Customer churn is one of the most costly business challenges — and often one of the hardest to solve. Adding predictive and generative AI technologies can make an immediate impact on retention numbers. And, when implemented strategically, these tools have the potential to completely transform the way customer service and support teams operate.
Researchers at McKinsey & Company recently looked at the business impact of AI use in customer service. One company they studied increased issue resolution by 14% and reduced the time spent handling an issue by 9% with the application of generative AI. Requests to speak to a manager went down by 25%, and the company even saw an increase in the retention of their service agents.
When every percentage point counts, the lift that AI tools can provide to better engage and retain customers (and employees) can make a major impact on your ability to hit business goals.
Broken customer service experiences accelerate churn
Customer retention and churn rates impact the bottom line and long-term business growth. It’s almost always significantly cheaper to retain your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Upselling and cross-selling to current customers is also a lighter lift for sales and marketing teams than net-new opportunties, as you can draw from your established relationship with the customer, who is already familiar with your products or services.
But when customers aren’t getting the level of service and support they expect, those relationships and the trust you’ve built with them can erode. When customers are bounced around from channel to channel, have to repeat their information multiple times, or have conversations with not-so-intelligent chatbots that go nowhere, they can sour on your company altogether.
As our friends at Salesforce shared, here are 4 signs your customer service is broken:
- Customers complain about how hard it is to get service on their preferred channels.
- Customers are stuck on hold and then have to repeat themselves.
- Agents are getting burned out.
- Contact center productivity falls — and the business suffers
CRM + AI gives you the power to predict and prevent customer churn
From website interactions to point-of-sale activities to call center inquiries (and everything in between), customer data is scattered across multiple channels and touchpoints. Without a way to connect all those dots and surface the right insights at the right moments, your team isn’t set up to deliver great customer experiences. Even the best, most dedicated service agents can’t properly serve customers without the full picture.
Fortunately, with a strategic framework and a unified customer experience platform like Salesforce Service Cloud, your team can get timely, relevant insights to assist customers and resolve issues quickly, and with more positive outcomes. And, with Agentforce Service Agents, your team can predict customer churn before it happens — and proactively right the ship when a customer is at risk.
Identify and engage at-risk customers with Retention Agent
Retention Agent is Atrium’s Agentforce solution to identify at-risk customers and provide sales, service, and support teams with personalized recommendations to re-engage them. Retention Agent will suggest tailored follow-ups, personalized offers, or targeted engagement strategies to proactively retain customers and prevent costly churn.
Using predictive and generative AI capabilities, Retention Agent:
- Identifies at-risk customers. Retention Agent assigns a churn score to each customer and creates a list of clients who may be at risk.
- Augments customer reviews. Retention Agent looks at engagement data, history, and churn score to provide more context on at-risk customers.
- Recommends relevant actions. Your agent will suggest personalized actions to re-engage an at-risk customer (e.g., sending a relevant offer).
- Creates personalized outreach. Retention Agent will help your team members draft and send relevant, personalized communications to customers.
Don’t lose another great customer. Learn more about Atrium’s Retention Agent.
