Live chat has been a mainstay of customer support for years, and the rise of AI chatbots means it’s only growing in popularity. Consequently, AI live chat is the new normal.
There are two big reasons why so many companies choose live chat:
It can drastically reduce wait times for their customers.
It can also drastically reduce support costs for their business.
Fortunately, customers also like live chat.
41% of customers say live chat is their preferred customer service channel — that’s more than any other channel.
But successfully integrating AI into live chat isn’t just about adding a tool or turning on a feature.
Combining AI and live chat successfully requires careful planning and a responsible strategy to ensure it enhances, rather than hinders, customer interactions with your brand.
Resolving customer issues is the end goal for every customer support interaction, but it’s equally important to make all of the touchpoints required to get there as effortless as possible.
If you introduce something that requires too much effort — like switching channels or making your customers repeat themselves — you’re likely to see more frustration and less loyalty from the customers you worked so hard to acquire.
Here’s a breakdown of how AI can transform live chat and what you need to consider to make it work seamlessly for your customers.
AI Chatbot - How AI Can Improve Live Chat Support?
Integrating AI into traditional live chat offers several key benefits for both your customers and your agents.
Reduce agent workload
AI can handle simple, repetitive tickets — like status checks or tracking updates — that don’t require human interaction to be successfully resolved. These types of inquiries often tend to be the highest source of ticket volume for support teams.
By offloading these common questions to AI, you can free up a ton of time for your agents, giving them the added capacity to focus on tackling complex issues that require extra thoroughness or human touch.
Improve response times
With AI, customers can access instant answers to their questions without having to wait in a queue for a free support agent. AI is also available 24/7/365, meaning your customers can get help even when your support team isn’t immediately available.
By handling straightforward tickets, AI can drastically increase first response times and make live chat (or other channels) a more efficient channel for support.
Enable autonomous customer resolution
Zendesk’s research found that 69% of customers say they would prefer to resolve issues on their own.
That’s not always possible, but it’s a lot easier when you have generative AI at your disposal.
For certain types of inquiries, a great AI chatbot can provide customers with all the tools needed to resolve a problem entirely on their own.
Cut support costs
Since an AI chatbot can handle a large volume of your easier customer service tickets, it often means you can serve more customers with a smaller team. Humans are still necessary and vital — but AI makes your support team’s efforts far more scalable.
Of course, you’ll need to spend money to invest in an AI tool to make this happen, but that’s generally significantly cheaper than hiring additional team members.
Potential Risks of AI in Live Chat
While AI offers valuable benefits, there are also risks to consider. AI’s effectiveness depends on responsible implementation, and poorly designed AI can feel like more of a deflection for customers, leading to an endless loop of unhelpful answers and a whole lot of frustration:
Risks of getting AI wrong with your chat experience include:
Increased Customer Effort. Poorly trained AI will serve up incorrect information or completely miss the mark on customers’ needs and emotions. Without a robust library of content and ongoing training, AI risks becoming a source of misinformation or, worse, an unhelpful presence in your live chat. There’s a reason you see memes and stories about frustrating chatbot experiences.
Loss of Continuity in Communication. Customers expect live chat to live up to its name and act as a direct line of communication with a brand. If the transition from AI to an agent on a chatbot isn’t seamless, it can feel like a jump between channels. This breaks the flow and completely defeats the purpose of incorporating live chat, and usually manifests itself as your customers needing to repeat themselves.
Lack of Empathy and Nuance. AI often lacks the empathy and human touch that make live chat appealing to customers in the first place. When AI responses come across as robotic or overly scripted, you risk creating a bad experience. Generative AI is much better at this than old-school rule-based chatbots, but there’s still a risk your AI could misread a situation and respond without appropriate empathy.
Minimizing Customer Effort with Live Chat and AI
The first two risks highlighted above share a common theme: increased customer effort and introducing friction into the chat support experience.
The good news is that there are tried-and-true best practices you can follow to implement AI into your live chat in a way that minimizes your customers’ effort and maximizes their outcomes.
Let’s check out a few.
Train your AI on quality data
Your AI is only as good as the information it learns from (kind of like humans, too, huh?).
Take the time to create a well-organized content library and train AI with accurate, relevant data. Most modern AI chat tools can be trained on multiple sources, including your knowledge base, past customer interactions, and other internal documents (like your company wiki or Google Drive).
By ensuring that your AI fully understands your products, policies, and the true sentiment of common customer inquiries, you set it up for success.
Balance efficiency with customer satisfaction
While AI can reduce costs, there’s a fine line between efficiency and frustration.
This means you need to continually evaluate the cost savings against the customer experience your tools are providing. If your AI is struggling to understand the inquiries it’s being fed, it will erode trust with your customers and diminish the value of live chat as a support channel for your business.
Pay attention to the success rate for customers who are interacting with your tool so you can spend more time training the AI on where it’s failing or missing the mark.
You can do this by conducting regular feedback loop analyses on the tickets coming in through live chat and keeping track of how your customer satisfaction (CSAT) increases or decreases with different inquiries to the AI.
It’s also usually insightful to compare your AI’s results — CSAT score, first contact resolution, and more — with those of your human team members. Also measure and track the impact of AI on your Support Team.
Streamline access to a live agent
To make connecting with a live agent easy for customers, ensure the AI-to-human handoff is as undetectable as possible. If a customer’s query isn’t being resolved by the AI, you want a seamless transition to a human agent.
Removing all friction — like resubmitting details or re-explaining their scenario — creates a sense that the handoff is part of a single, continuous conversation, rather than a channel change.
This continuity reduces customer effort and leads to a more satisfying experience.
It’s also crucial to train your AI to quickly recognize signals of customer frustration.
When a customer starts to use words or phrases that indicate they’re getting upset, an immediate handover to a human agent is often a good idea.
This enables your human team members to double down on their empathy and to defuse the situation before things get worse.
Empower your customers with choice
Giving customers control over their experience with AI can greatly improve their satisfaction.
For instance, upon starting a chat, give customers the choice to instantly utilize AI for a quick inquiry (like checking order status) or join a queue, with a clearly stated time estimate, for a more complex issue that may require a human touch:
“It looks like the wait time for the next live chat agent is about seven minutes. Would you like to wait for them or can I try to help you resolve the issue instead right now?”
By offering clear options and being transparent about things like hold times, you put your customer in the driver’s seat.
That kind of empowerment goes a long way in keeping customers happy. Even if your AI chatbot isn’t able to resolve the issue, the customer’s choosing of it means that they’re less likely to get frustrated about the experience (compared to if you forced them to go down that route).
Improve Your Customer Support with AI Live Chat
Live chat has become an essential service touchpoint for delivering fast, effective support. When implemented thoughtfully, AI can make this channel even stronger by streamlining resolutions and reducing the workload on your team.
The goal of AI in live chat should be to enhance — not replace — human interaction. A great AI implementation empowers your customers to choose their preferred channel and opt for self-service — if they want it.
If not, by minimizing customer effort and delivering a smooth and easy handoff to a human agent, you’ll still create a great chat experience that ends with satisfied customers.
At Swifteq, we’ve created numerous Zendesk apps that help you get more out of Zendesk, whether you’re interacting with customers via live chat, email, or another channel.
From ChatGPT-powered ticket automation to improved Zendesk help center management, Swifteq apps will ensure you’re maximizing Zendesk’s capabilities to deliver a great customer experience.
Eryn Chesney
Eryn is an experienced e-commerce CX leader in e-commerce with a strong background in writing and content marketing. She’s passionate about empowering support teams and using the invaluable insights they collect to drive business success.