The term “artificial intelligence” may sound risky to you and your IT department, but the fact is that your customer-facing teams need AI software to do their jobs efficiently. AI provides support teams with the tools and insights required to make smarter decisions and create more efficient processes.

AI becomes smarter every time you use it. The software leverages processes and algorithms to evolve itself to help with crucial tasks, like measuring customer sentiment and assigning the most qualified agents to specific cases. While AI doesn’t replace support teams, it augments their work performance. 

But the advantages of AI-powered customer support software also extend beyond the sphere of customer relationships. This is why IT departments must become organizational champions for AI implementation – they stand to reap significant benefits:

AI security continues to grow and improve

Customers share sensitive data with your organization with the understanding that it will be safe—but in 2022, over 4000 global data breach events were reported across industries including retail, healthcare, and technology. In the third quarter alone, 15 million data records were exposed.

IT teams are relied on to constantly develop and maintain security protocols to ensure data protection and compliance. This work extends to every third-party tool your organization uses to carry out daily operations. Fortunately, most purpose-built AI tools already have security measures in place – and they’re constantly improving. 

Software vendors are employing measures like virtual private clouds that host a lightweight connector, data platforms, web portals, and role-based access control, offering end-to-end data security. Penetration tests, SOC Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications ensure these safeguards are current and independently verified. These safeguards make sure your IT department’s security concerns are handled, freeing them to work on other issues and keep data security-related headaches at bay.

AI lowers operational costs 

The right AI tools can significantly reduce your organization’s operational costs and extend your IT team’s capabilities without adding headcount. SupportLogic customers, for instance, see a 35% reduction in operational expenses after implementation. 

Once you integrate customer support AI software with your ticketing system, it can:

• Provide a more user-friendly interface—which translates to customer support agents operating on their own, fewer IT support tickets and calls for help on basic issues
• Maintain itself without human intervention, including incorporating any new database updates, which decreases the IT team’s workload
• Provide a low code or no code option, meaning you won’t have to hire extra developers
• Measure customer sentiment in real-time, which removes the need to conduct and pay for customer surveys

AI automates workflows and increases team efficiency

Think of artificial intelligence as a tool to improve the IT and the customer support team’s performance in tandem. AI customer support software automates parts of the support agents’ job while making them less reliant on you and your department: 

• Automating a lot of a customer support agent’s workflow, like predicting escalations or analyzing customer churn risks
• Making it easier for support team leaders to become self-sufficient with software that provides prescriptive recommendations, leading to fewer CRM change requests
• Giving IT staff more time to focus on nuanced and important tasks like predictive analytics instead of gathering data for the customer support department
• Keeping all of your organization’s customer data in one place, meaning you’ll have fewer tools to manage

AI tools provide ready-made data science and valuable insights

Having the right data insights on hand helps customer support succeed. Without key information about customer sentiment, previous history with the company, and product feedback, they won’t know how to personalize interactions with customers, identify their needs, or provide tailored support.

Without AI, customer support must rely on the IT department to comb through data and find specific information to reveal trends and create reports. But, bring AI software to the table and both teams will have easy access to the data they need.

SupportLogic provides teams with real-time, data-driven insights that would be difficult and time-consuming to uncover manually. Teams can use this information to make better and accurate decisions faster, leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased efficiency for both support and IT teams. 

How IT can launch and scale a successful AI project

AI and all it offers is exciting, but your IT team needs a plan and strategy before implementing it. With the right planning, it’s more likely that your AI project will succeed. Without it, it’s more likely to fail. 

Get executive support from the beginning

Before launching an AI project, make sure you have executive buy-in. If you don’t have members of the executive team on board and ready to invest, the project might not even get off the ground. 

To secure support from the higher-ups, be clear about the benefits of the project for the organization. If your CTO learns how much money an AI project would save and how much time it frees up for your team, they could become the champion for your project and advocate for you with the rest of the executives.

Determine which pain points you’ll help solve

Figure out the business problems that artificial intelligence will help overcome. Your AI project won’t be very effective if you implement it without clear goals in mind. 

Say your customer support team has trouble identifying signs of churn before it’s too late. They need a tool that helps them spot which customers are increasingly unhappy so they can be proactive about retention strategies.

Use high-quality data to build a strong foundation

You’ve heard the term “garbage in, garbage out.” If you feed wrong or low-quality data into the AI interface, then you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. Use the right data schema from the beginning so that your AI tools will give you the best possible results. 

Suppose you have data about how a customer has interacted with your company in the past. If you put that data into the AI engine blindly, it will be a lot tougher to see if that customer is a churn risk or if the support team is even deploying the right communication strategies.

Learn more about how SupportLogic benefits your IT team

SupportLogic helps customer support teams do their job better and rely less on IT. The platform plugs in to systems you already use, providing your customer support team with valuable insights that they can act on to deliver an overall better customer experience. To learn more about how this benefits IT, download our new eBook: The Company-wide Benefits of Support Experience.