Every time one of your customer service agents clocks in, you’re investing in customer service. In fact, your investment is directly impacting the trust, satisfaction, and lifetime value of your customer base.
The tools your customer support and customer experience team uses are part of this investment. Organisations are now investing in AI customer service for good reason: one study found that it can improve responses by 20% with automated, conversational chat. It can also hand off queries to live agents at any time with full context, and CX agents can continue to leverage AI in live chats to access vital customer support data and lower average resolution times.
With any investment you make, it’s important to understand the potential business value it creates. But measuring the ROI of customer experience (CX) investments isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. Below, we’ll explore some of the important ways that customer service tools can impact your bottom line.
The impact of customer service
Customer experience (CX) plays a pivotal role in shaping businesses outcomes. Exceptional customer service can significantly boost a company's reputation, foster customer loyalty, and drive revenue growth through positive word-of-mouth and repeat business.
When customers feel valued and their needs are met efficiently, they are more likely to become brand advocates, attracting new clients and strengthening the company's market position.
On the other hand, poor customer service leads to customer attrition, negative reviews, and damaged brand image. In today's interconnected world, where consumers can easily share their experiences online, subpar service can quickly escalate into a brand trust issue, potentially causing irreparable harm to a company's bottom line and long-term viability.
Customer service automation ROI: the basics
At its core, your return on CX investment is the total amount your customer support tools and processes earn versus how much you’ve spent over a given period of time. When you incorporate an AICX solution such as Proto, you can reduce the amount of time agents spend on simple and repetitive queries, which allows them to address more complicated matters faster, enables more customers getting served, and improves resolution quality and time.
This is because AI does not complement CX by only solving simple queries. Implementing AI can in fact result in creating a more loyal customer base, reducing churn, and boosting revenue.
Key metrics for measuring ROI
What percentage of your profits can you attribute to customer support? It might be more than you think. A lot of companies look at the cost of their customer support as a cost of ensuring retention. However, high quality customer service - enabled by the right tools - can go a long way towards generating new, and maintaining existing, revenue.
Consider these KPIs when factoring in the cost of your customer support tools:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
- Net Promoter score (NPS)
- Customer lifetime value
- First response time
- Average resolution time
But while KPIs are important, numbers won’t give you the whole picture of how customer support tools function to impact your team and reach new customers.
Looking beyond quantitative data: how AI boosts agent performance
Automation in CX can improve the key quantitative metrics of customer satisfaction and issue resolution. However, it can also empower agents and improve their productivity and, consequently, the overall experience customers have with your brand. In fact, while 80% of organisations are adopting genAI in customer support, your customer service agents will determine how effective these strategies are.
For example, many companies opt for CX automations that help agents access internal customer service information faster. This helps reduce average resolution times and increases the number of chats agents are able to take on. Another example is when genAI helps agents communicate more effectively, meeting the brand voice, without needing to spend extra time training the agents.
A recent study by Microsoft found that 47% of respondents had voice-only customer support powered by agents, and 60% of businesses could benefit from omnichannel customer service. The same study found that 40% of large companies were still relient on manual routing for agent assistance.
Omnichannel capabilities may not have a direct impact on key metrics, but they can improve customer satisfaction. Support on channels like Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS is particularly crucial for organisations in industries like transportation where customers need information on the go. CX platforms can help agents streamline communication across multiple channels, giving them access to all queries in one place.
Additionally, multilingual capabilities can drastically improve trust with customers who prefer service in their native language. This is a key consideration for large organisations that have a global customer base or who have large global business operations, entering markets that are not English-first speaking. In such situations, if agents don’t speak the same language customers do, AI support tools can help them communicate more efficiently with automatic translation to boost customer satisfaction.
Enabling such personalised and localised service results in stronger brand value, better customer trust, higher retention, lower churn, more referrals, more upgrades and upsells, and greater new revenue generation through positive brand perception.
How Proto can help you deliver high-impact customer support
A good AICX tool is quick to implement, easy to use, and shows ROI quickly. With Proto, you can get started in minutes with chatbots that can learn from information on your website, .pdfs, and prompts in seconds.
Proto gives your support team instant access to LLM-enhanced chat, allowing agents to automate responses to repetitive questions and improve their own service with tools for multilingual chat and instant translation.
With Proto’s customer profile data synced with companies’ CRMs, agents will have all the information they need to serve customers efficiently, along with access to key metrics that link service back to business value.
Ready to improve your customer service ROI? Set up your free forever account or reach out to one of our team members for a personalised demo.
