Artificial Intelligence ( AI) disrupts the customer service industry by reducing the burden on human operators. One of the most practical ways to enhance the customer experience is by making resolutions faster for the clients. In contact center industry, it is called Customer Response Time.

Although achievable by humans alone, if the business is rapidly growing, things often get tricky. Let us look at how we can use Artificial Intelligence in this blog to prioritize customer needs and accelerate the road to resolution.

 

What is Customer Service Response Time?

Man screaming and people responding

Response time, commonly used in Customer Care and Service, is the time taken between when the customer posed a problem and when a support team member first answered the raised question.

Response time is considered as a major contributor to the customer retention potential of a business. It is an important metric to track and develop because your customers feel recognized and important by a quick response. They want to know that their company is valued and appreciated, perhaps more so because, because of the hyper-competitive nature of the market, they know that they can take their business elsewhere.

 

Unfortunately, 62 percent of businesses do not respond to E-mails from customer service, according to a survey. User experience of organizations might sometimes go off track even if they try hard to prioritize it, here are the top reasons why –

 

Agent Performance: The shortage of informed customer service agents is one of the main factors that could affect your response time. If your agent is not well educated and is trying to find the correct and fast solutions, problems that could potentially be resolved in 10 minutes will take hours or even days.

 

Lack of Technology: Today, not utilizing technology will make businesses fail. Resources can be wasted by not using a comprehensive Helpdesk, a canned response, or chatbot conversation. You can get away if you receive 5-6 E-mails a day, but as the company expands and customer needs increase, it can be overwhelming to keep track of Email queries.

 

Lack of KPI Tracking: Management teams are also a big factor in slowing down agents if they do not follow up on the metrics and hold their workers accountable. For example, failing to see what the priority of your customer query is can lead your agents to treat them as equal, failing to fulfill their SLAs.

 

How to Improve Your Response Time?

Response time getting improved

Time is most certainly essential when it comes to customer service. Here are several ways to reduce response times by using Artificial Intelligence.

 

    • Improve Your Response Time with Voice Assistant

Voice bot improving response time

Voice Assistants are software programs supported by AI and Natural Language Processing ( NLP) that are designed to simulate human conversation. Voice Assistants can streamline problem-solving processes by allowing businesses to deflect basic queries and repeated tickets and drive improved customer experience.

AI-Powered Voice Assistant experience ensures faster real-time response times 24x7x365. They are present in almost every industry such as e-commerce, retail, etc., conveniently integrated into telephony, VOIR etc.

 

Voice bots like Kwantics AI Voice Assistants are proving to be innovative in delivering reliable data to customers and instant replies within seconds. This encourages customers to use self-service support. At the same time, slow response time can result from emails or chat.

It requires regular follow up, seeking the right information, long wait times, transfers of calls, and much more. But that could be taken care of by automation and AI Voice Assistant implementation. 

 

    • Improve your Response Time with Business Intelligence Tools

You can’t improve the areas which you are not tracking. Setting up KPIs and religiously monitoring them will help you get ahead of the curve, which is very important for the smooth running of an organization. Aligning your KPIs with business plans would help you concentrate on enhancing the efficiency of your agent and customer satisfaction.

 

Business Intelligence (BI) tools are very useful in analyzing consumer behavior and ticket trends by quickly searching through stacks of data. This helps you keep track of the challenges you sometimes face and make business decisions that are data-driven, such as how to manage resources to meet demand.

It will also help you motivate your agents well by providing a good understanding and visual snapshot of the time your agents have been investing, to provide your customers with the best possible service, faster.

 

    • A Clear Understanding of Your Clients

Man rating service as a client

Support software powered by AI allows agents to view in seconds the complete history of support operations for each client. They will be able to see what concerns they have encountered in the past and how they have been handled.

AI will also monitor new client behavior and automatically update the system. This means that without having to make updates themselves, the agents will still have up-to-date data.

 

    • Suggest Historical Threads

One way to solve complicated problems for CSRs is by looking at similar past threads (which have been resolved successfully) and learning how those problems have been solved. In contact centers, speech analytics can be used to understand trends.

This can be done by automating the process with Machine Learning and NLP by suggesting historical threads for each support application. This ensures that the service representatives do thorough research, contact persons and managers for help with a problem.

Again, this will help increase response times and maybe even improve the first touch resolution as the members of the service are better prepared to deal with problems.

 

On a conclusive note, customers expect a response that is not only fast but also reliable when they bring complaints or concerns to a business. 48 percent of customers expect an answer to social media questions and concerns within 24 hours, according to a survey.

That is why successful businesses around the world are looking to invest in instruments that use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to find effective solutions for customer service to separate themselves from their rivals. Sustainable AI solutions will grow!

Interested in how AI-Powered products like AI Voice Assistant can help your business and boost the productivity of call center agent? Request a free live demo of our AI Solutions. Click Here!