Let’s be honest, customer service teams really do have a tough job. They’re often buried under piles of tickets, and so many of them ask the exact same basic questions over and over. That’s tiring for the agents and means customers wait longer for an answer. But what if you could take some of that repetitive work off their plate? That’s where AI, especially the kind of technology behind things like ChatGPT (those big language models), can really help.
These smart AI tools are changing how things work, offering ways to automate tasks, get answers faster, and free up your human team to handle the truly tricky stuff. But bringing AI into your customer service isn’t just a simple flip of a switch; you need a smart way to go about it and the right tools. This guide will walk you through the practical steps to make that happen.
What AI and ChatGPT tech can do for your customer service
When people talk about “how to use ChatGPT for customer service,” they’re usually thinking about using the tech behind it – what are called large language models (LLMs) – through platforms built specifically for businesses. These aren’t just the public ChatGPT website; they integrate those powerful LLMs into your existing workflows and teach them using your company’s specific information.
LLMs learn from huge amounts of data, which helps them understand what people mean, write text that sounds like a human, and even do things based on instructions. This makes them incredibly handy for automating and making customer interactions better.
Big perks of using AI
Adding AI capabilities to your support team brings some really nice advantages:
- Faster answers, anytime: AI can reply instantly, 24/7, no matter how many questions come in.
- More consistent help: AI gives the same approved answers every time, unlike different agents who might phrase things slightly differently.
- Handle busy times: AI agents can manage tons of simple, repetitive questions, stopping your human team from getting swamped.
- Save some money: Automating tasks means less manual work on easy tickets.
- Help your human agents: By taking care of the routine stuff, AI lets your team focus on the complex, important conversations that need real human empathy and problem-solving skills.
Real ways to use AI and what tasks it can do
So, how can you actually put these AI skills to work? Here are some practical things they can do:
- Drafting replies: AI can suggest draft answers for your agents based on the ticket details and helpful info. This is where tools like the eesel AI Assistant (sometimes called an AI Copilot) are great, giving agents context-aware suggestions right where they work.
- Summarizing conversations: Got long email chains or chat histories? AI can quickly give you a short summary, helping agents catch up in seconds.
- Sorting and routing tickets: AI agents can automatically look at new tickets to figure out what the customer wants, how they’re feeling (sentiment), and what language they’re using. Then, they can send the ticket to the right team or agent, add tags, and decide how urgent it is. eesel AI Agent’s smart sorting is built for this kind of task.
- Training new people: AI can pretend to be a customer so new hires can practice, or it can be a quick way for them to find info while they’re learning.
- Finding information: Need to find a specific rule or help article fast? AI can quickly search your knowledge base and give you the answer or the link. This works for customers using a bot and for agents needing quick info. eesel AI Agent and AI Assistant are good at pulling information from lots of different places.
- Automating simple questions: Lots of easy, repeated questions (like “Where’s my order?” or “How do I reset my password?”) can be handled completely by an AI agent without needing a human at all. eesel AI Agent is especially good at solving these common issues.
- Helping with reviews and social media: AI can write draft replies for public comments or reviews, helping you keep your brand’s voice consistent.
| Customer Service Task | How AI Can Help |
|---|---|
| Answering FAQs | Automate responses based on knowledge base |
| Summarizing tickets | Provide quick summaries of long conversations |
| Routing inquiries | Intelligent triage based on intent, sentiment, language |
| Finding information | Instant knowledge retrieval from multiple sources |
| Training agents | Simulate interactions, provide quick info access |
| Drafting replies | Suggest draft text based on ticket context and knowledge |
| Automating simple questions | Resolve common issues end-to-end |
| Assisting with reviews/social media | Draft replies for public comments |
What you’ll need to get started
Before you jump into adding AI to your customer service, it’s a good idea to have a few things ready:
- A way to use AI: This usually means signing up for a platform or service that includes AI features designed for business, rather than just using the free public ChatGPT website.
- Your business information: Your AI needs to learn about your products, services, rules, and how you’ve handled customer issues before to be truly helpful.
- A customer service system: AI tools often work best when they connect with the helpdesk you already use, like Zendesk, Intercom, or Freshdesk.
- Clear goals: Know exactly what you hope the AI will achieve before you start setting it up.
Step-by-step: Putting AI to work in your customer service
Getting AI working well in your customer service isn’t just about adding a chatbot. It’s about smoothly adding AI features into your current workflows and tools to make your team even better and improve things for your customers.
Step 1: Figure out what you want AI to do and where it fits
Start by thinking about the specific problems you want AI to help solve.
- Do you want fewer simple tickets reaching your agents?
- Faster reply times when things are busy?
- Help new agents learn faster?
Pick the first few tasks or workflows where AI seems like it could make the biggest, quickest difference. Focusing like this helps you see if it’s working and make adjustments.
Step 2: Pick the right way to use AI
Deciding how you’ll get access to AI capabilities is a pretty important step.
Just manually using the public ChatGPT interface for customer service tasks isn’t really practical for a business.
- It’s hard to scale up.
- Not very secure.
- Doesn’t connect with your other tools.
- Doesn’t know anything about your company.
Many helpdesks have their own built-in AI features, but these can sometimes have limitations.
