Routine, statistics, analytics: what an AI assistant can help a technical support or hotline department manager with

How an AI assistant helps a support desk and hotline manager reduce routine work and speed up analytics and decisions.

  • Another great day
  • Still listening to every call yourself? Then AI is coming for you
  • Useful material on implementing an AI assistant
  • Scripts and procedures are followed to the letter on every call. And if they are not, you know exactly who, how many times, and with which client deviated...

5.9.2024 Reading time: 7 min. 97% of business owners believe artificial intelligence will help their businesses (source→). But only 35% of companies have integrated AI tools into their processes! And that is the global figure - in CIS, the gap between "we think it is useful" and "we actually use it" is even wider. In this article, KT.Team experts explain how an AI assistant can help the head of a service company or service division reduce routine work and get analytics faster for management decisions.

Another great day

Let's imagine an ordinary Monday for a technical support manager.

Their week is already planned, and they have to: decide on 10 employees on probation - who to keep and who to dismiss; decide on several current employees - whose salary to raise, who to remove from customer calls and promote to senior manager, and who needs additional training; decide on employees who are under scrutiny because of negative feedback from customers and colleagues;

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analyze frequently repeated requests together with trusted employees; determine how to change scripts and standards on your side to reduce repeated mistakes; train the customer's employees to use the new system; try to make sure the weekly window of chaos does not grow into a portal to hell.

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Half, or even more, of these tasks are tied to call analytics: how employees behave when speaking with customers, how well they follow procedures, and whether the current procedures are still relevant at all. To get all this data, you either have to listen to the calls yourself or delegate the task to a trusted (and often the highest-paid) subordinate. But maybe there is another way?

Still listening to every call yourself? Then AI is coming for you

According to Deloitte's The Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) AI Dossier→, an AI assistant is among the five most promising developments for companies in the TMT sector. 54%→ of TMT organizations achieved ROI above 20% thanks to investment in AI. This includes solutions that can structure and analyze call information.

Useful material on implementing an AI assistant

7 possible security mistakes and how to avoid them. Open guide

Assess where AI can deliver impact in your process

Scripts and procedures are followed to the letter on every call. And if they are not, you know exactly who deviated from the standards, how many times, and with which client.

A typical B2C company call center

Every day, they handle hundreds or thousands of calls from customers with questions and complaints.

There is a protocol for every scenario: how to respond, where to look for information, how to avoid emotional remarks. Also: what to fill in and how in the customer, product (if the complaint is about the product), and employee records...

But are you 100% sure that all rules are being followed?

There are two ways to verify this: listen to the call and compare it with the protocols, or choose “senior managers” who do almost nothing except supervise their colleagues.

It is almost impossible to learn about all the mistakes and shortcomings at this pace. A manager's time is not unlimited.

To evaluate every call, you would need to hire as many experts as you have frontline employees, which is not cost-effective. At best, you can afford a small random sample, and that may miss the most problematic calls or employees.

Meanwhile, every incorrect answer or emotional outburst is a threat to the company's reputation and metrics.

If a manager makes such mistakes regularly, it is better to find out as early as possible. An assistant that evaluates calls objectively and provides you with department statistics Now imagine receiving data for every call from every manager.

And these data are analyzed by an unbiased expert who can easily match calls against existing procedures, assess compliance accuracy, and break down results by project or manager.

To make decisions, you only need to look at a simple table like this: and you will see that in half of the cases managers suggest solutions that do not match the script.

Why does this happen: because the script is outdated, or because managers do not know it well?

You can figure that out if you have reliable analytics data at hand.

The manager themselves will receive emails with a detailed analysis of how their calls comply with procedures, along with recommendations on what needs improvement! What will the result be?

Within a month, the quality of procedure compliance will improve by 50%-95%, and the procedures themselves will improve too - because you will now receive data about their obsolescence much faster.

More data for personnel decisions

Undervaluing employees, like overvaluing them, are twin problems that cost you money.

