The Ticket: Unlocking customer service’s strategic potential with AI

With AI taking over more manual tasks and freeing teams up to focus on more meaningful work, customer service roles are becoming increasingly strategic.

For too long, many businesses have viewed customer service as a cost center. But now, with AI and automation increasingly handling transactional queries, customer service teams are evolving into strategic value drivers with the ability to provide more consultative guidance, deliver key insights, and directly impact customer adoption and retention. This is powerful because increased retention leads to increased revenue, and demonstrates how customer service can positively impact profit.

This week on The Ticket, Intercom’s Bobby Stapleton, Senior Director of Human Support, and Anthony Lopez, Director of Customer Support Operations, unpack how customer support leaders can confidently guide their teams into this new strategic future.

Here are some key takeaways from their conversation:

• Knowledge management is mission critical: When you’re feeding an AI system, knowledge management is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a strategic imperative. Properly documenting your team’s knowledge and expertise allows you to power AI agents and copilots effectively and unlock their full potential.
• Be open to exploring new career paths as the need for different roles emerge: The nature of support roles will change as AI takes over manual tasks and human team members focus on more complex issues. This shift in focus will lead to new specializations emerging, like knowledge management and conversation design.
• Operations will shift: As an AI agent becomes more ingrained in the team, you’ll have to adjust your reporting to factor in its contribution and performance. Qualitative analysis that tracks things like customer sentiment becomes as vital as traditional metrics to get an accurate overall picture.
• Team members will take on new responsibilities and have greater strategic impact: With AI handling transactional work, customer service teams can be proactive consultants and work cross functionally with product and sales teams to identify adoption risks, advocate for improvements with AI-driven insights, and directly drive customer activation and retention.

If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.