- You might find they cost a lot, often charging per agent or even per ticket the AI solves, which adds up fast.
- Customizing them might be pretty basic, maybe just picking from a few preset tones.
- Often, they can only learn from information within that platform, like your help center articles, missing out on useful stuff in other documents or past conversations.
A dedicated AI integration platform, like eesel AI, is built specifically for customer service.
You can find all the eesel AI integrations here.
Step 3: Connect your sources of information
Your AI needs to become an expert on your business. That means feeding it all the relevant details about your products, services, rules, and how you’ve handled customer issues before to be truly helpful.
- Gather up your help center articles.
- Include internal documents (like Google Docs, Confluence, PDFs, standard procedures).
- Especially include those past support tickets – they hold a lot of valuable context.
It’s really helpful to use a tool that can easily connect to and learn from all these different places. Some basic AI tools are limited to just their own knowledge base, which means your AI won’t have the full picture from past customer chats. eesel AI is designed to train on multiple sources and automatically syncs, so your AI’s knowledge stays current without you having to manually update it all the time.
Connect your knowledge sources to eesel AI here.
Step 4: Set up how the AI should act and what it should do
This is where you get to shape your AI agent’s personality and actions.
- Decide on its tone – should it sound friendly, formal, or somewhere in between?
- Set up greetings and sign-offs that fit your brand.
- Tell the AI exactly what steps to take based on what the customer is asking for. This could mean adding tags, sending the ticket to a specific team, or even looking up order details from your e-commerce system using an API.
Importantly, decide when and how the AI should pass the conversation to a human agent. Tools like eesel AI give you detailed options for setting up the AI’s instructions and actions, offering more control over these workflows compared to simpler, preset options.
You can customize your eesel AI bot’s behavior here.
Step 5: Test it out and make tweaks
Don’t just launch your AI agent and hope for the best! Testing thoroughly is key to make sure it works the way you expect before it starts talking to all your customers.
- You can simulate conversations within the AI platform to see how it answers different questions.
- A really effective way to test is by running the AI on a bunch of past tickets to see what replies it would have given and how many it would have been able to handle on its own.
eesel AI has a simulation feature that lets you test new setups and instructions safely. You could also start by rolling out the AI to just a small group of agents first, get their feedback, and improve its performance before launching it more widely.
Test your eesel AI bot’s responses in the dashboard.
Step 6: Launch it and see how it’s doing
Once you feel good about how it’s performing in tests, deploy your AI agent to the channels or agent teams you chose. Now comes the ongoing part: watching its performance.
- Keep a close eye on important numbers like how many tickets the AI handles completely (deflection rate), how fast it resolves issues, and how happy customers are with interactions the AI handled.
- Use insights the AI platform provides, like seeing where the AI struggled to find answers (knowledge gap analysis). This helps you figure out if your training information is missing something or isn’t clear, so you can keep making the AI better over time.
eesel AI offers reporting and insights to help you track performance and spot areas you can improve.
Tips for making it work and handling bumps in the road
Adding AI to customer service can bring amazing benefits, but it’s not always perfectly smooth sailing. Here’s some advice to help you succeed:
- Make sure the information is correct and high quality An AI agent that gives wrong answers is actually worse than not having one at all.
- Make sure you regularly update the information you use to train your AI.
- It’s a good idea to have a human check AI responses, especially when you’re first starting out, before they go to customers.
- Use tools that let you easily fine-tune the AI and test things out, like eesel AI’s testing features, to keep improving accuracy.
- Find the right balance between AI and human agents AI should work with your human team, not just replace them.
- Think of the AI as an assistant or the first point of contact.
- Train your human agents on how to work effectively alongside the AI – knowing when to hand a ticket off, how to use the draft replies the AI suggests, and how to take over a conversation smoothly.
- Make sure that when a handoff happens, the human agent gets the full history of the conversation, which is something eesel AI is built to do for smooth transitions.
- Think about privacy and security Customer information is sensitive stuff.
- Be really careful about the data you use to teach your AI and make sure it follows all the necessary privacy rules like GDPR or HIPAA.
- Pick an AI platform that has strong security and is clear about how they handle your data.
- Keep an eye on costs AI can definitely save you money, but some pricing models can lead to unexpected bills.
- Understand how different platforms charge – is it per agent, per ticket solved, or per interaction?
- Compare costs based on how many tickets you expect to handle.
- Look for platforms with clear, predictable pricing, like eesel AI’s pay-per-interaction model, which can be a lot more cost-effective as you handle more and more tickets.
Ready to make your customer service even better with AI?
Using AI and the technology behind ChatGPT is a powerful way to really improve your customer service. It can make things more efficient, faster, and able to handle more questions. By automating everyday tasks, giving instant information, and helping out human agents, AI can significantly boost how well your operations run and how happy your customers are. Getting it right means planning carefully, picking the tools that work well with what you already use, and constantly watching and improving how it performs.
Stop feeling overwhelmed by repetitive tickets and start empowering your team. eesel AI connects easily with your current helpdesk and other tools, learns from your specific business information (yes, including those important past tickets!), lets you customize automation to fit your exact needs, and offers an affordable way to scale your support without hidden fees.
Learn more about how eesel AI can automate and improve your customer service. Start a free trial today or book a demo.
