In the ever-evolving ecommerce landscape, providing exceptional customer service has become a fundamental success factor and a strong ticketing system is crucial for any well-run customer service operation.
Still customer service operations have been under pressure due to the influx of customer requests combined with the shortage of qualified agents and the need to save cost.
Now generative artificial intelligence (AI) seems to come to the rescue, presenting advanced capabilities that empower businesses to handle customer interactions with greater effectiveness and efficiency.
Best of both worlds: AI with human support
Firstly, AI takes charge of classifying and prioritizing incoming tickets. Frequent issues are swiftly resolved by AI, while more unique/complex problems are handed over to human agents. This ensures critical problems get immediate attention and each issue lands with the most suitable agent.
Furthermore, AI offers rapid, automated responses to common issues, freeing human agents to focus on more nuanced queries. It also provides predictive suggestions to agents based on analysis of past interactions and knowledge base articles, thus enhancing response efficiency.
Generative AI doesn’t just respond, it learns. It can continuously analyze customer interactions to detect patterns, common issues, and areas needing improvement. This helps in refining the AI system’s responses and indicating training areas for human agents.
The integration extends to AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. These tools can process transactions and answer queries while standing by to loop in human support when needed.
Popular AI-Enabled Ticketing Systems in Ecommerce Customer Service
Now, we will delve into some of the leading ticketing systems employed in ecommerce customer service, namely Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gladly, Gorgias, eDesk and more to discover their current AI integrations.
Zendesk
Zendesk has firmly established itself as a leading (ecommerce) customer service solution. One of the most notable features of Zendesk is its commitment to omnichannel support. In the digital age, customers expect to interact with businesses on their preferred platform, be it email, live chat, phone, or other messaging platforms. Zendesk caters to this demand effortlessly, opening up multiple communication channels and, in turn, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Zendesk has integrated AI into its customer service platform, leveraging billions of real-world interactions. This has enhanced over 250 million tickets and saved significant agent time. The AI tools aid agents by suggesting responses, detecting customer intent, and providing context, helping to streamline the handling of customer queries.
Zendesk’s AI and Advanced AI also speed up issue resolution by integrating intelligence into the workspace and offering timely, personalized information to agents. Automation is a key strategy, with bots that can autonomously handle customer requests or direct them to the right agent.
Zendesk has also partnered with OpenAI to bring more human-like AI capabilities to customer service. They offer a range of AI and bot capabilities in their Suite offerings, with advanced features available in an AI add-on for Suite Professional plans or higher.
Finally, Zendesk is committed to data protection, ensuring transparency, GDPR compliance, and accuracy in their AI models. This approach guarantees trust while providing top-tier, AI-powered customer service.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk has quickly become one of the more popular customer service tools on the market, offering an array of features that greatly benefit ecommerce businesses. With its intuitive interface, multichannel support, customizable options, collaboration tools, and extensive integration capabilities, Freshdesk provides a comprehensive solution. In the past, users have reported certain drawbacks associated with the solution.
When it comes to AI integration, Freshdesk has made significant strides. The platform includes a chatbot named Freddy AI, which automates various aspects of customer service, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.
Additionally, an AI-powered ‘Summarize‘ feature generates ticket summaries based on all responses received, facilitating the efficient handling of lengthy tickets by agents.
Gladly
People-centered service for people-centered brands is how Gladly markets its customer service software designed for ecommerce brands. The way Gladly sets itself apart from other brands is by the user-friendly design around conversations instead of tickets. All communication with a customer, no matter the channel, is displayed in one conversation overview – almost like a WhatsApp screen.
Most of the reviews are raving, agents really value the simplicity and the conversational design.
In terms of AI, Gladly has sped up its developments over the past months. Apart from a suite of AI-powered tools designed to boost agent productivity, Gladly also offers Sidekick, an AI-powered automation platform enabling personalised self-service.
Gorgias
Recognized as highly regarded, ecommerce focused, customer support software, Gorgias excels in consolidating requests from multiple channels into a single dashboard, leading to enhanced customer responsiveness.
One of the main advantages of Gorgias is its user-friendly interface, which simplifies the management of customer interactions. The software lets you connect to multiple channels and add team members with just a few clicks.
It also offers a variety of features to help improve collaboration, such as the ability to create a ticket, assign tickets to another agent, send one-click replies via automation, and set up tags.
Additionally, Gorgias allows you to perform actions like editing or refunding orders and cancelling subscriptions directly from the helpdesk.
The platform’s AI capabilities are certainly worth mentioning as well, offering automation for repetitive tasks, sentiment detection, and robust ticket management.
Gorgias offers AI automation for many repetitive tasks. For instance, you can automate responses to frequent customer questions like “Where is my order?” by creating rules and macros, boosting agent productivity. Also, you can automate customer sentiment detection, creating rules that tag comments based on sentiments, such as positive, negative, threatening, urgent, or offensive, which can be instrumental in identifying and addressing issues more swiftly.
Gorgias also excels in its ability to effectively interact with social media platforms and classify tickets for efficient handling.
