gradually convert more prospective customers. 

Customer experience is gradually assuming the center stage. For instance, McKinsey research reveals that two-thirds of millennials seek real-time support, and three-quarters of all customers want a cross-channel service experience. 

While adding more agents to your CX team is the ideal option, the cost of hiring and training them may not always be a viable route. 

This is why many forward-thinking businesses are turning to AI to help them provide proactive and personalized support to win over modern customers. A top-tier customer support team equipped with a powerful AI help desk solution can make this possible. 

According to HubSpot, in 2024, 85% of customer service leaders acknowledge the role of AI in improving response times, and CSAT, and decreasing customer service costs. 

An AI help desk transforms a traditional help desk into a proactive and organized system that accelerates query resolution. In this blog post, we'll explore how AI help desks can create a seamless customer experience.

How does an AI helpdesk work?

Having the right artificial intelligence help desk solution in your customer support tech stack can help you live up to your customer's expectations and leave a positive impression. It can significantly improve how your team handles help desk tickets and resolves customer issues seamlessly.  

Here are some of the ways you can integrate AI into your help desk operations for more productive support workflows and higher customer satisfaction: 

Chatbots for 24/7 support

Chatbots are AI-powered software that can be trained to mimic human behavior by leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to understand, interpret, and respond to human language. 

By utilizing machine learning algorithms, these chatbots can be trained on vast datasets to enhance their ability to engage with users in a contextually relevant manner, ultimately ensuring an optimal customer experience as they can respond to customer queries at any time of the day and handle inbound traffic when all the agents are busy. 

For instance, a customer looking for details of a particular feature can be directed to the appropriate content or knowledge base articles without involving a human agent. 

Lastly, a chatbot can also be configured to immediately hand over complex issues to a human agent if customers are unsatisfied with the responses.

Efficient management with automation 

AI help desk solutions can take over most of the repetitive tasks from your agents. This could range from simple tasks like categorizing support tickets and logging calls and texts into your CRM–all the repetitive work that should ideally require minimal human intervention. 

The best artificial intelligence help desk providers eliminate the need to hire more agents by offering automated query resolution that expands your existing agents’ bandwidth.

Improve performance with AI-powered agent assistants 

AI-powered agent assistants provide agents with all the information they need to resolve customers’ queries. Given how sensitive and crucial every customer conversation is, empowering agents with the right prompts and guidance can make a huge difference. 

Tapping into customer data history helps agents build rapport and demonstrate empathy during calls. 

During live chats, AI-powered assistants provide real-time prompts and suggestions to agents, ensuring smooth and efficient conversations without awkward pauses or fumbles.

You can deploy this tool to prepare your rookie agents to handle customer calls easily and help seasoned agents perform at their peak.  

Integrated knowledge base articles

 With NLP and machine learning, AI chatbots can help organize and recommend articles to customers with minimal agent intervention. 

For instance, if a customer wants to learn about the different features of different subscription plans, they may type keywords like ‘pricing plans’ or the specific names of the pricing plans. In this scenario, the AI chatbot integrated with the knowledge base will automatically pull out the relevant articles, FAQs, and tutorials for the customers.

Smarter query resolution with ticket routing

Whether you lead an enterprise-sized business or an SMB, you’re likely to encounter the problem of high ticket volumes. Managing and routing these inbound queries to the right person can exceed the bandwidth of an already busy support team. 

Smart ticket routing with AI solves this problem by directing calls to suitable agents based on pre-defined criteria such as experience level and availability. 

This results in the timely resolution of customer queries while preventing agent burnout as every agent handles queries relevant to their use cases. 

Incident prioritization

AI-powered incident prioritization also relies on NLP, predictive analytics, and machine learning (ML). It adequately handles security breaches and other critical incidents requiring immediate attention from your support teams. This way, AI helps prioritize tickets based on urgency and potential for churn. 

As a result, you can ensure that your customer service team can offer swift support in make-or-break situations, especially where customers are likely to churn. Some providers may also provide the option to prioritize tickets based on sentiment and topic. 

Benefits of using AI help desks

Let’s look at some of the top advantages of using an artificial intelligence help desk for your customer support: 

Improved response times

90% of service professionals suggest that AI has helped them serve their customers faster. AI features like AI chatbots, intelligent routing, and automation all contribute to shorter response times. 

