beth mcentee

What will the future of customer service look like? We asked 400 CS professionals to find out

We recently shared some early insights from our research into the effects of AI on customer service. Given how fast the industry is changing, we wanted to share more of the learnings that we’ve gotten from over 400 support leaders in North America to help support teams take advantage of this immense opportunity.

We’ll be publishing the full report in the coming weeks, but some of the key insights include:

• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of support leaders believe they’re already seeing value from their automation efforts.
• Some 58% say that they expect to reduce support costs over the next five years by adopting AI.
• Almost three-quarters (74%) of support leaders say they expect AI to transform customer support careers in the next five years.

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Liam Geraghty

AI boosts customer service team productivity by 14%, according to Stanford and MIT researchers

How much does AI actually help customer service teams provide better support? We talk to MIT researcher Lindsey Raymond about the first major study on the topic, which revealed the huge impact AI is about to have on the industry. The Fortune 500 company they studied saw a 14% average boost in productivity among customer service workers, and an eye-popping 35% jump among the newest or lowest-performing workers.

In this fascinating conversation, Lindsey covers a lot of topics, such as:

• Generative AI thrives on abundant data, which is what makes customer support, with its wealth of text data, a prime industry for the development of AI tools.
• The productivity gap between top-performing and bottom-performing support agents are major drivers for improvements in the customer service industry.
• Low-skill workers benefited most from the AI tool, as it helped them adopt best practices they hadn’t figured out on their own yet.
• The significant productivity gains enabled by AI, such as improved problem-solving and customer satisfaction, could potentially support the rise of the four-day work week.

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Liam Geraghty

Building AI that works: How to navigate the AI frontier as a product leader

Our Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor talks to two of Intercom’s product leaders, Rati Zvirawa and Brian Donohue, about how we built Fin, our new AI chatbot, and what we learned about managing ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence.

Des also offers a prediction for how AI might disrupt the entire concept of the user interface – he basically suggests the traditional UI could disappear entirely for complex products – which goes to show just how revolutionary generative AI really is.

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