Breaking frontiers: 10 ways to use AI for your help desk

A functional help desk is key to customer satisfaction. With the growth of every company also comes great responsibility: attending to the inquiries and complaints of customers. If anything, leaving your customers with a positive experience could be the lifeblood of your business. Don’t agree with us? A report from Zendesk in 2022 shows that 81% of customers attribute their loyalty to a business to their positive customer experience. Therefore, ensuring your customers can quickly solve their problems could be how you retain a huge percentage of your prospects.

Despite the importance of this fact, statistics still show that customer service could use a boost in terms of response times. According to a Statista study, the wait times when using customer services range from less than a minute (40 seconds) to over 2 minutes (140 seconds). In an age where everyone wants the correct answers fast, we can all agree this can be improved.

So, in this article, we’ll walk you through how important AI is in bridging the gap between the ideal and the current state of customer service. Also, we’d highlight ten various ways utilizing AI in this field can bring about the necessary changes needed.

The importance of incorporating AI into help desk support

Now, we’d be lying if we said despite AI’s ground-breaking achievements, it hasn’t had its downsides. So, why exactly should you overlook its ‘numerous’ downsides and incorporate it into your customer service operations? We’ve got your answer below:

Improves customer service metrics

As a company, your data and metrics are the best way to judge how well your company is performing in certain areas. Customer support is no different from this. Metrics like time to resolution (the average period between a customer’s ticket and its resolution), customer satisfaction score (how satisfied your customers are with the services offered), and customer effort score (how difficult it is to complete an action with your company) can be improved when using AI in your helpdesk.

24/7 customer service support

Except you have infinite finances to spare, you’d most likely not have your customer service team working around the clock. However, your customers’ needs could come anytime (even in the thick of the night). The use of AI-powered help desks would ensure they can access some help in the night. If their requests aren’t too difficult, they could even resolve them without human interaction.

10 Ways to incorporate AI into your help desk

AI-powered help desks provide a great advantage to customer service agents, helping them execute their tasks smoothly. Below, we’ve highlighted ten different ways AI could be used to improve help desk support.

1. Personalized customer experiences

Imagine a consumer trying to have a subsequent conversation with your chatbot and is met with a “nice to hear from you again, (customer name)” response with some checkups about their last interaction. This would make them feel special and want to work with your brand again. This is an example of what personalized customer experiences with AI could offer. According to a Twilio study, 83% of consumers alluded that personalized customer service experiences improve their satisfaction with a company’s services.

2. Intelligent ticket routing and prioritization

To get the best out of your customer service team, there needs to be a structure in place that helps assign various custom tickets. It would be unwise to give routine inquiries to your most experienced or effective customer service staff to handle. AI-powered help desks could step in here to correctly assign these tickets and prioritize them based on their complexity. Sometimes, it could even resolve some routine inquiries without human intervention.

eesel AI is an example of this. Our AI tool can be easily customized to resolve routine inquiries (Tier 1 tickets) and assign more complex inquiries to the agents to handle.

3. Automate routine inquiries

Just as mentioned earlier, automation of routine inquiries would help save both consumers and customer service agents valuable time that could be used elsewhere. As long as the AI tool can provide helpful information that solves their problem, they’d gladly pick it over speaking to a human agent. That way, they do not have to endure long waiting times.

4. Optimize operating finances

Using AI-powered help desks would help you conserve finances that could be used in employing Tier 1 agents. With tools like Eesel AI, you can assign these low-difficulty tasks to the AI tool. Those resources can be used in more productive areas.

5. Analyze customer sentiments

With AI, you can analyze the customer’s sentiments judging by the tone of words used, emojis, and various other markers. This can help judge their satisfaction with the data received, hence providing reports to help better your customer service offerings.

6. Language translation

Language doesn’t have to be a barrier when working with AI-powered helpdesks. With these tools, you can get language translation back and forth, helping both parties understand each other without constraint. With eesel AI, for example, you get language support in over 80 languages, ensuring your customer service agents aren’t left stranded.

7. Integrations with other platforms

AI-powered help desks are also renowned for their ability to be incorporated across various platforms. Hence, you can use the AI even on the company’s platforms to pass across information. With Eesel AI, you get cross-platform collaboration with apps like Google Docs, Confluence, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Service Cloud, Zendesk, and many more.

8. Reports and AI analytics

Data is highly vital in judging the performance of your help desk team. However, being able to compile this data before the advent of AI used to be quite the task. However, by incorporating AI, you can get summaries of customer service conversations and their resolutions. You could analyze this data to get proper insights into your team’s performance and see how to improve.

9. Natural Language Processing

Unlike chatbots, where customers can only click on preset responses to access particular resources, AI-powered help desks go further. With Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, customers can express their inquiries/complaints in their own words with the help desks able to understand nuanced meanings and usings surrounding texts and trained on previous interactions.

10. Smart suggestions

This is useful for customer service agents. If you run a large company, the number of tickets customer service agents have to attend is usually voluminous, and editing text each time could be pretty frustrating. However, the smart suggestions and tone recommendations from AI could help rephrase statements in a more presentable way to the customer. You could also personalize the AI to have responses similar to one of your top-performing customer service agents. This is another capability eesel AI possesses.

Conclusion

AI-powered help desks are here to take over the future, with studies showing that 69% of customer service leaders plan to invest more in AI incorporation in 2024. Rather than working against the technology, embrace it and use it to improve customer service for your consumers. Try eesel AI today and see what the future could look like for your customer service.