We’ve all heard about the benefits of AI – whether it’s providing personalised customer service, boosting customer loyalty or reducing your agents’ workload. But what about the ROI of AI-driven customer service?
This post will serve as a comprehensive guide to calculating the tangible, quantifiable benefits of implementing AI in customer service. We’ll leverage insights from our partners at Zendesk, a leader in AI-driven customer service solutions, to illustrate our points.
Here at redk, we dive into the nitty gritty of AI solutions so you can determine whether they’re right for your business. Let’s get into it.
“Zendesk AI allows us to focus on things like quality and coaching instead of wasting time reading through tickets and manually categorising.”
Director of Customer Service Operations, Liberty London
Enhancing Agent Productivity Through AI Empowerment
When we empower agents with AI, productivity improvements are incremental and transformative. Zendesk’s Advanced AI can lead to a 10% increase in productivity, yielding an impressive $146,000 (£117,070) in annual savings from productivity gains. This figure is based on the premise that AI tools streamline workflows, enabling agents to resolve customer issues more quickly and accurately with macro suggestions and reduced context-switching.
This efficiency isn’t simply about cutting costs but reallocating resources towards more complex and revenue-generating activities. By harnessing AI, agents are transformed into high-performing assets, driving customer satisfaction and financial results.
Streamlining Operations with Automated Triage
Zendesk’s Advanced AI can help businesses save 220 hours per month with automatic ticket classification and triage, transforming operational efficiency.
Zendesk AI’s Intelligent Triage feature can save an average of 45 seconds per ticket. For a business processing 78,828 tickets per month, this translates to a monthly saving of $63,000 (£50,516).
Automated ticket triage cuts out the manual work of responding to repeated requests, leading to a significant cost reduction and a notable increase in the throughput of customer service requests. This is not merely a cost-saving measure but a strategic move to enhance the customer experience and improve response times without increasing your team’s workload.
Capitalising on Deflection with Bots
The concept of deflection in customer service refers to resolving customer inquiries through automated systems, such as Zendesk’s Advanced Bot. Pre-trained bots can solve customer issues with generated responses based on your company’s Knowledge Base without human interaction.
Applying Zendesk Advanced AI leads to a 3X increase in bot deflection.
This level of deflection implies that AI is handling more and more customer interactions and resolving them effectively. Using Zendesk’s Advanced Bot across email and messaging channels can reduce the cost per ticket to $1.40 (£1.12), leading to a noteworthy annual saving of $264,000 (£211,689). These additional inquiries deflected by the AI system demonstrate the bot’s efficacy and the cost-saving potential of AI in customer service.
Empowering Agents with AI-Driven Insights
AI doesn’t just automate; it informs. AI-driven insights provide agents with real-time data and recommendations, enabling them to make informed decisions swiftly. This empowerment leads to a more nuanced and sophisticated customer interaction, fostering a service environment where quality and speed are not mutually exclusive.
Generative AI tools can summarise conversations, adapt the tone of voice and provide accurate and consistent responses. By equipping agents with these AI capabilities, companies are seeing an improvement in the speed and efficiency of service delivery and the quality of interactions, which can profoundly impact customer loyalty and lifetime value.
AI is a great investment
In conclusion, AI in customer service is proving to be a prudent financial investment, delivering impressive returns through enhanced productivity, streamlined operations, and empowered agents.
The detailed savings highlighted by Zendesk’s figures speak volumes about the potential for AI to not only cut costs but also to drive revenue and improve service quality. These savings are a testament to the power of AI to revolutionise the customer service industry and create a competitive advantage.
