A Complete Guide to AI-Driven Customer Support Automation

A taskforce of AI agents - not a futuristic tale anymore.

Imagine a typical day in the life of a customer support agent: responding to hundreds of repetitive inquiries, handling frustrated customers, constantly switching between tabs to find the right help center resources, all while ensuring every interaction is properly tagged and organized. It’s no wonder this role experiences high turnover—reaching up to 40%, according to PwC (2024).

Businesses today are expected to provide efficient, 24/7 customer support, which often means long, exhausting shifts in a high-pressure environment. For many companies, delivering exceptional service without overwhelming their teams or skyrocketing costs can seem nearly impossible.

This is where AI-driven customer support automation comes into play. By streamlining repetitive tasks, improving response times, enhancing customer satisfaction, and significantly reducing operational costs, AI offers a powerful solution. It allows customer support agents to focus on tasks that require empathy and human judgment, while the AI takes care of everything else.

In this guide, we’ll explore how AI support tools can help businesses reduce costs and elevate the customer experience.

1. What tasks can AI help with?

The best place to start is identifying routine and repetitive tasks that can be solved by supplying customers with the right information or by performing standardized processes. 

• Repetitive requests that can be solved by reading the frequently asked questions (FAQs). As much as we try to create insightful and easy to read materials, customers often end up reaching out to support.

• Routing customer queries to the right department (e.g. forwarding a customer who wants to cancel their contract to the Customer Retention department)

• Making human agents faster by gathering standard information about the customer and their request

• Performing standardized actions for customers (e.g. changing the address on their order)

2. What customer support channels can be connected to AI solutions?

Depending on the AI solution you have chosen and your current setup, you can integrate AI in different channels. AI solutions often integrate with popular tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk, MessageBird and others. Just make sure to ask your AI solution provider if they are able to integrate with your tech setup.

• Chatbots

• Emails

• Phone support

3. So you want to implement AI in your customer support operations. Now what?

Here are a few steps that can help you get started:

• Identify Repetitive Tasks: Start by analyzing which tasks are repetitive or time-consuming and can be easily automated. It also helps to look at your tag volumes and see which of the most requested topics have the best chance of being automated.

• Choose the Right Tools: There are new AI products for customer support being developed every day so finding the right fit can be challenging. So start small - explore different products, talk to experts in your organization and make sure to organize demos with suitable clients. It helps to come prepared with information such as number of requests per month, channels used, current metrics and topics with automation potential. You can also book a demo with us - we’d be happy to walk you through the process. 

• Monitor and Optimize: AI tools learn much like human agents and need to be monitored and improved over time by adding new knowledge and ensuring sufficient training.

4. What does that mean for human agents?

While AI automates many repetitive tasks, it doesn’t replace human agents. Instead, it complements them by handling simple inquiries, allowing them to focus on complex, high-priority issues that require critical thinking and emotional intelligence. This not only improves your support metrics like response time and CSAT, but can also help decrease agent turnover by improving their work experience.

Conclusion

AI-driven customer support automation offers a powerful way to enhance service efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. If you decide to integrate AI in your customer support operations, there are two things you need to be mindful of: 

1. Know your case: Start with your customer support metrics (number of requests per month, response time, CSAT score, etc.), your technical requirements (CRM system, support setup, used channels) and topics and processes that are suitable for automation. 

2. Demos speak louder than words: Schedule demos as soon as possible to make sure the tools you are exploring can actually deliver the results they promise while making sure you receive sufficient support from the vendor’s team.

One place to start is CSGPT - we developed a solution that helps customer support teams create and train their own agents without engineering help. If you want to see how it works - book a demo with us here.