THE FUTURE

OF SUPPORT
CONVERSATIONS:
AUTOMATION, AI,
AND AUTOQA
 4 SCALING THE CUSTOMER SERVICE TERRAIN

5 AUTOMATION: THE REPLACEMENT FOR CONVERSATIONS THAT DON’T NEED TO HAPPEN

9 AI: INTRODUCING REAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN MACHINE AND HUMAN

10 A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHATBOTS

11 WHAT GENERATIVE AI MEANS FOR CHATBOTS

13 MACHINE VS HUMAN SUPPORT ABILITY

18 CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENTS: THE DECIDING FACTOR

19 THE THIRD TIER AND FINAL FRONTIER OF CUSTOMER SERVICE IS HUMAN INTERACTION

23 HOW TO REACH YOUR QUALITY POTENTIAL WITH AUTOQA

25 WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF CONVERSATIONS?

2 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 When you talk to people in customer service about
how artificial intelligence is going to change the way
businesses converse with customers, it’s tough not
to err on the side of hyperbole.
Discussions get hyperbolic because we can feel
that there are tectonic shifts in the industry, and
can barely predict the current lay of the land. What
is sometimes forgotten in this is that humans form
the foundation of customer service. We feel that
the moving target is technological advances, and its
momentum is causing a slippery surface upon which
it’s tough for service teams to advance.
3 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Remember, though, that the
ultimate goal is to meet customer
expectations.
It is not to blindly chase the latest technological
trends, but to observe how AI is shaping customer
expectations. By putting the customer first
and listening to their needs, you can ensure that
support is relevant and effective, even in the face
of evolving expectations.
That concept exists on both sides of the
conversation: technology should be helping your
customers get the solutions they need and it should
also be assisting your customer service specialists
by any means they need.
So, let’s talk about the future of
conversation, and how to visualize it.
SCALING THE CUSTOMER HU M
AN

SERVICE TERRAIN

In 2020, Intercom introduced the idea of the
Conversational Support Funnel, an efficient way
to visualize customer service by the distinction of
Proactive, Self-serve, and Human. This encapsulated
how to use technology to best serve customers.
Finally, there are the instances where only Complex issues that
only trained service
skilled customer service agents can provide the agents can resolve.
appropriate assistance. How customer service
agents work is, of course, also aided by the data and
technologies at their disposal.

Considering the customer’s perspective, they When we look to the future of customer support,
perceive customer service as a challenge to reach a conceptualizing starts with ‘how much’. How much
resolution. The landscape of this journey is shaped of your team’s duties should be automated? How AI
by the technological tools at their disposal. much can chatbots take over
from agents themselves? How much of this can
Common problems are the gentlest terrain to you actually control, so the customer’s
navigate. Automated customer support can journey is smooth?
effectively handle these simpler issues, resolving
them in a cost-effective and hands-off manner for
Involved inquiries
customer service teams. which chatbots are
capable of solving.

When a customer faces a larger issue, the path AUTOMATION

to resolution becomes steeper. This is where
AI comes into play, offering a more advanced
form of technological support. Chatbots, and
their increasing abilities, cover these more
involved queries.

4 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA Basic issues that can be solved
proactively, e.g. through alerts
and help centers.
 Chapter 1

AUTOMATION:
THE REPLACEMENT
FOR CONVERSATIONS
THAT DON’T NEED
5 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
TO HAPPEN
 Automated customer support is widely regarded and
sold as the ultimate time savior for customer service Ways to automate customer service:
departments. Automating more monotonous and
time-consuming tasks alleviates time pressures, but
it also helps amass valuable data and keep it clean.

Universally recognized as a gift to customer, agent, Notifications of service/ Reviewing tickets for
and support leader, automations are a one-time product disruptions, 100% coverage
setup with lifelong value. upgrades, new releases

What has recently changed is the access to technology.

While large enterprises had access to advanced
technologies since 2018, the playing field is now more Surveys to collect Employee shift

levelled. Smaller companies can now build and maintain feedback, optimized
for response rate
scheduling

solutions, with the help of different tools, but without the

need of having machine learning engineers or analysts.

