This company built an AI for helping customer service teams

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This powerful artificial intelligence tool can help customer service agents, or converse with customers directly.
This powerful artificial intelligence tool can help customer service agents, or converse with customers directly.
Photo: Agent.ai

This post is brought to you by Agent.ai.

Not all businesses can afford a full-time staff of phone operators. And let’s be honest: Frustration with automated systems can leave customers looking for another place to do business.

Agent.ai has created something that bridges the gap — a customer relationship management (CRM) system that’s powered by machine learning. It comes in two forms: Co-Pilot and Auto-Pilot.

CRM that learns from experience

Co-Pilot uses machine learning to feed customer service reps helpful advice (via an admin console) when dealing with customer inquiries. The idea is to streamline the resolution process based on previous customer interactions, as well as the company’s own knowledge base. It usually takes about 5,000 messages to get up and running, but the system can be fed data indefinitely.

Then there’s Auto-Pilot, which works more like something straight from the future. Built around a conversational AI engine, once it’s been fed enough background information and specific data on customer issues, it can interact directly with customers free of agent intervention. A deep learning system means it provides an answer, question or suggestion only once it has achieved a very high degree of confidence. Customers can interact with it via text, Twitter, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger and many other routes.

Agent.ai operates as a standalone system or plugs right into an existing CRM platform with ease. A proprietary natural language processing engine means the system isn’t just looking at keywords, but at the actual content of conversations.

How does it work? Most customers encounter similar problems, so their most common questions and interactions with customer service agents can be fed straight into the Agent.AI console via HTTPS, text, Word document and other formats. Within a few minutes (seriously), the system is able to address and even predict customer problems.

Unlike a phone system or even a team of operators, all interactions with customers get fed into a dashboard that offers useful analysis for improving interactions. That means customer support managers can become a lot more effective. Agent.AI frees them up for dealing with the issues that really need a human to step in.

The smart automation saves a lot of headaches on both sides.

AI: A sign of things to come

This isn’t just a gimmick: It represents where customer service is headed in the future.

As the technology improves, you can bet that a lot more companies will start integrating AIs into their teams. According to research agency Gartner, “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.”

Machine learning just makes sense as a CRM tool. Over time, such a system can learn best practices for a wide range of company-specific issues. The responsive AI assistant can get back to customers with an answer (or question) in a matter of seconds, as opposed to days. It can make existing CRM teams more effective, and offer options for companies who need more flexibility or can’t afford to hire a large team.

Try Agent.ai’s smarter CRM solutions today

If your company is interested in augmenting its CRM system with some cutting-edge AI, it doesn’t take cutting-edge prices. Agent.ai is offering analysis of the first 5,000 monthly messages for free, after which every message costs just 5 cents across any customer channel. For more information or to get a demo, visit Agent.ai’s site, or contact demo@Agent.ai.

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