How transparency can help your customers get more out of AI support

We’ve spoken a lot about preparing your support team for a new way of doing customer service with AI, but what about preparing your customers for a new way of receiving customer support?

According to a recent Gartner survey, 64% of customers would prefer it if a business didn’t use AI for customer service. The reason behind this is something we can all relate to – interacting with chatbots has historically been a shocking experience.

It’s not necessarily that the technology was bad, but by and large, chatbots weren’t set up well, which made interacting with them clunky and frustrating.

Luckily, we’ve come a long way – even since that Gartner research was conducted – and next-gen AI agents like Fin are starting to have a positive impact on customers’ perception of automated support.

AI is only as good as it’s set up to be, however, so support teams have the responsibility of really making the experience great for customers. Here are a few quick tips to help set your customers up for success when interacting with your AI agent.

 This post originally featured in our customer service newsletter, The Ticket.

 

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Tell your customers how to talk to your AI agent

Perhaps due to poor experiences with previous generation chatbots, many people don’t actually know how to interact with AI agents. Instead of asking a question in a normal conversational manner, they resort to single keywords or basic phrases, like “need help.”

“Chatting in a natural, conversational way works best”

AI agents are pretty smart, but they’re not mind readers. Not having enough information is going to cause the bot to draw a blank and frustrate the customer, so it’s important that customers know how to communicate to get the best results.

Chatting to Fin in a natural, conversational way works best, so we set this prompt at the beginning of a customer’s chat with Fin that explains this in a really brief way:

Hi [First Name], you’re speaking with Fin AI Agent. 👋

 

I can do much more than chatbots you’ve seen before.

 

Tell me as much as you can about your question, and I’ll do my best
to help you in an instant.

We worked closely with our conversation designer to get this right by running a couple of A/B tests and tweaking the copy until we landed on something that clicked for our customers.

This simple prompt has helped customers have much richer interactions with Fin and a better overall experience, so I’d highly recommend trying something like this if your customers are struggling to get what they need from your bot.

Lead with your AI agent, but make it easy to access human help

Customers are getting used to AI agents being the first to respond to their queries, but many still want to know they can easily access a human’s help. This is why it’s important to make the handover from AI to human as seamless as possible when a customer requests it.

“The key is limiting the effort the customer has to put in”

When one of our customers opens the Messenger and asks a question, we’ve set Fin to answer first as much as possible in our automated flows. If Fin can’t answer, the customer can select “I need to speak to a human.” A few clarifying questions then help the human agent understand the customer’s issue.

The key here is limiting the effort the customer has to put in. We conducted some research and found that after just four clicks, a customer will drop off if they’re not connected to a human.

We used to talk about “deflection” in support, but abandonment rate – which is what we’re referring to here – is not good. Customers just going away rather than receiving help is not something you want as a business.

As customers continue to have good interactions with AI agents and develop more trust in them, we’ll see more and more queries resolved without needing input from the team.

Set expectations upfront

There is some debate around this, but I firmly believe support teams should let customers know when they’re speaking with an AI agent.

“Always be honest with customers to foster and maintain trust”

Some teams like to “humanize” their AI agents with a human photo and name, but in my opinion, we’ll only really help our customers get more comfortable with this technology if we’re transparent about what it is.

We’re all working towards making automated support better and a big part of this is bringing our customers along with us on this AI journey. My advice is to always be honest with customers to foster and maintain trust.