So the question is not how, but what should you

automate? You need to make sure you are creating the Data analytics
to understand
Canned responses to
ease the burden of
right synergies between your customer service team and customer and repeat questioning

your automation solutions. team performance

Sylvain Mlodyszewski, Director of Partnerships – Ultimate

6 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 Customers like being well-informed and when
they’re given the independence to seek out facts
for themselves. 49% of customers say that they
prefer to solve problems themselves instead of
contacting service, yet the same amount have also
had to abandon self-service due to lack of adequate
information1. The emphasis is often placed on
Millennials and Gen Z as spearheads of proactive
service expectation, having grown up with instantly
accessible search engines. However, the truth is
that the vast majority of customers at any age have
now spent two decades with self-search – the initial
manifestation of digital self-service.
49% of customers
say that they prefer
to solve problems
themselves instead of
contacting service
7 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Agents‘ days are less cluttered with mundane
tasks, tasks that would otherwise make them feel
undervalued and unmotivated. 81% of support
leaders believe that technology like automated
tools will help improve employee engagement and
attrition2. Companies cannot expect two things:
well-trained agents adept at handling complex
issues, and for the same agents to feel fulfilled
by continuously answering everyday questions.
The two being mutually exclusive, automation is a
company’s key to relieving the burden of support
task monotony.
81% of support leaders
believe that technology
like automated tools
will help improve
employee engagement
and attrition
1 https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/sales-service/documents/trends/customer-service-2023-leadership-vision.pdf
2 https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/customer-service-trends-2023
3 https://cxtrends.zendesk.com/
Leaders are given far more data to strategize with.
Automated customer service not only picks up
the mundane work, but it also handles the mass
of information that customer service departments
have at hand. This mass can tangle, with information
strewn disconnected across platforms and teams.
Automation acts to store and weave it together to
depict a high-level overview of how your customer
ecosystem functions. This is crucial knowledge for
accurate decision-making.
Combining customer
service data with
data from other
departments is a
priority for 79% of
companies3
 There is one other benefactor, aside from the
above, of automated customer service: AI. Artificial
intelligence tools flourish with historical data – and
strong data hygiene practices serve as a good
foundation for AI precision and efficiency.

Poor data quality costs organizations an average

$12.9 million.4 Continuous data collection and
analysis is vital for AI systems to fortify and adjust to
evolving situations.

For example, customer service teams are starting to use AI in-house

to update their FAQs. There is one other benefactor, aside from the
above, of automated customer service: AI. As it allows for efficient data
processing and extraction of valuable insights.
These conversations can be collected from various channels, then AI
models, like ChatGPT, identify the main purpose of the conversation and
map the issues. Common themes and topics, once identified, can then
be added to the FAQ section.

4 https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/sales-service/documents/trends/customer-service-2023-leadership-vision.pdf

8 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 Chapter 2

AI:
INTRODUCING
REAL CONVERSATIONS
BETWEEN MACHINE
9 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
AND HUMAN
 A BRIEF HISTORY
OF CHATBOTS
Alan Turing introduces the
1950
concept of The Turing Test. ELIZA, the first chatbot,
1966 is developed by Professor
Joseph Weizenbaum and
uses scripts to respond.
Chatbots have progressed from being programs
that read off a script in response to certain PARRY is created by
keywords, to the smart bots of today that use AI psychiatrist Kenneth Colby 1972
as a way for psychiatrists
to customize their responses through language, to unvderstand
content, and tone. schizophrenia. RACTER is designed by William
Chamberlain and Thomas Etter
1983 to produce prose, although it’s
coined as closer to artificial
insanity than artificial intelligence
A.I. is first incorporated
into a chatbot in Dr 1991
Sbaitso, Creative Labs’
speech synthesis program.

Richard Wallace’s A.L.I.C.E.

1995 is released, using open
source artificial intelligence
markup language.

Mitsuku becomes the first ‘virtual

friend’, developed by Pandorabot 2005
– she can play games, do magic
tricks, and act as a companion.
Apple releases Siri, not
ChatGPT bursts a chatbot as such, but
2011 an assistant that carved
to the fore, the
most advanced expectations of user-led
iteration of AI 2022 conversation.
and chatbots
developed by
OpenAI.