Take inbound calls—where the nature of queries demands the expertise of specific agents. AI-powered smart routing ensures that customers are immediately connected to the right agent, eliminating the need to pass calls from one agent to another manually. 

This saves a lot of time for both the agent as well as the customer and helps put the focus on quicker query resolution. Support teams can easily rely on AI chatbots to field simple, repetitive queries without human intervention. In most cases, the query gets resolved at this first point of contact.

Increased agent availability

AI, especially help desk automation features, takes up most of your manual, repetitive workload. For instance, with automation features, agents no longer need to spend time manually recording call details in the CRM—automated integrations will do the job for you. 

Hubspot data suggests that 67% of support leaders are already seeing value from their automation efforts. 

Another case in point is an AI-powered chatbot with an integrated knowledge base that can field the most basic inbound questions and queries. With the more frequent queries out of the way, more agents can take customer queries and resolve them seamlessly.

Increased scalability

AI-powered help desk solutions can easily handle a huge volume of queries and tasks simultaneously without adding any operational costs of scaling up. 

For most e-commerce businesses, the holiday season is a time of surge in customer calls and queries. AI eliminates the need to hire additional staff to handle the huge volumes of customer inquiries, ensuring big cost savings on hiring efforts. 

According to Intercom research, 60% of support leaders expect AI to be important in reducing support costs over the next five years, mainly by improving team efficiency. With most of the manual tasks being handled by the AI help desk, the cost of hiring and training additional support staff is out of the picture. 

Better insights

Artificial intelligence combined with predictive analytics and NLP reveals much about your customers. 42% of customer service pros using AI/automation state that AI tools help collect and analyze customer feedback, significantly improving the customer experience.

Powerful insights like customer sentiment, customer behavior, and areas for improvement help you deliver high-quality, proactive support. Additionally, it alerts you about potential signs of customer churn so you can put out the fire at the right time. 

For instance, a subscription-based SaaS business can use AI to detect negative sentiment in a particular conversation and take corrective action to boost retention rates. 

Plivo CX: Automate responses to 70% of customer queries

When it comes to boosting help desk productivity and improving customer satisfaction, Plivo CX can step in as an all-in-one solution to revamp the customer support tech stack of SMBs. 

Here are notable features that make it a reliable and effective solution for your help desk management efforts: 

Unified agent desktop

Pursuing an omnichannel customer support approach, most modern businesses are open to serving their customers on their preferred channels. This is why Plivo CX offers a Unified Agent Desktop, a centralized hub for managing customer interactions across various channels (LiveChat, SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, etc.). This provides a comprehensive view of the customer queries by consolidating their context and interaction history. Also, agents no longer need to switch between channels. 

AI chatbots and voice bots 

The platform also has OpenAI-powered self service chatbots and intuitive voice bots that handle 50-60% of customer requests with minimal agent involvement. The added advantage is that it comes integrated with customizable knowledge bases that help customers get an easy resolution for their queries.  

Pre-built integrations with popular CRMs, helpdesks, and business tools

Plivo CX streamlines your workflow by offering seamless integration with HubSpot, Help Scout, Zendesk, Salesforce, HappyFox, and other essential business tools, including custom-built systems.

This eliminates the need for constant window-switching, allowing your customer support team to operate efficiently from a single platform.

No-code workflow builder

The drag-and-drop workflow builder allows you to create pre-built customer journeys without complex coding or agent intervention. You can visually build workflows, set up actions, and trigger them based on data or system events. If things get complicated, you can easily hand off to a live agent. Plus, the system makes sure the right agent gets the right question, and your data is always safe and secure.

Historical reports and live dashboards 

To ensure that your agents are performing well, you’ll need access to in-depth data and insights from every customer conversation. Plivo CX’s live dashboards and historical reports provide all the necessary data to get an eagle-eye view of your performance. 

Using Plivo CX for your help desk management, you can tap into the power of AI built into a solid omnichannel platform that enables higher customer satisfaction and builds burnout-free processes for agents. 

Ready to take your help desk productivity to the next level? 

‍Book a demo to learn more.