How to customize your AI assistant to enhance customer support

No matter what type of business you run, one question remains: How can we stay ahead of our competitors? With artificial intelligence-powered assistants, customer experience teams can leverage a versatile, responsive, and efficient tool to facilitate better customer service and engagement. 

However, it’s essential to understand that maximizing the benefits of AI chatbots requires thoughtful implementation and patience to see significant results. To realize the transformational impact of this technology, every organization needs three things:

• An AI assistant that creates more efficient customer service agent interactions

• Customizations that address core business needs by leveraging customer data

• Seamless integrating of AI into your customer experience workflows 
  
  

For non-technical team members, the above bullet points can sound intimidating. But that’s the beauty of AI: you don’t have to be a data scientist to implement and build robust AI solutions that support a better customer experience.

If you’re eager to build your own AI assistant but unsure where to start, we’re here to help. Learn more about the role AI chatbots and assistants can play in enhancing your customer experience—and how Bird’s AI experience makes it easy to implement a customized bot into your CX workflows.

Why AI assistants make customer success agents more efficient

When it comes to customer engagement, the expectation of what AI can achieve is high, with 82% of executives reevaluating their consumer experience (CX) strategies in response to the progress made in generative AI, increasing competitive pressure, and shifting customer expectations. 

AI chatbot performance addresses that pressure, enhancing your CX by helping your business:

• Provide personalized experiences that strengthen brand loyalties and support customer retention. An AI assistant, for example, can refer to specific products and orders when asking customers about their satisfaction with a recent purchase. They can also be responsive to customer sentiments, taking on a more apologetic tone if they realize the customer is frustrated or angry.
  
  

• Get to market faster with integrated communication around new products or special offers. Go-to-market messaging can be made accessible to AI chatbots to help them quickly adopt the language and key messaging points around those campaigns. This can improve consistency when releasing new products or services, or even undertaking a more intensive rebrand.
  
  

• Improve time to resolution (TTR) and quality by implementing low-lift, low-cost technology solutions. By facilitating customer interactions at scale, AI assistants can alleviate CS bottlenecks and accelerate TTR—which can contribute to greater customer retention over time.
  
  

• Free up your CS agents to focus on higher-value tasks. When AI assistants are able to take on a greater workload in communicating with end-users, your CS agents are more available to focus on complex tasks that AI isn’t equipped to handle.
  
  

A better customer experience lays a foundation for sustainable growth for your company. An investment in AI assistants and chatbots is an investment in improved customer satisfaction, a stronger brand experience, and an improved outlook for revenue generation.

How to customize your AI assistant for better customer support

You’re ready to implement a powerful AI assistant to enhance customer interactions. But before you plunge into the deep end of the AI chatbot pool, you need to decide what functionalities your business needs most.

Here are seven types of AI assistant functionality you’ll want for any customer support use case:

1. Omnichannel messaging options 

Omnichannel messaging lets you deliver CX support to your customers or prospects anytime, anywhere. Create enriching conversations that preserve context across channels as your business grows, and as customers jump from one marketing channel to another.

2. No-code chatbot implementation

Don’t waste time on expensive specialists or complex DIY builds. No-code AI creation tools allow you to create your dream chatbot for your CX infrastructure. By cutting out coding, you’re able to maximize your internal resources while minimizing AI-related costs and resources—all while taking advantage of powerful, pre-built components created by trusted AI experts.

3. Automated FAQ generation

FAQ answer models can help you quickly account for likely customer inquiries that will be received by your AI chatbot. Automated FAQ generation uses NLP to scan your website, identify common questions your customers might have, and provide correct answers even in real time. Bird offers a step-by-step process for creating, training, testing, and deploying a custom FAQ model.

4. Shopify store integration

If your business runs a Shopify store, you’ll want to integrate your AI chatbot with that store so the AI can access the store’s knowledge base of data. Once integrated, your chatbot will be able to reference your available inventory for product recommendations and other answers to customer queries.

5. Automated workflow enablement

Streamline your support workflows and conversations to reduce resolution times. Bird’s Flows Assistant, for example, uses AI to simplify the creation of advanced flows that will streamline workflows for your CS agents and administrators. Creating with Flows Assistant is easy: all you need to do is provide a verbal prompt to describe what you want to automate, and AI will create a customized flow tailored to your exact needs.

