Wondering about the potential benefits of AI for customer care for your team? AI chatbots are gaining traction as a critical solution for solving customer service teams’ top pain points and enabling their key priorities. Here’s how these solutions can help. 

Top Pain Points & Priorities for Customer Care Teams

Today’s customer service organizations are struggling with higher levels of workplace stress, greater employee turnover, and challenging workloads. At the same time, consumers are facing long wait times and declining customer experiences. As a result, in 2024 customer care leaders are doubling down on prioritizing self-service adoption, improving team operations, driving employee productivity, and enhancing the customer experience. 

Top pain points for customer care teams

1. Poor employee engagement and productivity and high burnout

According to the American Psychological Association, employees who work in customer service are more likely to experience high levels of physical, cognitive, and emotional fatigue and they’re also more likely to say that these issues are keeping them from achieving their goals at work.

When engagement suffers, that’s costly for businesses. Gallup has found that companies with highly engaged employees generate 18% more sales and 23% greater profitability. 

2. High customer service turnover

Call centers experience notoriously high turnover rates, 2X the average of other departments. That’s a challenge as when the employee experience is less than optimal, customer experience declines. 

3. The cost of attrition and recruiting new agents

Every time a call center agent churns, that adds up to an average cost of $10,000 to $21,000 per employee, due to training costs, recruiting costs, and loss of productivity.

4. Long wait times for customers

U.S. consumers spend billions of hours in line for services each year, with retailers reporting that customers having to wait is the #1 reason they lose customers. 

5. Poor customer experiences

Recent data from Forrester’s Customer Experience Index ratings in the US, Canada, and UK indicate that the quality of customer experiences is on the decline, falling two years in row and hitting all-time lows. That’s an issue as bad customer experiences cost businesses $3.7 trillion in sales annually when customers decrease or stop spending altogether with companies after poor experiences. 

Top priorities for customer care teams

Given the pain points cited above, it’s no wonder that when Gartner surveyed customer service leaders asking them to list their top priorities for 2024 that the top areas of focus for the majority of leaders surveyed (61% or more) include:

• Improving the customer experience 
• Improving operations
• Improving customer retention and loyalty
• Improving self-service adoption and success
• Improving employee productivity and enabling them with technology

Benefits of AI for Customer Care for Businesses 

According to Gartner’s study, the vast majority of customer service leaders (83%) say they plan to invest or have already invested in using generative AI for their teams and almost half (48%) say virtual customer assistants will have a “high impact” on their organizations over the next 12 to 18 months. There’s good reason: When used effectively, AI solutions for customer care can help companies address many of the common pain points customer service teams and customers experience and empower companies to achieve their top customer service priorities. 

AI chatbots like indigitall’s are designed to:

• Slash customer wait times, enable 24/7 support, and reduce contact volumes for customer service agents by enabling brands to automatically answering FAQs in real time
• Speed up customer care with the dynamic routing of high-priority tickets to live agents
• Streamline employee workloads with automated queue management, ensuring work is balanced equitably
• Enhance customer satisfaction and experiences with multilingual support
• Provide omnichannel customer support across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and brands’ apps and websites
• Improve employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention by making their workdays more efficient
  

Discover indigitall’s Leading AI Chatbot for Customer Care

indigitall has partnered with global brands across industries—McDonald’s, Movistar, and Carrefour—to help teams improve their customer and financial outcomes. Get your copy of our eBook to learn all about leveraging generative AI for customer care. Schedule a demo with our team today to learn how we can help you harness the power of AI for answering customer questions in real time.