PixieBrix Blog

How to Onboard Customer Success Agents Faster With AI

Written by Eric Bodnar | Nov 12, 2024 8:57:53 PM

Customer success leads can often feel like they need all the help they can get. Their teams are often understaffed, underappreciated, and overwhelmed. Getting budget approval for new tools can be tough, and they might need an ironclad argument before they’ll be allowed to add one to the mix. If this sounds like something you’re dealing with, just know you’re not alone. Not only that, but AI might just be the answer to your problems, especially when it comes to onboarding new customer success agents.

Here's why.

Why should you use AI to onboard new agents?

AI is incredibly popular right now, and there are probably teams in your organization that are using some kind of AI-powered solution already. But does that mean you should go through the trouble of deploying an AI tool to your customer success team just because the marketing team has some fancy, automated content-generating tool?

Call centers and other customer success teams can have some of the highest turnover rates across all industries, which means that finding ways to streamline onboarding and get new agents up to speed faster are massive concerns for customer success leaders.

AI seems to be up to this challenge. Early research is already showing that AI helps customer success agents be more productive, closes the skill gap between your top performers and the rest of the team, and reduces the number of requests for a manager.

Sounds like a win all around.

3 ways AI accelerates onboarding for customer success agents

When you boil things down, onboarding a new employee involves three main aspects:

  • Making sure an employee takes in your company’s culture and is a good fit.
  • Helping new employees feel welcome in their new team and helping them build connections with their coworkers.
  • Building up a new employee’s skills to match the demands of the job so that they can work independently as soon as possible.

While there are AI solutions that can definitely help with the cultural and social aspects of onboarding new customer success agents, this technology is best suited to helping employees build their technical skills. Here’s how.

It helps them make the most of your resources

The knowledge base is one of the best resources for new agents. Not only will it answer their questions about your product or service, but it’ll also give them easy answers for most of the requests they get from customers. Learning how to use it effectively, though? That can be tough.

Some AI solutions pair naturally with popular knowledge base platforms, meaning they’ll help new agents navigate them efficiently without the intervention of a lead or other senior employee.

It can handle basic customer needs

Every customer success agent knows there are basic, routine requests that they could do in their sleep. Usually, they might put a customer on hold while they go through the motions taking care of a task that not only takes all their attention but can also be error-prone when it’s done almost subconsciously.

With AI, you can automate this type of request so that your agents have more time to handle more complex cases. For new agents, that means more time to learn the ins and outs of different kinds of tickets.

It provides guidelines for everything else

The first few days when customer success agents find themselves answering support tickets on their own can be some of the most stressful in their careers. They look around for help that isn’t coming, and they don’t want to bother the rest of the team through a chat app for every request.

AI can help eliminate that stress without using up the team’s resources. That’s because AI trained specifically for customer success teams can automatically light the path for an agent handling tough situations, guiding them toward the best potential resolution for a customer.

Why PixieBrix should be your AI partner of choice

The AI furor has been raging for months, and there are already dozens of AI solutions on the market. Some are free and built for more general purposes (like ChatGPT) while others are built specifically with customer success in mind (like ChatBot). But what if your AI solution could combine the best parts of both types of tools, all while doing more than just AI?

That’s where PixieBrix comes in.

PixieBrix is a low-code platform that empowers all sorts of teams to get more out of the websites and software they use every day. It works natively with customer support tools like Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce, but it’s also powered by AI. It can bring AI tools like ChatGPT to the platforms your customer success agents need to get things done, helping them get up to speed faster and close more tickets.

You can use PixieBrix to build your own automations and sidebars or use pre-built mods to quickly deploy AI to the entire team. Here are just a few examples of these mods.

  • Knowledge Base Copilot: The knowledge base is perhaps the single most useful tool in your customer success team’s arsenal, but newer agents can struggle to get the answers they need. With this AI-powered mod, they can automatically pull the right information in moments and share it with customers.
  • Writing Assist: Response speed and accuracy are top of mind in CS, but critical aspects like grammar and brand voice often get lost. To solve this, the Writing Assist uses ChatGPT to improve your writing based on communication goals that you establish.
  • AI Copilot: ChatGPT has the power to be your personal assistant, except it requires prompt engineering and isn’t available on demand, when and where you need it. To solve this, the AI Copilot comes with a curated set of CS prompts, which you can customize, and makes them available any webpage providing context and convenience.

The best part? You can start using PixieBrix for free and deploy it to your team in minutes.

Get some support

No matter which AI solution you decide to go with, you’ll quickly realize just how much help it is in ramping up new hires. It pairs naturally with the tools you’re already using and helps new agents build up those support muscles that make your long-timers close out tickets at record speed. A tool like PixieBrix is a great way to try this out for free, so make sure to sign up and roll it out to your team.