On the website Giorgias shares its AI development roadmap including an AI co-pilot for agents and AI query management.
eDesk
Widely embraced in the realm of ecommerce customer service, eDesk brings its own set of advantages and drawbacks. The platform seamlessly integrates with various channels, offers multilingual support, an efficient feedback mechanism, and a centralized mailbox for all customer queries.
eDesk’s AI capabilities are robust, enhancing its ability to deliver exceptional customer service. According to eDesk, the company offers the only AI-powered customer service software ‘connected to everywhere you sell’.
Noteworthy AI features include AI Classification and Summary, AI Agent Assist, ticket prioritization, the HandsFree feature, and integration with OpenAI’s GPT models.
These AI functionalities collectively contribute to eDesk’s capacity to provide quality customer service.
Greyhound
Greyhound CRM is a comprehensive customer service solution, predominantly catering to the German-speaking market, aimed at enhancing businesses’ client relationship management.
This robust platform offers unparalleled flexibility in deployment, accessible through Cloud, SaaS, and Web-based platforms. Additionally, it extends its compatibility to a wide range of operating systems including Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chromebook for desktop use; as well as Android, iPhone, and iPad for mobile access.
Where Greyhound truly differentiates itself, however, is its incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) services designed to streamline and automate a range of daily tasks. These include translating emails, understanding user intentions, data classification, and operating chatbots.
Adhering to GDPR standards, Greyhound’s proprietary AI provides reliable assistance while maintaining data privacy.
In an effort to further enhance its offering, Greyhound also extends the option to connect to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This innovative feature allows users to tap into an expansive knowledge base and engage in communication that is as close to natural human language as it gets.
AI-powered Customer Service at Salesupply
Our agents are trained in working with all the systems mentioned above (and more) and they are constantly being updated on the latest (AI) developments of these systems.
In addition we are on the verge of unveiling our suite of (currently running in beta) AI solutions, promising a superior service experience at significantly reduced costs.
In short the AI initiatives of Salesupply focus on:
- Agent Empowerment – Agents save a lot of time because of AI’s capability to categorise, summarise, enrich and even solve customer requests.. The AI tool has access to all relevant information, from product – and order information to all previous communications with the client. This way, AI can actually prepare factual email suggestions for the agents resulting in faster processing and higher quality.
- First-Call Resolution improvement: One of few existing AI-powered chatbots; able to serve customers from pre-purchase all the way to returns. The bot is monitored by agents for quality purposes.
- Continuous improvement – the AI Workflow Manager is constantly analysing results and optimising AI prompts to improve continously.
Here’s a sneak peek into what’s in store:
- Categorisation: ChatGPT scans and categorizes your historical customer service requests, identifying common questions posed by your customers.
- Template creation: this information, inclusive of categorized queries and AI-generated templated responses, is fed into the solution’s training module to enhance its capability to address requests autonomously.
- Enriched responses: our solution doesn’t provide repetitive responses. By embedding ChatGPT into the system, it crafts bespoke replies to customer inquiries, enhancing their experience.
- Multichannel: the hybrid solution will be accessible through chat and email, with future integrations into phone and WhatsApp channels.
- Teamwork: mails are analysed and processed by AI. If AI can process it, it will provide instant draft responses for the agents to be checked and sent.
- Hybrid customer service: when a customer prefers human interaction or if AI cannot provide an answer, the customer will be redirected to a customer service representative.
- Translations: agents can handle tickets in any language. They will read the request and prepare the response in their preferred language. The customer receives the response in their native language
- Perfect agent communication: Emails written by agents are optimised by AI to provide the perfect response
- Two-way quality control: the solution’s performance and content will be constantly supervised and enhanced by our team and AI will do the same with the output from human customer service representatives
- Ensuring safety and compliance of the system is paramount. Compliance with privacy laws will be consistently monitored while the solution is in operation.
What does your online business stand to gain?
Currently, the combination of artificial and human intelligence optimally leverages the best of both worlds. Here’s what it means for you:
- ChatGPT scans and categorizes your historical customer service requests, identifying common questions posed by your customers.
- By harnessing a hybrid chatbot powered by an advanced tool, you can address most of your customers’ queries promptly, boosting your first-call-resolution rate and customer experience.
- This system also allows your customer service representatives to focus on addressing intricate queries, leading to increased customer satisfaction and positive feedback.
We’re in the last phase of refining this solution and will provide updates shortly. If you would like to discuss how AI could benefit your customer service operation, please email us at info@www.salesupply.com.
AI & Customer Service final take-aways
It is clear that AI provides unmatched potential to optimise your customer service operation. Whenever you decide to integrate AI in your customer care – to whatever extend, keep the following in mind:
- It all depends on data. If you don’t have complete, actual data, you can’t automate your processes properly
- Prompt engineering is vital. Only with the right prompt you will get the responses that live up to the customer expectations of your brand
- Don’t rule out the impact and importance of human agents. For now, the technology is far from reliable enough to fully automate your customer service operations – not even taking into account the fact that your clients probaly don’t want this. For now most ticket systems deploy AI to categorise, identify customer sentiment and provide summaries to help agents grasp the context and save time.