10 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

WHAT GENERATIVE AI Chatbots as
MEANS FOR CHATBOTS unreliable agents
Limited capabilities
ChatGPT, in its current iteration, hasn’t passed
the Turing Test. It does not possess the analytical
The emergence of ChatGPT was a watershed As a result, they were often unable to engage in skills of the human brain to compute and calculate
moment on our technological landscape. Its more nuanced, two-way dialogues with users. the diversions of human conversation. You will likely
versatility in generating conversation, solving This could prove frustrating for customers with have experienced reaching such an impasse with
problems, and even producing correct lines of code more complex queries, who needed to phrase ChatGPT or one of its counterparts, a barrier where
has cemented a new era of how machines talk to their questions in a precise manner in order to there is a level of complexity at which it falls short.
humans (and vice versa). avoid confusion. The more chatbots will advance, the more this
barrier will be pushed further into the conversation.
However, ChatGPT’s advanced architecture and However, we are a long way off from seeing it
natural language processing capabilities allow collapse entirely.
While previous chatbots it to engage in more sophisticated and varied
have attempted to emulate conversations, providing users with a more Falsified truths
satisfying and productive experience. As with any automated system, ChatGPT may
human conversation through make mistakes or provide incorrect information.
artificial intelligence, their As the basis of a chatbot, it is remarkable. However it also sometimes doesn’t admit these
However, as a fully-fledged agent, a chatbot fails in mistakes, and will falsify facts and present them as
capabilities have typically several regards. truths. This goes for OpenAI’s multiple generative AI
been limited to answering models. These “hallucinations” of fact, as generated
mistruths are referred to, will mean that chatbots
basic questions and based on this technology cannot tell the difference
providing predetermined between right and wrong.

information about products

or services.

11 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 With any large language model, if you use
it generatively, there’s always a chance for
a hallucination. You can lessen the chance,
but you can’t get rid of it. Essentially, such a
model is a massive matrix that computes the
probability of each word, then the next word,
and the next. The matrix has no cognitive
powers, it is simply expert at chit chat. However,
if you want your flights changed, chit chat is
not what you want. And a machine is perfectly
capable of lying to you without understanding
the consequences.
Mervi Sepp Rei, PhD - Data Lead, Klaus

12 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

MACHINE VS HUMAN
SUPPORT ABILITY
The Turing Test is designed to test the ability of
a machine to mimic intelligent human behavior to
the end that it is virtually undetectable to a person.
Although no machine has passed it so far, there
is no reason that the developing iterations aren’t
becoming increasingly competent at servicing
customer’s needs when they need support.
After all, the aim of the chatbot isn’t to go
undetected as a machine, it aims to imitate human
behavior to the extent that it’s a good customer
service agent. A customer support conversation
is at its base transactional. Even when you factor
in personalization, empathy, tone, the end goal
is to make the customer happy – not to have an
interesting conversation.
5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/03/02/68-of-americans-afraid-of-self-driving-cars-up-from-55-in-2022/?sh=56b21c4b4ddd3
13 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
? issue approaches cliché. But the alternative question
I believe that in about fifty years’
time it will be possible to programme
computers .… play the imitation game so
well that an average interrogator will not
have more than 70% chance of making
the right identification after five minutes
of questioning.
Alan Turing, 1950
Will customers accept
chatbot-only services?
The question perennially raised is whether or not
chatbots can replace human support agents. The
we should propose is whether or not they should.
Humans expect perfection from machines.
An overarching issue that plagues chatbot usage is
the fact that humans don’t give machines the same
liability that we give each other.
Self-driving cars are the requisite example.
Self-driving cars can’t drive drunk, they
don’t get tired, or text while driving. Yet
the vast majority (68%) of Americans fear
self-driving cars, not a number that is
set to diminish anytime soon5. The media
tends to give more extensive coverage to
fatalities resulting from accidents involving
these cars, as compared to those caused
by human errors.

