How customer support teams can use generative AI

Navigating customer support often feels like you’re constantly walking a tightrope. On one side, you have customers clamoring for your attention, frustrated and needing reassurance. On the other side, there’s your team, whom you need to keep motivated, empathetic, and efficient amidst a never-ending stream of support tickets. And through it all, you’re under pressure to deliver exceptional value quickly‌ — ‌not just to keep your current customers loyal but also to attract new ones.

This is where the power of generative AI comes into play, transforming the customer support landscape. By integrating this technology, businesses can ensure that their responses are both consistent and genuinely helpful, significantly boosting customer satisfaction. But the real value of generative AI isn’t reserved to handling routine queries — it’s in its ability to free up your team for more complex, nuanced interactions that require a human touch.

A recent Gartner report sheds light on this strategic nuance. It suggests that while some organizations might be tempted to deploy generative AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool, this approach could potentially backfire by compromising customer satisfaction due to inaccurate AI responses or “hallucinations.” Instead, the report advocates for using generative AI to enhance human interactions, enabling customer support teams to focus on more meaningful, value-added tasks post-purchase.

This strategic use of AI not only maintains the quality of customer interactions but elevates it, allowing your team to excel in providing service that goes beyond the transactional. As we explore practical use cases and examples, we’ll see how leveraging generative AI in this way keeps your customer support operations running smoothly while helping them thrive and grow. And in today’s competitive landscape, stellar service is what will put your business on the winning edge.

Summarized by Writer

• Customer support leaders face challenges like changing customer expectations, the importance of human interaction, and dealing with complicated regulations regarding AI.
• Despite advancements in digital tools, consumers, including Gen Z, still prefer live phone conversations, highlighting the importance of human touch in customer support.
• Generative AI aids customer support by creating personalized assets, analyzing data for actionable insights, and ensuring brand consistency across communications.
• Uber’s use of generative AI, in partnership with Writer, has streamlined their global customer support and knowledge asset management, enhancing efficiency and compliance.
• Writer generative AI tools, like the FAQ Generator and Knowledge Graph, help manage high-volume inquiries and tailor support content, improving overall customer service efficiency and personalization.

Why customer support leaders are struggling: three key challenges

Customer support leaders are facing a trio of formidable challenges that are reshaping the terrain of customer interactions.

Firstly, customer expectations aren’t just changing — they’re sprinting ahead. Today’s consumers are tech-savvy and demand instant solutions. They’re enamored with the speed and efficiency of AI for problem-solving‌ — ‌until it fails. When AI responses are inaccurate or feel unnatural, customer satisfaction plummets.

This dichotomy puts immense pressure on customer support to deliver flawless AI interactions that feel as intuitive and understanding as a human touch.

Secondly, despite the digital revolution, the human connection remains irreplaceable. A recent McKinsey survey of 3,500 consumers revealed a telling preference: live phone conversations still rank among the top methods for customer support, even among ‌digital-native Gen Z. This shows a key truth — while digital tools make life easier, the warmth and security of human interaction are often what really solves worries and builds loyalty.

Lastly, integrating AI in customer support workflows means navigating through a regulatory labyrinth. Businesses are eager to harness AI for its potential to personalize and enhance customer interactions. But they’re also grappling with stringent compliance issues and rulings around AI usage that will emerge in the near future. They can’t train their large language models directly on customer data without navigating a complex web of privacy regulations and ethical considerations.

These challenges aren’t just problems but opportunities. They’re opportunities to create new ideas, change how people engage with your brand, and combine technology with human understanding in ways that truly appeal to today’s consumers. As we move forward, the key will be in finding that sweet spot where technology enhances rather than replaces the human elements of customer service.

The key functions of generative AI in customer support

Generative AI can help customer support teams tackle these challenges head-on with three key functions — creating, analyzing, and governing. Let’s dive into how these functions work in the context of customer support.

Create: Generative AI excels in crafting support articles and responses that strike a delicate balance between customer service, product knowledge, and sales. For instance, imagine a customer asking about a skincare product for sensitive skin. Generative AI can quickly pull from an extensive database of product information and customer feedback to craft a personalized response that not only answers the query but also subtly upsells — for example, by suggesting a complementary, soothing toner.

Analyze: This function is about turning vast amounts of data into actionable insights. Consider a scenario where a support team needs to understand the most common complaints about a new product launch. Generative AI can analyze customer feedback across multiple channels, identify trends in dissatisfaction, and provide a concise report. This enables the team to quickly address these issues, perhaps by creating targeted tutorials or FAQs that preemptively solve these problems for other customers.

Govern: Maintaining brand consistency across all customer interactions can be a nightmare, especially with large teams. Generative AI aids in enforcing brand guidelines and compliance. For example, it can review outgoing communications from customer support agents, ensuring they meet all company standards and messaging is consistent. This helps in maintaining a unified voice and reduces the risk of errors that could lead to customer dissatisfaction or legal issues.

