With a view to create an ideal buyer expertise, buyer assist groups should be environment friendly. The extra environment friendly they’re, the faster they will reply to requests. The faster they reply to requests, the sooner prospects get a decision. And the sooner prospects get a decision to their situation, the happier they’re (usually talking).
For smaller assist groups, it’s widespread for many brokers to be generalists, which means they will reply to mainly any request that comes their manner. Nevertheless, as groups develop in measurement, it’s pretty widespread for folks to start out specializing in several areas. One group of brokers may deal with billing questions and one other the extra technical requests.
As soon as that specialization begins, there’s a brand new ticket administration layer added the place sure requests must get routed to particular folks and groups. In years previous, groups have addressed this in just a few methods. Generally a group member manually triages requests. In different instances they use consumption types that assist kind conversations. Many assist instruments additionally provide workflow options that may route tickets to brokers primarily based on particular key phrases within the message physique or topic line or by one other figuring out function like a group’s enterprise hours or the sender’s e-mail.
Within the final couple of years, some assist desks have added an alternative choice: AI ticket routing.
What’s AI ticket routing?
AI ticket routing is a course of the place synthetic intelligence types requests mechanically primarily based on components like sentiment or subject. AI may be preferable to an answer like an automatic workflow as a result of it doesn’t solely depend on key phrases. As an alternative, it makes use of pure language processing (NLP) to not solely determine the subject of a buyer message but additionally its intent. By way of machine studying, the AI also can get higher at recognizing patterns in several request varieties and make fewer sorting errors over time.
What are the professionals and cons of AI ticket routing?
Buyer assist is a troublesome job, plain and easy. It’s no marvel groups are intrigued by AI ticket routing, which may also help make issues a contact simpler. Nevertheless, whereas automated ticket routing actually has the power to make a constructive distinction, there are a few potential pitfalls. Listed below are some professionals and cons to AI ticket routing.
Execs
Sooner responses for patrons
With AI ticket routing, groups can assign tickets to the fitting folks in seconds. Due to that, brokers get requests sooner and prospects obtain a response extra rapidly as properly. For instance, if a buyer reaches out a couple of billing situation AI might acknowledge and route that request on to your billing group. Or, if you happen to’re utilizing an consumption kind and a buyer selects the flawed division, AI might probably catch that and rectify the problem by sending it to the fitting spot. This additionally means you would get extra granular over time with the way you kind requests (ex. routing not solely to the proper division but additionally to the particular person in that division most able to resolving the problem), serving to your group be much more environment friendly.
Much less stress for human brokers
Anybody who’s been on queue triage responsibility is aware of it may be a bit monotonous. By outsourcing request sorting to AI you save a human agent from doing the work. This implies fewer rote duties (that are usually those that put on folks down most) and additional time to concentrate on extra rewarding work. As an alternative of wanting by every request individually, brokers can merely monitor the queue, rerouting something that occurs to return to the flawed inbox. As AI sees these corrections, it will get a extra refined understanding of the place every sort of request ought to go, which means routing errors will drop over time.
Cons
It may be costly
Reducing-edge tech often doesn’t come low-cost, and AI ticket routing software program isn’t any totally different. Not all assist desks provide AI-powered ticket routing, so the function could require including one other device (and subscription payment) to your assist stack. For those who do, it’s usually relegated to the highest-cost plans. There are additionally the potential prices related to coaching and organising the function and managing ongoing upkeep. In the long run, larger groups could make the funding again in effectivity positive aspects, however for smaller, lower-volume groups, it’s not as sure.
Complicated instances can result in sorting errors
AI could be very spectacular at understanding sentiment and recognizing patterns. That makes it excellent at sorting primary requests (assume issues like password resets or refund requests). Nevertheless, for issues which are extra nuanced or requests that contain a couple of query, it struggles. Which means that it could possibly be extra more likely to put these tickets within the flawed place, probably extending a buyer’s wait time for a response.
Bettering the client expertise is all the time high of thoughts for assist groups, and for some, AI ticket routing could possibly be a great way to try this. Nevertheless, simply as it’s with any software program buy, you need to take time to judge the choices earlier than leaping in ft first.