But how do you get objective data showing that someone is not yet at the required level, while someone else is already truly overqualified for their role?

Ask their colleagues, ask the senior manager, and yes, again, listen to the calls where this employee speaks with the client.

You cannot rely entirely on subordinates' opinions: human judgment always depends on personal relationships.

Only personal involvement remains

It is fine if you need to make a decision about one person per month. But what if it is 10? 30?

A convenient visualization format and multiple criteria for evaluating incoming information

Aggregated and visualized employee data Now imagine that all of an employee's calls have already been listened to, transcribed, and evaluated for the criteria that matter to you.

You see a detailed table in front of you that you can sort by call type and date. And you can tell at a glance how the employee's score changes over time: whether performance has improved or stayed the same, whether they make mistakes, whether they are polite to customers, and whether they respond quickly to complex requests.

15 seconds for any answer about a customer relationship history

Imagine a client you have worked with for a long time refers, in a new request, to a problem that happened one or two years ago.

He does not even remember when that was

And your manager has to study the entire history from the past few years to understand what the problem was, how it was solved, and how it could affect the current situation.

Meanwhile, the client is getting anxious, time is passing, other tickets are being pushed back... Get an answer in seconds

All it takes is changing the tool, and the situation changes too.

Instead of searching through the CRM or another system you use, your manager writes to the chatbot: “give me the link to the ticket for this situation with this customer.”

In 15 seconds, they will get the link, a summary of the issue, the solution, a link to the call recording, and a screencast... Everything they need. What is even better: there is no need to repeat the exact wording that may have been used to describe the problem. The AI assistant understands both professional slang and natural speech.

Scale without increasing headcount

  1. Let's take a closer look at where managers spend their time during a standard 8-hour shift.

  2. Four hours for direct communication with customers and solving their problems, three hours for writing short meeting summaries, minutes, and memos.

  3. He will spend another hour reviewing the history of customer requests to understand whether there are any “painful” patterns in the CRM and what was previously done about them.

  4. In addition, you will need to understand the scale of the problems by searching for retrospective information.

  5. Routine tasks require recharging, so add coffee breaks and mindfulness meditation to that time if the problem is serious and you need to manage stress. A joke with a grain of truth.

  6. Half of support staff report burnout at work, according to the Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index report→. And 66% say→ they cannot finish their tasks during the workday.

  7. With a team of 24 people, the company can support, say, 12-15 clients.

  8. We would like more, but that would require adding one person to each of the three shifts.

  9. Less routine work means easier scaling

  10. Every customer support call should end with a protocol.

  11. The question is how much time the manager will spend on this and how accurate that protocol will be.

  12. Delegating this routine function to AI is a logical step.

  13. An AI assistant will transcribe the meeting, write a summary for the customer record, and not miss subtle but sometimes important details.

  14. The manager will only need to lightly edit the wording and add actions for resolving the issue to the protocol.

  15. This approach frees up about 1-2 hours per day for each employee. That may not sound like much, but it is 1-2 hours for more complex and important tasks. And an additional 12.5-25% of resources for scaling the entire business.

How much does it cost to implement an AI assistant in technical support or hotline processes

It depends on the goals you set for the future AI assistant. If you only want "call transcription," then you do not really need an assistant - a subscription to any of the many transcription tools will do. It will cost you from $10 per month, plus a small change in each manager's workflow - every recording will have to be uploaded to the transcription interface and the text taken back out from there.

But if you want not just extra text files, but also to: get feedback on calls; easily analyze manager performance; spend minimal time and effort training new employees; automatically attach transcriptions and protocols to customer records; get any answers about any call in 15-30 seconds; improve customer satisfaction; and protect the confidentiality of that information,

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that customers trust you with on calls - at that point, you are talking about implementing an AI assistant that includes, in addition to transcription, integrations, information anonymization and encryption modules, a chat bot, and an analytics module.

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The scale of the numbers is different here, of course. For example, at KT.Team we offer implementation of such an AI assistant from 1 million rubles, with a timeline of 4 weeks.

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