By integrating these functions, generative AI gives superpowers to your customer service team‌ — ‌it enhances their capabilities, allowing them to deliver faster, more effective and personalized responses. This isn’t just about keeping plates spinning in your support juggling act — it’s about adding more plates and doing it with style.

Generative AI in action in customer support: Uber

When Uber faced the colossal task of managing over 45,000 support agents and a sprawling knowledge base of 5 million support assets across various platforms worldwide, they knew they needed a smarter approach.

Enter the partnership with Writer, our cutting-edge generative AI platform. Designed for accuracy and security, Writer is the leading full-stack generative AI solution for enterprise companies with global teams.

Spearheaded by Uber’s Director of Global Community Operations, Hadley Ferguson, and Global Knowledge Production Lead, Peter Tu, the goal was clear: streamline and enhance their global knowledge ecosystem for customer support and internal operations.

The implementation of generative AI transformed how Uber managed its content. By developing custom AI applications with Writer, Uber could automate the creation and updating of saved replies and generate fresh articles for the Uber Help Center. This not only eased the burden on their support content teams, allowing them to focus on higher-level strategies and user experience, but also ensured that all content was compliant with regional legal standards and consistent with Uber’s voice.

The results? A significant boost in operational efficiency and overall user experience. The AI integration helped consolidate knowledge and best practices into a central system, reducing duplication and enhancing information accessibility across the company.

“We create upwards of one million saved replies today, and have over 50,000 help center articles,” says Hadley Ferguson, Uber’s Director of Global Community Operations. “The Writer apps we’ve built for these use cases are helping us improve our user experience, while simultaneously optimizing our team’s capacity.”

With plans to further explore AI applications, including developing a Knowledge Graph, Uber continues to set benchmarks in the tech industry for enhancing customer support and internal content management.

Get the full customer story: How Uber creates a unified knowledge ecosystem with generative AI

Actionable customer support use cases for Writer

Whether it’s a peak season or just another day at work, the challenges of customer support remain the same: efficiently managing inquiries, understanding customer pain points, and providing personalized help.

Let’s dive into how Writer can transform these everyday challenges into opportunities for stellar customer service, all year round.

1. Managing high-volume inquiry periods

Imagine it’s your typical high-traffic period‌ — ‌not necessarily the holidays, but maybe a product launch or a major sale. Your team is swamped with questions. Here’s where the Writer FAQ Generator comes into play. By leveraging this tool, your team can develop a comprehensive FAQ section that addresses the most common queries related to the event. This proactive approach reduces the load on your support team and speeds up response times for customers seeking quick answers.

Explore the FAQ generator

But there’s more to it. With Writer Knowledge Graph, your team can access a wealth of historical data and insights. What are the common issues during similar past events? What queries keep popping up? By understanding these patterns, your team can prepare better and even automate responses to frequent questions, ensuring they’re never caught off guard.

Tour Knowledge Graph

2. Identifying and addressing customer pain points

After any customer interaction, whether it’s a campaign or regular support, there’s invaluable feedback to parse through. This is where Writer AI Studio shines. Set up AI apps  to sift through feedback and pinpoint recurring themes or specific complaints. It’s like having a detective at your fingertips, one that helps you see beyond the obvious and dig deeper into what your customers really need.

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And when it comes to real-time interaction, Writer chat apps like Ask Writer are invaluable. Equipped with advanced RAG technology, these apps allow your team to pull in specific data or documents up to a massive 10 million words. This feature lets your team understand customer feelings better on the fly. This helps them make smart decisions and change their strategies quickly.

Check out Ask Writer

3. Tailoring responses to fit customer needs

No two customer queries are exactly alike, so why should your responses be? Customizing support content is crucial, and with Writer, it’s straightforward. You can create AI apps designed for generating support articles and email responses that resonate with specific customer issues while matching your voice and compliance standards. Pair this with Knowledge Graph, and your team has access to a rich repository of real-time internal data. Whether it’s details from previous interactions, specific product information, or updates on company policies, this tool ensures that your answers are as accurate and as helpful as possible.

By integrating these powerful tools from Writer into your customer support strategy, your team is no longer stuck in reaction mode: they’re freed up to proactively enhance customer experience. It’s about being prepared, insightful, and adaptable — qualities that define great customer support, all year-round.

Learn more about scaling great service with Writer

Discover the many ways Writer can support your customer support team

Ready to see what generative AI can do for your customer support team? Try Writer today and experience firsthand how it can transform your customer support operations, making them more efficient and customer-centric.

Don’t wait to enhance your customer support strategy. Take a product tour or request a demo now and start delivering superior customer service with the power of generative AI.