The core question is, who takes the blame?
If a Tesla crashes, is it the driver’s fault?
The same goes for ChatGPT as a product –
it may solve 80% of your cases, but that
doesn’t matter. The question is who takes the
blame for the times where it makes a mistake?
You cannot give too much power to anything
or anyone who has nothing to lose when they
make a wrong decision.
Andre Tätter, PhD - Machine Learning Researcher, Klaus
14 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Customer service bot failures don’t quite match the
severity of a faulty autonomous vehicle, but our
approach in levying more blame on a machine than
we do on our peers still holds out.
Machines are programmed to perfect specific tasks
to the best of their ability. As much as a chatbot
might be able to mimic our capabilities, it cannot
match the layers of subconscious and conscious
decision-making that humans undergo when we
communicate. And we are very conscious of that.
So, if we have more empathy for each other than
we do for machines, businesses have to strongly
consider how much power they give chatbots. If a
bot cannot reach a perfect solution, their customers
are more likely to be even more disappointed.
 Where do chatbots
add value?
The capabilities of a chatbot sits between the
basics of automation and the complexities of
human interaction.
Chatbots that blend the powers of AI and
automation are able to provide more detailed and
personalized responses for customers.
Integrating with business systems, like order
management and scheduling systems, they can
offer real-time advice and assistance. They’re also
able to process individualized requests and offer
tailored solutions.
15 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Use cases for chatbots
1. Troubleshooting technical issues
Through personalized assistance and real-time
feedback, chatbots are far better equipped to
deliver guidance than a knowledge base article,
for example.
2. Order tracking
By seamlessly integrating with other systems,
such as a company’s order management system,
chatbots provide an efficient and accurate tra-
cking experience.
3. Appointment scheduling
Eliminating the need for manual scheduling,
chatbots can digest customer needs and
preferences, and then suggest available
appointment times that meet their requirements.
4. Personalized recommendations
Which city to visit, jeans to buy, film to watch,
workout program to follow – all of these questions
can be answered by a chatbot. And each answer
is unique to the person.
So the optimal deployment of a chatbot demands
a strategic approach. Using AI in replace of a
human to converse with your customers, aka a
chatbot, will be successful if, and only if, the chatbot
understands its limitations. They should be able
to address customer queries beyond the basics of
automated support, while also being cognizant of
the opportune moments for human intervention.
Chabots can calculate the human handoff by
knowing if the issue itself is beyond their reach,
understanding keywords (like “this is frustrating”),
analyzing sentiment to gauge when a customer is
unhappy, and recognizing when an inquiry has taken
too much time or has gone through multiple rounds
of troubleshooting without resolution.
16 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Precipitation is important: waiting until a person says
they want to speak directly with another person is
already too late. Fortunately, many services exist
with this intelligent handoff caveat built in:
◾ Ada
◾ Solvvy
◾ Zendesk Bots
◾ Fin
There is a place in support for chatbots. But well-
trained customer service agents are still going to be
keeping their jobs for the foreseeable.
While implementing a chatbot, one has to first
consider the scenarios that can be automated
- when doing this, it’s important to look at
repetition as well as situation. Scenarios
requiring empathy can never feel fulfilling
when handled by a bot and even if these are
repetitive, they should be handled by a human.
From a technical standpoint, while implementing
a chatbot, we should look at the channels it’s
going to be made available on and tailor it to
meet the requirements of that channel (reply
with buttons on WhatsApp and web, reply with
text on SMS, etc.).
Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Director - Product Marketing – Freshworks
 The art of chatbot
conversation design Automated quality assurance provides conversation designers with
A well designed flow means that at any hint of a faster way to detect snags in the flow.
frustration on the customer’s side, or ineptitude
on the chatbot’s side, reroutes the conversation With Klaus’ AutoQA, you will already have a map to find out where
seamlessly to a better equipped agent. the problem areas are.
It will:
Perfecting this flow is a dynamic journey of
development. However, due to the nuances and
sheer volume of interactions, locating the chinks Distinguish between bot conversations and agent
in the armor of a chatbot is time-consuming and conversations (and allow you to filter between
inexact. If the upkeep of chatbot quality is too the two)
time-consuming, it contradicts the very purpose of
deploying a chatbot – to minimize manual labor.

Assess bot interactions against AutoQA categories

Compare human and chatbot performance

Identify necessary improvements to enhance the

chatbot’s performance.

17 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 Chapter 3

CUSTOMER
SERVICE AGENTS:
THE DECIDING
FACTOR
18 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
THE THIRD TIER AND FINAL FRONTIER OF
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS HUMAN INTERACTION

Issues that reach a customer service agent’s desk But contact centers are facing annual turnover
are, by nature, the toughest problems. The basic rates of up to 60%6. The reverberations of
issues can be solved automatically, through FAQs, this are felt on the bottom line, but also in
alerts, and the like. Slightly stickier problems that customer dissatisfaction when their agent
require a more customized response can be now performance is lacking.
covered by smart AI chatbots. And this leaves
agents to deal with the trickiest of terrains.
A Klaus report found
So agents with fast problem-solving skills and
the ability to deftly maneuver the frustrations
that service teams now
of a customer with a complex problem are in track DSAT (customer
high demand.
dissatisfaction score)
more than CSAT7.
Companies are worried. And underinvesting
in customer service will only broaden the
gap between customer expectation and
support team ability.

