Integrating AI with Human Agents: Building an Efficient Hybrid Customer Service Model

Why Hybrid Customer Service Models are the Future

The statistics speak for themselves:

• By 2025, 37% of customers will try to use a virtual assistant to interact with a company’s customer support. If your human team can’t keep up, you risk losing almost 4 out of 10 clients.
• 60% of US customers believe that chatbots save them time—a further 45% of those surveyed like getting instant answers from the bots.
• Over 70% of companies are already using or developing AI applications. If you don’t, you might be left behind.
• 86% of customers prefer to speak to a human consultant. 71% of those surveyed said they’d stop dealing with a company that didn’t have human consultants. Therefore, you need hybrid customer service rather than full on AI-based solutions.

From a practical standpoint, chatbots aren’t capable of handling all types of queries. You need hybrid customer service models to support customer satisfaction.

The Role of AI in Customer Service

AI can handle multiple functions for your clients and internal support team. Some common tasks include:

• Answering Frequently Asked Questions: You can program AI to answer common queries instantly. It will always give the right answer and never have an “off” day. You can make this available to your clients and employees to save time and improve customer satisfaction.
• Handling Tickets: Customer support automation makes it possible for AI to sort and categorize client queries based on their urgency and complexity. It can also direct the queries to the right department. This is one of the most common ways businesses start integrating AI with human agents.
• Sentiment Analysis: Ten years ago, you needed to listen in on calls or read hours of logs to monitor customer interactions. Today, you can task AI to detect tone and sentiment. It can then highlight sensitive conversations in real-time. It can also sort through historical data to see how your team is doing.
• Data Collection: Is a product of yours problematic? Are customers wanting you to add more features? AI can collect and analyze data from several sources to identify trends.

The Role of Human Agents

AI-powered support has its limits. Bots can mimic empathy up to a point, but they can’t match a human response. They also lack the imagination to come up with creative responses. Bots can’t feel emotions like humans can, so they’ll miss subtle cues that the customer is dissatisfied.

You need human agents to:

• Handle Complex Issues: Bots can’t make decisions outside of their programming. A human agent can apply advanced and creative problem-solving.
• Provide Emotional Support: Your customers may feel upset, frustrated, or confused and human agents can respond appropriately. Bots deliver standard responses. Therefore, a hybrid customer service model gives you the best of both worlds.
• Make Judgment Calls: AI is better at understanding the context of queries thanks to advances in natural language programming. However, human agents have intuition. They might pick up on pauses and other cues that AI would miss.

The Top 5 Benefits of a Hybrid Model

Most people assume that hybrid customer service models only augment human service with AI. However, you can also incorporate AI for customer support agents. Let’s examine the potential benefits for your company.

1. Improved Productivity and Accuracy

Integrating AI with human agents allows you to automate repetitive tasks. This feature allows your consultants to focus on more complex and high-value interactions. In addition, your employees will deal with fewer boring or repetitive queries. This improves their job satisfaction.

As a further benefit, you’ll see an increase in accuracy when it comes to tedious tasks. AI can complete these tasks flawlessly, without making transcription errors. Human employees are more prone to make mistakes when they’re bored.

If you use AI internally, your employees can search several databases for the answers they need. They’ll, therefore, be able to complete tasks more quickly, improving efficiency.

This functionality is particularly useful for management teams. You can not only ask the system for reports about a particular issue, you can ask it to summarize the content. Depending on the bot, you can usually ask it to highlight areas of concern and suggest improvements.

2. Scalability with Hybrid Customer Service Models

What happens to your call center during peak periods? What if customer queries suddenly increase? If you’re like most businesses, service levels drop. Integrating AI with human agents enables you to scale up your operations effortlessly and affordably.

There are several ways that machines can help. They can divert calls to the right areas. Voice-enabled systems can answer simple client queries, without the customer needing to speak to a person.

It can also automate follow-ups and other tasks to relieve the pressure on your team.

3. Cost Savings with Hybrid Customer Service

You won’t need as many human consultants when you augment your support team with AI. You can still deliver great service without paying a fortune.

Your bots work tirelessly and never need sick leave or time off. You don’t have to pay them salaries or worry about benefits. Developing your bot is a one-off expense. Thereafter, you might pay a negligible amount for each answer, but it’s nowhere near as expensive as hiring human consultants.

4. 24/7 Availability with Hybrid Support Solutions

Running a full-time support center can be prohibitively expensive. Bots are available 24/7 and can handle a number of queries when your team is offline. Your human agents can follow up with more complex questions when they return.

5. Better Customer Satisfaction by Integrating AI and Human Agents

Some clients prefer to deal with bots, and others prefer to deal with humans. By having both, you give your customers the best of both worlds.

Your customers with simple queries get the quick answers they need. Those with complex questions benefit because they don’t have to wait as long for a consultant.

The Challenges of Integrating AI and Human Agents

There are clear benefits to the hybrid customer support models. However, before you sign on the dotted line, you need to understand that it’s not all sunshine and roses.

Integration Complexity

It’s sometimes difficult to integrate AI with your existing systems. That’s why it’s important to deal with a full-service provider.

Training and Change Management

Some employees will embrace the new systems. Others will feel intimidated by them. They may even fear that AI will replace them. You need to deal with these issues before integrating AI with human agents.

Ensuring AI Accuracy

AI will give consistent answers. However, these will only be as good as the training you provide. You’ll need to carefully train your bot and update it regularly before implementing your hybrid customer service models.

It’s a good idea to work with a company that has a traceable track record in this area.

Maintaining the Human Touch

You have to be careful not to rely on AI too much. You need to balance automation and human interaction to improve customer satisfaction.

Best Practices When Implementing the Hybrid Model

Let’s look at how you can make the implementation successful:

• Start with a small trial and simple tasks. You can scale up the systems as necessary.
• Create seamless workflows and ensure that the AI can easily escalate complex issues. You’ll need to train the bot to identify these issues as early as possible. You should always give clients the option to speak to a person.
• You must invest in agent training so your employees properly understand how integrating AI with human agents will work.
• View this as an ongoing process. Monitor the performance of the system and tweak it as necessary.
• Personalization is key. You should ensure that the bot can access past customer interactions and purchases. This enables it to create a seamless experience.

Conclusion

Integrating AI with human agents can enhance your customer support process. The bots can help your clients and employees access the information they need quickly and efficiently.

The key to success is partnering with a company that adopts a full-service approach. You want a firm that will work with you until the system is up and running.

From there, it’s a matter of deciding what tasks you’ll hand over to AI and how you’ll utilize your human team. With careful planning, you can offer your clients the best of both worlds.