Have Your Cake and Eat it Too — Experience Personalized CX at Scale With Answer Threads

Great customer service could be the difference between your company’s survival or its demise. In a world where operating margins are thin, competition is fierce, and brand loyalty is disappearing, each penny of revenue is crucial for every direct-to-consumer business. It’s well documented that “Improving customer experience, even by a sliver, can generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue by reducing customer churn and upping customer spending.”

Other research shows that customer experience “has steadily become the most important source of retailers’ long-term competitive advantage,” and therefore a critical driver of revenue.

Customers communicate with companies across many channels, particularly digital and social ones, and expect consistent and personalized service as well as instant and effective resolution. They also expect companies to remember who they are throughout every transaction.

Unfortunately, most companies fail the test of creating an omnichannel, digital-first, life-long customer experience because of poor technology implementation and a lack of collaboration between teams. And as a result, customer satisfaction is stagnating.

This doesn’t have to be your company’s story, though. You can create the kind of experience customers crave — personalized, memorable, tailored to their preferences — and you can scale it to thousands of interactions daily, saving your agents time and you money. You no longer have to choose between great customer support and preserving revenue. You can have it both ways; you can create a bespoke, delightful customer experience without expending untold resources on agents, software, and training.

Is this sorcery? No, it’s Gladly’s new generative AI feature, Answer Threads.

Conversational AI your customers will actually like

Answer Threads is the latest AI breakthrough from Gladly that generates enjoyable, conversational interactions with customers, answering routine queries in an engaging, friendly way, thus saving live agents’ time for more complex tasks. Answer Threads works on chat and SMS platforms, and generates freeform responses using customers’ knowledge base, allowing for natural yet automated conversations with customers.

Answer Threads is integrated with Gladly’s platform, making it easy to set up and monitor — in fact, it can be set up in minutes. The feature allows for testing and refining responses to ensure accuracy and relevance, can be trained to communicate in your brand voice and tone, and has safeguards in place to reduce hallucinations.

Passing the customer expectations test

Most companies’ digital customer experience platforms focus on efficiency, measuring how many tickets agents close in an hour or a day. But this is precisely what’s driving customer experience into the ground. Customers want to be seen as people, not tickets to be deflected. Answer Threads uses generative AI to make free-form, conversational responses based on your company guidelines and training. It follows advice and instructions on company policy, brand tone, and customer service protocol. It does not draw from the wider internet when it doesn’t know an answer. When Answer Threads can’t answer a question, it connects customers to a human agent, and it’s so seamless most people don’t realize they’ve switched.

Answer Threads is also enriched by Draft Answers, which automatically suggests answers for the Gladly Admin by analyzing post-handoff conversations between consumers and live agents that the AI wasn’t able to answer. Draft Answers helps companies improve their knowledge base quickly and easily by detecting gaps and suggesting answers based on the live agent’s response, enhancing both human and AI responses. Both the human and AI agents learn from the interactions, meaning that the customer experience gets better each time the platform is used.

Safety features are built in

We know how important it is to maintain customer trust, and thanks to a number of high-profile incidents, consumers are skeptical of how well AI can handle their concerns. 80% of consumers say they just don’t trust retailers to use AI responsibly. We want to help you overcome the trust gap. When we developed Answer Threads, we built in a number of safety features into the product:

Smart engagement. The AI automatically detects topics or keywords that it should not handle — such as sensitive or off-topic inquiries, legal actions, abusive language, or requests to speak with a human — and transfers these conversations to a human agent. This includes globally sensitive topics like attempts to abuse or jailbreak the AI.

Relying only on knowledge base-derived answers. Staying true to your Gladly Answers, Replies adhere to facts from your knowledge base to ensure accurate responses are generated, while remaining resilient and handling variations in the way customers talk to you.

Your admins control the AI experience. Admins can configure how the AI behaves, what type of language it uses, and when inquiries should be transferred to human agents.

Guardrails in place. Various algorithms further suppress hallucinations, unsupported actions, and more.

With Answer Threads, you can be confident that your customers receive the best, most accurate information every time.

Our customers adore Answer Threads

It’s been fantastic to see our customers’ response to Answer Threads. One said, “We’ve been tickled pink with the performance of Answer Threads. Particularly in its ability to approximate our brand tone to a tee, and its ability to know when to transfer a conversation to an agent.”

One benefit that our customers particularly love is the time savings for their agents. The time spent doing routine customer service tasks can now be handled automatically by Answer Threads, with the same care and consideration your agents would give. Your agents can focus on delivering high-end or complex service, elevating the experience for your customers and encouraging return visits and higher spend.

Flexible pricing for Answer Threads

Answer Threads solves the trickiest challenge for customer experience leaders today. Therefore, we want to lower the barrier for all companies who are interested in using generative AI to provide a delightful customer experience at scale. Answer Threads is available with a pay-as-you-go model for all Gladly customers.

Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more information about how you can get started with Answer Threads. Don’t choose between customer delight and operational efficiency. Have your cake and eat it too! It’s delicious!

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