6. Seamless integration options

Building and maintaining high-performance chatbots shouldn’t require days or weeks of manual configuration. Instead, seek out a solution that offers straightforward, native integrations with all your important data sources—including your CRMs and data platforms—or easy integration options via APIs.

7. In-depth analytics and reporting

To truly understand how your messaging is performing and how your customer satisfaction rates are evolving, you need a robust analytics system built into your messaging solution. You must be able to get key takeaways regarding your crucial metrics at a glance and, when required, dive deeper into your data to extract insights at the most granular levels.

The Power of Bird’s AI Assistants To Improve Your CX Value

Bird recognizes that each business has different needs. That’s why our AI experience offers a chatbot suite powered by integrations with leading AI platforms, including OpenAI and Gemini, to help you build an AI assistant that meets and exceeds your expectations. 

If you’re looking for a low-stress chatbot with rock-solid fundamentals, Bird is here to help. But if you need a cutting-edge, fully autonomous chatbot with all the bells and whistles, our platform has everything you need, too.

When Bird customers deliver correct, timely, personalized responses to their customers—no matter where they are or what channel they’re using—they can build trust while driving agent efficiency. 

Here are some of the features Bird offers to help you build powerful AI chatbots for a better customer experience:

Automated FAQs

Leverage generative models and traditional frameworks to give your chatbot experience the best of both worlds. This AI chatbot solution can auto-generate FAQs to simplify your integration process and accelerate your go-to-market velocity, a key metric for global scalability and profitability.

OpenAI dataset generation makes this solution a true “plug-and-play” option. You add company information and choose your channel, and it automatically builds conversational scenarios and pre-filled questions and responses. It can also suggest information based on a single question and auto-generate variations and corresponding answers.

Automated FAQs are easy to deploy through Bird’s AI Hub, which can be accessed through your dashboard. You can also train and test your FAQ model through the Bird platform prior to deployment.

Intelligent routing for agent support 

Better bots mean higher-performing, better-informed support agents. With an intelligent routing bot solution from Bird, agents get instant access to AI technology that can understand context cues and route common requests to the correct resource with little to no human intervention. Beyond providing a hyper-personalized experience, it also helps agents save valuable time.

Intelligent routing can be further enhanced through Bird’s Agent Assistant solution, which allows your CS agents to generate replies using AI when they’re not sure how to answer a question. It can also help them summarize information for management and internal diagnostics. These summaries help agents add personal touches when giving stakeholders updates on the latest happenings in CX.

Knowledge base development to enhance AI agent intelligence

Knowledge bases collect a library of organized information to help your AI agent generate answers to your customers’ questions. 

Bird facilitates knowledge base creation through its deep OpenAI integration. Folders will be set up to house all of the documents pertinent to that category of information. One folder, for example, could contain FAQ documents that have been auto-generated based on your website content. Other folders may be set up to store information related to ordering and shipping, account management, and other topics you want your AI chatbot to handle.

The larger and more organized your knowledge base is, the more valuable it will be to your AI solution—which will increase the volume of customer queries the AI assistant can answer.

An AI assistant is an investment worth making

The AI revolution is here to stay—and that’s great news for your CX team. Rather than replacing your CS agents, AI chatbots built with Bird can support your agents and streamline their own workflows while giving your customers a more responsive customer experience.

The challenge for some CX leaders is quantifying the business impact of AI chatbots on stakeholders. This means focusing on money saved, productivity gained, and customer satisfaction improvement rates. 

With Bird’s Flow Builder and Inbox, customers have seen their First-Response Time (FRT) decrease, productivity increase, and partner onboarding experience improve.

• Ralali increased their NPS score by 40% with Flow Builder

• Aramex becomes 2.7x more efficient in agent productivity with Flow Builder and Inbox

• Glovo reduced costs by as much as 80% for partner onboarding
  
  

Now, with the application of AI, businesses are empowered to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction while decreasing communication spend even further. The sooner your organization embraces AI assistants, the faster these benefits could be yours.

Bird is ready to help. Contact us today to learn more about AI customer service.