The Ticket: How AI is transforming customer service tech stacks

Over the last decade, support tech stacks have become fragmented and clunky, slowing support teams down and holding them back from providing fast, personal customer experiences.

Now, with recent tech advancements, support teams that adopt a complete AI-first platform can provide world-class customer experiences at phenomenal scale. With an AI engine at the core – rather than bolted on to the edges – your team can provide personalized support at scale, boost team and operational efficiency, and improve the business with data-driven insights.

In the latest episode of The Ticket podcast, our Director of Human Support, Bobby Stapleton and Declan Ivory, our VP of Customer Support, unpack this evolution.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation:

• Support tech stacks are fragmented and outdated: Historically – through no fault of busy support teams – the customer service industry has been slow to innovate. Over time, support tech stacks have become disconnected and overly complex, often consisting of multiple point solutions, including a main customer support system, with additional tools for things like workforce management, QA, and multiple integrations bolted on to the edges. Now with advances in AI, it’s increasingly clear how hodgepodge tech stacks are impeding your business growth.
• AI should be at the core, not the edges: An AI-powered customer service platform empowers support teams to analyze conversation data, quickly spot trends in issues, and deliver personalized experiences – at scale. A consolidated platform is far more beneficial and efficient than trying to pull data from multiple point solutions or managing separate parts of your process through specialist tools. Bonus: Your support team can become the voice of the customer, providing the rest of the organization with valuable insights.
• An AI engine improves the customer experience: You don’t have to make the shift to an AI-powered platform all at once. First, you might use an AI bot to resolve repetitive queries using specific business and customer data, which provides 24/7 personalized support and instant resolutions. Next, within that core AI-powered platform, you’ll get access to historical conversation and business data, which you can use to build a much more contextual, personalized, and proactive customer experience. Then, you can take AI to the next level – a customer might ask, “How do I set up this capability?” and the bot can do it for them there and then.
• Proactive engagement becomes possible: Support teams have long talked about this pipe dream of moving from reactive to proactive support. Now, with an AI-first support tech stack, this shift is entirely possible. You can use AI to detect actions customers are taking in your product and service, preemptively engage with them to help unblock pain that they’re going to encounter, or prevent friction from happening at all. You can also use AI to proactively onboard customers and set them up for success from day one of using your product or service. The possibilities are endless.
• AI unlocks better business results and meaningful metrics: Adopting an AI-powered support platform will improve customer service metrics across the board, including customer satisfaction, team performance, and operational efficiency. Rather than solely looking at individual metrics, you can use AI to intelligently measure all of your customer interactions to determine if you’ve reached your version of success. At Intercom, we have a program called “Beyond CSAT” where we’ve developed measures to understand if we’re delivering to our standards. And if a customer didn’t have a good experience, we can see that, understand why, and what we need to do to fix that.

If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.