New AI-Powered Capabilities Allow Enterprises to Optimize Support Operations and Deliver Superior Customer Service at Scale
SAN FRANCISCO—March 20, 2018—Helpshift, the company revolutionizing the customer service industry, today announced the release of SensAI, the first artificial intelligence natively built for customer service. Using SensAI, brands can automate the support process to make service interactions more human—while reducing time to resolution, optimizing operations, lowering overhead in the contact center, and improving day-to-day life for agents.
“Our technology stands in stark contrast to the overhyped and under-delivering AI and bots on the market today,” said Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift. “Customers expect instant, personalized, in-channel support, and brands must be able to deliver it at scale. Helpshift’s chatbots and AI have been thoughtfully developed for carefully-tailored use cases that will meet those needs by simultaneously improving the customer experience and boosting operational efficiency.”
Uniting People and Bots for Support Excellence
SensAI uses AI to automate the right parts of the customer service experience, making it possible for brands to deliver personable—and highly personalized—messaging-based support to their customers at scale. SensAI has three main components:
- The Bots You Need, Out Of The Box. SensAI bots allow brands to automate the simple customer service interactions that humans shouldn’t be wasting time on, freeing up agents for higher-level tasks. Routine, time-consuming inquiries can now be fully automated or seamlessly handed off to humans when necessary.
- Real-Time Classification + Routing. Automatically classify issues and route them accordingly—eliminating the costly overhead associated with call center operations—and bring order to complex ticketing workflows.
- Instant, Actionable Insights. Proactively improve the customer experience by addressing support issues before they occur—such as impending stock shortages or defects—and mitigate or eliminate the business impact.
“We’re at a tipping point: AI will soon be a natural part of customer service,” said Shep Hyken, customer experience expert and New York Times bestselling author of The Amazement Revolution. “The idea is not to replace humans but to have AI handling the most routine support questions to free up agents for customers with more complex inquiries. If just 5-10 percent of queries are being handled by AI, the increase in productivity is huge—and Helpshift is one of the companies that is enabling these new levels of efficiency. Many support centers have not yet embraced this concept, but they will have to in the near future or find themselves struggling to keep up.”
Improving the Customer—and Agent—Experience
- For customers: SensAI enables a more personalized and efficient support experience—in-app or online—when and where customers need assistance.
- For customer support agents and supervisors: SensAI means liberation from mundane tasks so agents can focus on higher-touch problems, and supervisors with newfound bandwidth can focus on team empowerment and strategic analysis.
- For administrators: Unlike other solutions on the market today that require substantial development resources and expensive consultants, SensAI is a point-and-click solution for customer support admins.
- For enterprises: SensAI means driving optimum levels of operational efficiency while seamlessly scaling—and improving the quality of— service operations by reducing time to resolution, lowering the average cost to solve an issue, and lowering overall overhead in the contact center.
“Organizations have historically encountered a tough trade-off by having to choose between increased scale and customer satisfaction,” said Abinash Tripathy, co-founder and CSO of Helpshift. “Expensive channels like the phone were good for high-value interactions but didn’t scale and were too costly for simple, repetitive issues. Knowledge portals, on the other hand, were low-cost, mass-usage channels, but they led to customer frustration and churn. The advent of chat and messaging combined with AI has fundamentally changed all of this. Messaging, AI and bots now allow organizations to dramatically improve customer satisfaction while lowering costs and accommodating massive scale—all at the same time.”
About Helpshift
Helpshift bridges the disconnect between conventional customer service channels—like email and phone support—and a growing consumer base that does more on mobile phones and has a strong preference for messaging as the primary mode of communication. Through Helpshift’s AI-powered support platform, companies can resolve issues more efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction in the process. Companies such as Xfinity Home, Virgin Media, Zynga, Viacom, and hundreds of other leading brands use the Helpshift platform to provide messaging-first customer support. Helpshift is installed on two billion devices worldwide and serves more than 130 million active consumers monthly. To learn more about Helpshift, visit helpshift.com and follow @helpshift on Twitter.
Media Contact
Stacey Grimsrud
415.271.1028
