On this International Customer Support Day, we join the global community in recognizing the value and impact of customer support professionals. Their expertise, knowledge, and commitment play a crucial role in driving customer satisfaction across every industry, making this day a powerful reminder of their important contributions to business success.
The January 2025 U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) reports a steady satisfaction score of 76.1, yet poor service is costing U.K. businesses $9.75 billion monthly. The data reveals that 21 percent of customers increased their spending with organizations that delivered excellent service. Emotional factors, such as trust, care, and openness, were found to be strongly linked to higher satisfaction levels. Additionally, while customers acknowledge improvements in the use of technology for service delivery, many still value human interaction, especially for more complex issues.
To build excellence in customer service delivery, companies should adopt intelligent solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) significantly cuts down waiting times and accelerates issue resolution, directly boosting customer satisfaction. While AI-powered bots efficiently handle routine inquiries, more intricate problems are seamlessly routed to human agents. Importantly, AI assistants empower these human agents to deliver consistently accurate responses. This synergy of AI addressing simple queries and providing real-time support to human agents, dramatically increases the likelihood of first-contact resolution, ultimately driving up key customer loyalty metrics such as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score.
With the help of agentic AI, human agents gain many benefits that lead to outstanding customer service. Firstly, it provides real-time information and recommendations during customer interactions, enabling agents to handle requests faster and more competently while reducing cognitive load and stress. Secondly, by automating repetitive tasks, agentic AI allows agents to concentrate on more enjoyable and complex activities, thereby improving job satisfaction and the quality of customer interactions, as agents can spend more time addressing unique customer needs. Further, it alleviates the stress associated with handling the high volume of customer interactions by assisting with information retrieval, compliance tracking, and other tasks, leading to a healthier work environment and reduced agent turnover.
With AI handling routine tasks, agents gain autonomy to make decisions and address complex issues, resulting in higher job satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment as they can focus on delivering excellent service and creating memorable customer experiences.
Jurgen Hekkink is head of product marketing at AnywhereNow.