6 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/customer-care-the-future-talent-factory?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_
medium=email&utm_content=20230428&utm_term=8341541&utm_campaign=money&utm_id=24947208&orgid=619&utm_att1=
7 https://www.klausapp.com/customer-service-benchmark-report/t=20230428&utm_term=8341541&utm_campaign=money&utm_
id=24947208&orgid=619&utm_att1=

19 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

Two investment priorities to shape
the future of human support
1. Talent
It’s imperative to equip today’s support represen-
tatives with the tools and training they need. The
critical needs of the customer at this stage demand
an intricacy of care which is determined by how well
you hire and coach your customer service team.
83% expect to resolve
complex problems through
one person.8
That’s a lot of pressure to put on that person.
8 https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/e-books/service/state-of-service-5th-edition.pdf
20 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
Excellent customer service at this stage is greater
than the sum of its parts. Your support specialists
need to be as empathetic as they are grammatically
correct, as personable as they are accurate.
Truly providing personalized support doesn’t mean
providing a blanket standard of service, it requires
an understanding of the customer as an individual
and thus a recognition that different people have
varying needs.
The companies that treat their customer support
team with great care: hiring the right people,
developing their talent, and providing a fulfilling
career path in the company.
I see a lot of companies working in customer
service struggle with turnaround. But in order
for you to be able to scale, you need to keep
the talent. The more complex your product,
the more important that is. You cannot afford
people to leave too early because you’ll be
consistently losing potential. You need to give
customer service specialists possibilities to
cooperate with other departments, with other
teams, always looking into how this person will
make progress within the company.
At Google they hire overqualified people, and
it’s an approach I took from there and used at
Revolut, and now at Shares.”
Inna Grynova, Head of Support – Shares
 Giving your agents some AI assistance

Agent-assist technology offers real-time

suggestions to support agents. These applications
use natural language processing (NLP) and natural
language understanding (NLU) in combination with
real-time transcription and conversational analysis A perennial problem in customer service is
to understand the context of a dialogue. Then it
can surface relevant information and even feed
finding and retaining talent. For Agent Assist,
customer service agents tonal advice to guide the you need people who embrace and understand
conversation to success.
this concept, which means specifically hiring
We can think of this as AI-enhanced communication. people for maintenance. The false line of
However, onboarding this kind of software is too
thought is that you can start from scratch with
often a slow process held up by lack of resources. a legacy AI tool, but this is near impossible to
Deloitte’s 2022 study into the state of AI finds that,
overall, companies are not making the requisite
implement economically.
investments for artificial intelligence success. Marco Certa, Research Manager – Klaus
Specifically, 79% of companies are not educating
their employees on best practices and ways to
prosper with these technologies.9 There is also the issue that agent assist can fail to
inspire customer service specialists in their role.
For Agent Assist to pay its due, a supportive If your aim is to recruit and train talent, consistently
infrastructure and applied manpower needs to be in feeding them with this information does further
place. Its success is an ongoing investment, with to disengage them from authentic interactions
team members trained to onboard, feed the machine with customers.
with the requisite information, follow up and fix
answers accordingly.
9 https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/deloitte-analytics/us-ai-institute-state-of-ai-fifth-edition.pdf

21 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

2. Quality management The two holy grail metrics pertinent to customer service quality are IQS
Managing how well your team is equipped to meet (Internal Quality Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).
customer expectations is an endeavor which im-
pacts the effectiveness of each stage of the con-
versation filter. However, it’s most pertinent to the IQS CSAT
third stage: making sure that when customers need (INTERNAL QUALITY SCORE) (CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SCORE)
a business most, their preferences are attentively Indicates quality levels against internal, set Indicates customer satisfaction with
catered to. standards. To track IQS, you review support overall company performance. This score
conversations and score them against encapsulates customer opinions of the entire
predefined categories. customer journey, not limited to support.

Weighing IQS with CSAT helps you understand where to target improvements.
ASSESS
Review communication
where it matters, fully
integrated into your
operations. There are other challenges on the horizon. How should agents act when many customers start to use
a digital assistant to contact support on their behalf? Or when face-to-face video support becomes
a common offering?

Quality is an ever moving target molded by customers’ evolving expectations, and a robust quality assurance
CUSTOMER process is your weapon with which to consistently hit it.
SERVICE
QUALITY
ASSURANCE
ANALYSE
ACT Gain full transparency
Take your insights of your Service Quality,
and turn it into identifying areas
precise improvements. of improvement,
enabling your team.

