Dive Brief:
- Customer service and support organizations are reallocating their budgets to spend more on technology and AI at the expense of labor and overhead, according to a Gartner survey of about 200 service and support leaders released last month.
- While overall service and support budgets increased by 2%, tech spending within that budget is up 15% and AI spending surged by 38%, Gartner found.
- Service and support leaders said the three “most valuable” service and support channels currently are live chat, phone and generative AI chatbots, the survey found.
Dive Insight:
As organizations reallocate their budgets to invest in AI, spending, on average, 13% of their total service and support budgets on AI initiatives, leaders can’t forget these systems must work in tandem with human agents, Gartner said.
Generative AI chatbots and voicebots allow organizations to scale their self-service options, particularly for inquiries that lend themselves to automation such as checking account balance and order status. As those easy-to-solve inquiries are automated, human agents can engage in higher-touch, higher-value interactions.
The key to AI chat and AI voice is providing customers an off-ramp, according to Gartner. When a generative AI-powered tool is not capable of autonomously resolving the customer inquiry or a customer indicates they want to speak with a human, the system should be architected to intake customer information, determine intent and route to the appropriate human agents.
AI tools can also pass along call context, allowing human agents to be more prepared when they take over the interaction. That minimizes another customer pain point: having to repeat themselves. If generative AI-powered solutions work in concert with human agents, an organization could see higher first contact resolution rates, which might then lead to higher CSAT and NPS scores.
Support and service leaders see AI becoming more valuable in the coming years. In two years, respondents predicted that generative AI chatbots will become the most valuable channel, displacing live chat.
Deployment of generative AI chatbots and AI voice is low at the moment, however, as these solutions are relatively new and require integration into multiple back-end systems. But because the perceived value of these AI systems is high, Gartner said it expects adoption to greatly increase in the next 12 to 18 months.
