1. Implement AI-powered chatbots to resolve routine queries

A typical payment system, say Payoneer, will likely face a barrage of routine queries such as transaction status updates, account verification issues, delayed payments, withdrawal failures, currency conversion rates, refund processing, and fee clarifications.

Imagine assigning an agent to constantly retrieve transaction status updates for customers when they could be handling more complex technical issues instead.

For a small business with only a couple of queries daily, that might not be any issue. But it’s a game changer for larger brands or those scaling rapidly. The consequences are far reaching:

• Routine and monotonous queries can cause agent burnout, which in turn, affects delivery.
• Customers with technical complaints receive diffused attention and eventually a poor experience. 
• Unsatisfied customers are more likely to switch to competitors, reducing your customer retention rate and increasing acquisition costs.

You can proactively avoid these issues by transferring your routines to Chatbots. These bots are capable of addressing repetitive requests by leveraging pre-trained data and access to your knowledge base. 

According to a recent report from Comm100, AI-chatbots can reduce routine queries by up to 80%, thus freeing up your agents to do other core tasks.

Sephora is an example of a brand using chatbots to reduce the queue and provide excellent support. The beauty retailer integrated AI-driven chatbots into its social media platforms such as Facebook’s Messenger. 

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• It not only handles repetitive questions, but also provides product recommendations and helps customers try out their choice before making a purchase.
• Sephora also introduced smart bots on its website to handle common queries. 
• According to Renascence, this implementation has helped it reduce response time by 40% and boost customer satisfaction even at peak hours.

As an all-in-one, omnichannel customer service platform, Plivo CX offers an OpenAI-powered chatbot to help deliver exceptional customer support around the clock and take the load off your agents.

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2. Empower agents with generative AI for real-time assistance

We get it—it’s quite unavoidable to get stuck choosing the appropriate words to respond with. And sometimes, peak hours won’t give your agents the luxury of time to decide on one. This is where GenAI is a perfect fit as a solution. 

GenAI primarily uses ML and NLP to analyze customer queries and data. The insights from this analysis are then used to provide real-time suggestions, context-aware responses, and automated knowledge retrieval during interactions. 

That means your agents can copy and paste an auto-generated response template tailored to the customer they’re helping.

Besides harshing out templates, GenAI can also auto-complete your sentences, especially when the complaints are so common. This helps to improve response time, reduce the workload on your agents, and clear ticket logs faster, thus highlighting why 85% of customer service leaders hope to integrate the technology in 2025.

3. Use an AI-optimized knowledge base to reduce ticket load

Empowering your agents is a good customer support strategy, but empowering your customers is even better. According to Gartner, approximately 73% of customers use self-service options such as knowledge bases and FAQs to find answers at some point in their customer journey. 

This effectively reduces the number of queries logged and helps your agents focus on issues customers can’t resolve by themselves.

However, only 14% of customer support issues are fully resolved via self-service, leaving the remaining 86% to agents and chatbots. Additionally, 45% of customers who engage self-help feel companies don’t understand their problems. In 43% of failed self-service cases, the reason for failure is that customers can’t find relevant content to their queries.

Not finding a useful solution frustrates your customers. Frustration weakens customer trust in your brand and damages your relationship.

To avoid this, you can employ AI to create a rich knowledge base through automated tagging. AI-tagging systems analyze your common queries, especially those not likely to require specialized intervention, and high-volume complaints to reveal where your customers are struggling the most.

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This allows you to create targeted content and populate your knowledge base with the right articles, ensuring your customers find the content they need at the right time. Your agents can also use this content as a reference when resolving unfamiliar complaints. 

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Plivo CX’s Unified Agent Desktop solution helps you integrate AI-optimized custom knowledge base with your communication channels and enables easy data retrieval in real time.

4. Implement smart routing to direct tickets to the right agents

Smart routing utilizes AI algorithms to automatically assign incoming support tickets to the most suitable agents based on various factors such as skills, availability, workload, and priority. 

This ensures tickets reach the right experts faster while streamlining escalations to prevent agents from being overwhelmed with issues beyond their expertise.

When customers lose contact with an agent, advanced AI systems can also reconnect them rather than assigning a new agent when they reach out again. For example, Plivo CX’s IVR solution uses sticky routing to ensure repeat callers are directed to the same agent, enhancing the experience for both customers and agents.

Most importantly, AI-powered routing minimizes ticket collision, which occurs when two agents work on the same ticket unknowingly.

5. Meet customers where they are with scalable omnichannel support

35% of customers expect to be able to contact the same customer service representative on any channel. But this can be cumbersome since your agents have to switch from one channel’s tab to another as required. Needless to say, this is time-consuming and may lead to disconnected customer experiences if you fail to meet the expectation.

Using AI-driven omnichannel support solutions resolves this impasse. Omnichannel platforms integrate all communication channels to give your agents a single point of view when addressing queries, eliminating tab switching.

Plivo CX’s Unified Agent Desktop is designed to help you seamlessly switch between voice, chat, text/SMS, and WhatsApp or use multiple channels simultaneously. It also enables integration with your CRMs, ERPs, and other home-grown systems, utilizing customer data to deliver personalized experiences.