Is your help desk team looking to achieve more with less? If you answered yes, you have probably considered Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a solution.
As more and more customers demand assistance that is highly personalized, easily navigable and provides quick resolution, businesses are showing keen interest in learning how AI improves help desk management.
From learning customer behavior patterns to improving response times to automating mundane tasks, AI can enhance the customer service experience in almost every way when it’s applied correctly.
However, there is a challenge.
The biggest problem with artificial intelligence is that businesses get excited and think, “We definitely need AI,” but they really don’t know how to implement it or where to even start.
If you are sailing in the same boat, this blog is for you. In this blog, we will understand how AI can transform your customer service process, discuss the role of AI-powered help desk software in automating tasks, and explore 8 ways AI can be used to improve help desk management.
Let’s go!
What Is Help Desk Management?
Help desk management is the process through which a business manages its internal and external support requests, issues, or complaints. The process helps you monitor your customer service operations and enables you to deliver delightful service experiences that drive customer loyalty.
Help desk management involves everything from training new customer service agents to monitoring your team’s performance with help desk software. It even involves forming relevant strategies to personalize interactions and investing in the right AI technologies.
Why Should You Power Help Desk With AI?
Artificial intelligence is making the world a better place for businesses and customers alike. Whether it is sales, marketing, HR, or customer service, the role of AI in augmenting complex processes has been immense.
For help desk teams around the world, AI has proved to be nothing short of a miracle. It has helped businesses avoid repetitive tasks, enhance productivity, offer 24×7 support, and delight customers with personalized interactions.
For example, AI in the form of virtual assistants has taken a lot of pressure off agents’ shoulders, giving them more time to focus on other urgent tasks. Similarly, AI is also helping support teams by automatically routing, prioritizing, and categorizing help desk tickets.
Top 8 Ways AI Can Support Help Desk Management
In the era of fading customer loyalties, how do help desk teams offer great customer service? The answer lies in artificial intelligence. Let’s explore the top ways in which AI improves help desk management.
1. Offer 24×7 Support With Chatbots
Whenever anyone thinks about help desk automation, the first thing that comes to mind is AI-powered chatbots. But what exactly are chatbots?
A chatbot is a sophisticated computer application that can hold human-like conversations with website visitors. Bots can be developed to generate leads, assist customers, or help internal employees with their queries.
AI-powered chatbots, leveraging technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), respond intelligently to visitor inquiries. These bots can also employ paid or free text-to-speech tool, enhancing user experience by converting text responses into spoken words for seamless communication, also use text to identify specific words and phrases, share smart responses, or take necessary follow-up actions.
The truth is that customers can encounter an issue anytime and would expect your team to help. If your help desk team does not operate 24×7, chatbots can fill in those hours and offer round-the-clock assistance.
2. Share Knowledge Base Articles
The best thing about self-service is that customers love it, and your business has nothing to lose. In fact, you can bless customers with a delightful self-service experience, enhance agent productivity, and reduce your ticket volume – all at the same time.
Did you know that 90% of customers globally expect businesses to have an online self-service knowledge base?
So what role does AI play here? Well, with an AI help desk, you can automatically suggest relevant knowledge base articles to website visitors depending on their search keywords. For instance, if the customer types the words “refund policy” in their query, AI can automatically trace refund-related articles, FAQ pages, video tutorials, etc., and share them with the visitor.
It is important to note that sometimes these suggestions might not be a hundred percent accurate. Therefore, you must give customers the option to connect with an agent if they are unhappy with the suggested links/content.
3. Understand Customer Feedback Better With Sentiment Analysis
Modern businesses have access to data from numerous sources – customer reviews, survey feedback, and social media comments or mentions. But the question is how do you sort through this data and make sense of it all?
Sentiment analysis can help you understand the hidden positive or negative emotions behind a text. You can understand whether a text is favorable, unfavorable, or neutral for your business.
