The landscape of customer service continues to evolve, as emerging technologies and customer behavior interact and dramatically transform the entire process. Traditional phone-based support is rapidly being supplemented by – or in some cases, replaced – digital messaging platforms. This is largely driven by consumer demands for convenience, and by business demands for cost-effectiveness and increased efficiency. Companies must adapt to this shift in behavior to meet and ultimately exceed evolving customer expectations, and stay competitive. Read on to learn how digital messaging and generative AI are revolutionizing customer service and how Cresta approaches this for our customers.
Digital messaging revolution
Several high-profile companies have already made significant moves in this direction. Frontier Airlines, for example, recently entirely dropped its customer service phone line, signaling a clear shift and full investment in digital support channels. Apple’s Business Chat integrates customer service with their iMessage platform, and WhatsApp is emerging as a major player in customer engagement. These changes are not just trends; they represent a fundamental shift in customer expectations and in how customer service will operate.
Advantages of digital messaging channels
Compared with traditional phone-based support, digital messaging as a channel undoubtedly has many advantages, to both the customer and to the business.
24/7 availability
Perhaps the most obvious advantage, digital messaging and text channels offer unparalleled convenience, allowing customers to seek support at any time, anywhere, and via their preferred device or channel. Unlike traditional phone support, these channels eliminate the need for customers to wait on hold – according to research, 66% of customers say they’re only willing to wait two minutes or less and 13% say there is no amount of time they’re willing to wait on hold. This allows businesses to eliminate specific service hours, and ensure support for their customers around the clock.
Cost-effectiveness
Implementing messaging can be far more cost-effective than maintaining legacy phone-based support systems. Businesses can handle multiple inquiries simultaneously with fewer agents, reducing operational costs while maintaining high service levels.
Efficiency and productivity
Messaging platforms enable support agents to manage several conversations at once. By implementing templates and automated responses for the most common queries, businesses can save time and increase productivity, freeing up agent time and cognitive load to focus on more complex, strategic issues.
Preferred communication method
Many customers now prefer text-based communication for its asynchronous nature and the ability to revisit previous conversations for context. By offering these channels, businesses meet customers where they are, catering to their preferences and enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.
Enhanced customer engagement
Multimedia features – such as images, videos, and links – can enrich and expedite the support experience. These elements provide clearer, more engaging interactions, improving the resolution process and customer satisfaction.
The role of AI in customer service and digital messaging
Generative AI is playing a crucial role in enhancing digital customer service. In one of our previous blogs where we explored predictions about the impact of AI, we predicted that one day, “typing will disappear” driven by the advancements in generative AI. While that prediction has not yet come to pass, Cresta Agent Assist exemplifies how this may become reality with features like Smart Compose and Suggestions for chat. These capabilities make it so that contact centers are able to adapt to an increase in chat volume, while still delivering on the customer experience. Chat-based teams are able to work faster and smarter, saving hours of time along the way. Read on for the many ways generative AI impacts digital messaging and operations in the contact center.
Ease of adoption
As more and more companies consider putting energy and resources towards implementing generative AI technologies, an obvious question will be how smooth the adoption process will be for agents. Cresta’s digital messaging capabilities are an ideal entry point for genAI-powered applications in digital customer service. These capabilities offer easy onboarding and high adoption rates because they seamlessly integrate with the most fundamental action agents take: typing. This integration enhances productivity without requiring dramatic changes to the agent workflow.
While generative AI is known for its caveats, such as potential hallucinations that could lead to misinformation, Cresta’s Smart Compose ensures that suggestions are always vetted by agents, emphasizing the important role that humans play in making the most of this technology. This makes it easy for agents to modify, ignore, or edit the suggestions, thus providing a significant net gain in agent productivity and reliability.
Enhanced typing assistance
Smart Compose makes it easy for agents to auto-complete as they type, simply tapping tab to complete a sentence with proven messaging and information. Similar to text completion on iPhone and Gmail, Smart Compose is fine tuned on company data and historical chat messages, providing personalized results and longer completions that largely don’t require any editing. However, the capabilities of Smart Compose are far more powerful, suggesting longer, on-brand, and contextual completions that are nuanced in a way generic text completion is not.
Contextual responses
Suggestions provides ready-to-use, context-aware replies for agents without them needing to manually search for the information. Trained on agents’ historical chat data, chat metadata, and your company’s knowledge base, these AI-generated responses deliver proven responses to agents, whether they’re up-selling, cross-selling, problem-solving or more.
Behind the scenes, Cresta is working to process every conversation to determine which behaviors work best so that agents always know what to say and how to handle whatever may come up with each individual customer.
A standardized workforce
These capabilities are particularly big game-changers for new agents, helping to speed up the onboarding process and up-skill them while on the job. For companies tapping into offshore BPOs, this can help with non-fluent English speakers who may struggle with grammatical or spelling errors. Suggestion and Smart Compose models won’t just train on historical chats as they are; they will automatically transform the training data by filtering, cleaning, and applying style changes to make the predictions consistent and more professional.
Easy integration
Cresta is designed for easy integration, without requiring a heavy lift or replacement of existing chat platforms or CRMs. It can be seamlessly integrated into popular platforms like LivePerson and Twilio Flex, with installation as simple as adding a browser extension.
—
Cresta’s chat customers generally see 40%-60% reductions in typing saved, reductions in average handle time (AHT), and more standardized practices among agents. While implementing generative AI is overwhelming, its applications in digital messaging for customer service offer an easy and effective entry point for contact centers. See it in action with your own personalized demo here!
