How to improve customer service while reducing costs-to-serve?

Here are some real-life stats to start with:

A human customer care agent answering support calls, can take 1 call at a time. Depending on the industry, calls length may vary but, let's assume an average duration of 5 min per call.

An agent answers in average 12 calls per hour. On an 8 hour day, theoretically 96 customers can be served per agent.

To serve 500 customers per day, at least 5 human agents would be required.

Cost = 5 * salary for customer care agents for phone calls + 1 salary for their supervisor

Let's change the strategy by erasing all hotline numbers, and replace them with call- to-actions to chat with our chatty human agent.

Around 5 and 10 chats can be managed in simultaneous, and kept with a fluid conversation and very low delay in the responses.

The agent’s workload increases, as focus on different conversations simultaneously is required.At an average duration of 5 min per chat, a total of 96 customers per hour (60min / 5 min per chat * 8 customers served simultaneously * 8 hours) can be served.

That's 768 customers per day, IF they would all dial in sequentially, one after the other.

But reality never turns out like this.

Most customers won’t have time to contact you during normal business hours to solve their delivery issues or complain about something else.

Instead, they contact you during their break, at lunch, or right after work.

Causing an overflow of incoming requests for our human customer care agent.

Cost = 1 salary for a customer care agent on chat requests who might be idle for several hours of the day + one or two contingency workers for the peak time

What we need is a superhuman. A person who can talk to hundreds of customers simultaneously, focus on multiple conversations never losing focus, stay alert to new requests, attend to them immediately, and doesn’t make mistakes in the information provided.

Possible? Almost. But that's actually not what we want.
We have already reduced the cost of our customer care solution from 5 to 1.

With the minimum of 1 resource, any peak will make the customers wait longer than our patience allows, leading to a huge dropout.

Any requests out of business hours are still not covered.
Weekends and holidays are also not covered.

To extend the support hours to 24/7, we would have to triple again the human resources required to work in a 24/7 shift. Plus some extra resources for weekends and holidays.

An unthinkable increase of expense nowadays.

So, what would be a solid solution, allowing you to expand your service to 24/7, whilst maintaining the absolute minimum of required human resources?

An AI-powered Virtual Customer Care Assistant, tailored to your industry, to enhance your human customer care agent!

The formula is simple:

The AI is trained to understand your customer request.

It will send suggested responses to your agent through our specific interface.

The human agent’s response time decreases to 0.5 seconds.

Searching for the customer's purchase history, or customer relevant information in your CRM and a "please wait until I check your information" belongs to the past.

The AI interfacing with your CRM, will fetch all the required information for you when needed, display accurate and detailed information to the agent, who can forward pre-defined and pre-approved responses within one click to the customer.

Overall chat duration decreases to an average of 60 seconds. Maintaining an average of 8 customer sessions simultaneously, we reach an astonishing 3.840 customers per day (60min / 1 min per chat * 8 customers served simultaneously * 8 hours).

As previously stated, customers tend to come in all at once.

Any incoming request, 24|7|365 will be answered by the AI.

With its best abilities and its best training, it will be able to respond to 80% of customers requests. Any request not understood, will be redirected to our human agent. Who now has the chance to focus on the really important questions.

Questions like: "I want to cancel my order", or "how do I get an invoice", or "where is my delivery" can be completelyautomated through the AI.

We have now successfully reduced the cost of the human resources to the absolute minimum, whilst we have increased the amount of customers to be served and expanded your customer care solution to 24 hours 7 days a week 365 days a year.

Being able now to serve thousands of customers per day, the only remaining problem for you will be to drive enough traffic to your customer care focusing on up-sale and cross-sale of your products and services for existing customers.