With an AI help desk solution, you can share surveys and understand the real “sentiments” behind customer feedback. For instance, you can share open-ended questions with customers like, “What was your recent support experience like?” In this case, AI can assign a sentiment analysis score to each feedback response and help you understand whether a customer is happy, sad, or neutral.
Sentiment analysis is a great technique to get closer to your customers, identify their unique needs and interests, and improve your process.
4. Ticket Routing and Categorization
If your business receives hundreds or thousands of tickets every day, you can lose track of important issues. In such a scenario, ticket routing and categorization can be the most important features.
With a proper ticket routing process, you can ensure every ticket has a relevant owner. Similarly, better categorization will help you keep your help desk inbox well-organized.
AI can improve help desk management by automatically routing tickets to the most appropriate staff members. Whenever a request or issue comes in, AI can compare it with past tickets and automatically assign tags for better categorization.
But that’s not all. AI can even judge the severity of an issue and prioritize it accordingly. This can help your agents avoid repetitive tasks and focus on more pressing customer issues.
5. Leverage AI-Powered Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Remember the time you called a customer service team and were guided by an automated voice? Well, that is a popular technology called interactive voice response or IVR.
IVR is an automated call center technology that allows callers to find solutions via a voice response system. Callers can hear recorded messages and respond via voice or DTMF tones.
AI-powered IVR can help your business cut costs by automating routine calls such as appointment booking inquiries, order confirmations, and more. Moreover, AI can detect high-empathy calls, prioritize them, and automatically route them to the right agent.
Particularly during times of high call volume, AI-powered IVR can ensure only the most complex and high-value calls are assigned to agents. This, in turn, will help your team avoid long hold times and reduce the average call abandonment rate.
6. Assist Agents With Their Tasks
Customer service agents have a lot of tasks on their plates – chatting with customers, reading emails, escalating urgent issues, and so on. Can AI help your agents become more efficient in their day-to-day tasks? The answer is a big YES.
AI improves help desk function by helping agents make faster decisions every minute.
For example, during a phone support conversation, AI can translate speech into text in real-time and ensure the agent does not miss out on any important details shared by the caller. Similarly, AI can be used to remind agents about their pending tasks or tickets that are nearing SLA breach.
In addition to this, AI can search for relevant help articles for specific issues, then surface them in the Agent Console during conversations. This way, your agents will no longer have to waste time manually searching for key resources.
7. Help Customers Make Better Purchase Decisions
The maximum number of service requests or complaints are related to customers making the wrong purchase decision.
Think about a customer trying to return a clothing product that does not fit or a customer complaining about an adapter that is not compatible with his mobile device.
An AI help desk solution offers chatbots that can assist customers in making the best purchase decisions. Bots can answer customer questions instantly, gather complete details about what they are looking for, and offer customers personalized product or service recommendations.
Artificial intelligence can also refer to the past purchase or browsing history of a customer and recommended products with the highest chances of purchase.
8. Leverage Predictive Insights
Predictive analytics uses internal and external data to forecast future trends. This enables your business to understand customer expectations and optimize your support process.
When it comes to help desk management, artificial intelligence has turned data analysis on its head. It offers you rich insights into customer behavior and helps you predict their future actions.
AI with predictive analytics can make your valuable customers feel like the entire support process has been designed for them. AI can help you understand their preferred communication channels, expectations regarding an agent, and the best time to contact them.
Based on their recent support interactions and other behavior, AI can help you identify customers who pose the highest risk of churn and provide insights into the best strategies to retain them.
Delight Customers With Help Desk Automation
Artificial intelligence has transformed how help desk teams operate around the world and assist customers with their queries or complaints. Agents no longer solely depend on manual methods or traditional channels like phone or email.
It is clear as day that AI improves help desk management in multiple ways. This advanced technology is being used to automate tasks, offer 24×7 support via chatbots, assist agents, predict customer behavior, and enable customers to direct and control the experience.
So if you are looking to leverage AI to transform your customer service, it is a great idea to start now. Don’t worry; there is no need to make any heavy investments. You can even start with an AI-powered solution such as ProProfs Help Desk and delight customers with automated support.
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