22 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 How to reach your quality
potential with AutoQA 100% COVERAGE
to label and autoscore
AutoQA is short for automated quality assurance. conversations
By using a tool to automatically assess support encompassing both agent
tickets, you achieve 100% coverage for a complete, performance and
unbiased overview of what is happening in your customer sentiment
customer conversations. It takes into account multiple
categories and languages to handle huge ticket AUTO QA

volumes in less time.

CONVERSATION
This technology works twofold: DISCOVERY
to identify critical
◾ 100% coverage means that all of your QA conversations for further
bases are covered for every single one of your reviewing
conversations, and every single one of your agents.
Every conversation is worthy when you want to MANUAL QA
understand conversation quality from a statistical
standpoint. Without having to open a single QA ANALYST
interaction, you can understand the breadth of both investigates data
overall customer sentiment and team performance. and against customer
feedback metrics to
◾ Conversation discovery, for pinpointing specific design improvements
areas of improvement and facilitating targeted
training or support to help agents improve
performance. Analyzing complex conversations Targeted feedback Product and
also helps QA specialists address issues that delivered to development
are negatively impacting customer satisfaction – customer support feedback delivered to
whether those problems lie in customer service or agents relevant departments
need to be communicated to other departments.

23 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA


Historically, QA has been based on a form of
random sampling. Whereas in an AI world two
things are going to change. One, you have to
think about the full experience and take into
acount interactions with bots, the handover
from automation layer to human, or vice versa.
Second, it’s about doing QA at scale. There’s no
reason we shouldn’t be able to QA every single
customer interaction that we have. That’s one of
the benefits of working with a partner like Klaus.
Declan Ivory, VP of Customer Support at Intercom
24 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
There are 5 key principles10 that, when followed, aid
optimal human-machine collaboration:
1. Reimagining business processes
2. Embracing experimentation and employee
involvement
3. Actively directing an AI strategy
4. Responsibly collecting data
5. Redesigning work to incorporate AI and cultivate
employee skills.
AutoQA taps into each and every one of these
principles, when used by a QA specialist with the
eye to pluck out critical conversations and knowledge
to put the ensuing analytical data into action.
This approach feeds into the maintenance of an
engaged, skilled team. Quality management is as
important for customer satisfaction as employee
satisfaction. When you have invested time and
effort into building a team of talented customer
service agents who consistently tackle challenging
issues for valued customers, it is crucial to nourish
their skills.
10 https://hbr.org/2018/07/collaborative-intelligence-humans-and-ai-are-joining-forcestion.pdf
 Chapter 4

WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN
FOR THE FUTURE
OF CONVERSATIONS?
25 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA
 Training is an arena where we will likely see a Thinking optimistically, what will become more

lot of machine growth. For agents to be skilled, cherished is the authenticity of human-to-human
interaction, and an appreciation of the resources
they cannot jump straight into complex queries that go into that. While customer service agents

on day one. Humans take time to learn, but still deal with the tribulations of handling angry
customers, the sheer availability of human support
expediting the training of talented agents by will abate the frustrations of customers.

using machines as simulation to play scenarios In other words, when a person’s issue reaches the
out. Agents won’t have to worry about the level where it needs to be addressed by a human

quality of their answers because it’s internal. representative of the company, this is a clear
acknowledgement that the business is taking the
Mervi Sepp Rei PhD, Data Science Lead – Klaus problem seriously.

26 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

 That said, AI chatbots will cover greater and For many companies, we will eventually have
greater areas of terrain. However, companies will
feel reluctant to hand over the reins of customer
a situation where all conversations are at least
interaction completely to machines. AI-assisted. Full automation is much more
A conversation between business and customer is
possible when you have a quality management
of mutual benefit, and it is not in the interests of system to oversee, holistically, what is
either party to widen the gap between person
and product. Machines may take over more of the
happening. But if someone says “chatbots will
talking, but the process of analyzing customer take over in 5 years” take it with a grain of salt.
conversations to gain insights and feedback
will become more sophisticated. Consequently,
Human support will always be an asset.”
maintaining quality management will necessitate Andre Tättar PhD, Machine Learning Researcher – Klaus
increased expertise and thoroughness.

27 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA

Extra Resources

What is AutoQA? Catch up with this Definitive Guide

Quality Conversations with Klaus

Deloitte’s State of AI in Enterprise

McKinsey’s The next frontier of customer engagement: AI-enabled customer service

The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report 2023

Klaus’ Customer Service Benchmark Report

28 THE FUTURE OF SUPPORT CONVERSATIONS: AUTOMATION, AI, AND AUTOQA