Behind the Tech: Stories Shaping Our Digital Future
Copilot Impact on Customer Service!
Written by: Exquitech Group
In today's competitive business environment, more and more customers expect instant customer support from businesses. So as customer expectations continue to rise, it’s essential to find intelligent support solutions that facilitate fast, efficient and personalised customer support. One of the most promising tools for achieving this is Microsoft Copilot AI.
In this article, we’ll explore how AI-powered assistance with Copilot can improve customer service for businesses and their customers. We’ll look at the key benefits and features of Microsoft Copilot AI and explain how you can successfully implement this customer service technology in your business.
Microsoft Copilot AI is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that connects with a business’s CRM to seamlessly integrate into their customer support workflow, enhancing the productivity and effectiveness of customer service teams.
Microsoft Copilot AI assists customer service teams by suggesting responses and automating repetitive tasks. With AI-powered assistance, Copilot can even handle simple customer queries without any human intervention.
By leveraging advanced AI technology, Microsoft Copilot AI helps businesses streamline their customer service processes, improve response times, and deliver a more personalised customer experience (CX), resulting in enhanced customer interactions and increased customer retention.
AI-powered assistance is transforming how businesses interact with their customers, and Microsoft copilot customer service is at the forefront of this transformation.
One major way AI enhances customer experience (CX) is by providing faster and more accurate responses. In today’s competitive business environment, businesses are always trying to improve response time and customers expect responsive customer service.
For simple, straightforward queries, virtual support agents can analyse queries and provide valuable answers almost instantaneously.
In addition, businesses can answer customer questions even after business hours, as virtual support agents are always there to assist customers. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but also reduces the workload on your customer service team.
Copilot AI also analyses past interactions, preferences, and purchase history, and offers tailored responses based on each customer’s unique preferences. The level of personalisation available with Microsoft copilot customer service makes customers feel understood and valued, helping businesses build a stronger connection with customers.
Intelligent support solutions can also handle a large volume of customer inquiries simultaneously. This ensures that all customers receive support right away, which improves customer experience (CX) and streamlines support ticketing systems. Copilot AI also lets customers schedule a call with human agents if virtual support agents can’t resolve the issue.
Microsoft Copilot AI offers a range of features designed to enhance customer service operations:
Real-time assistance for customer service agents: As agents engage with customers, Copilot suggests relevant responses, provides access to necessary information, and even automates certain tasks.
Microsoft copilot customer service not only speeds up the support ticket resolution process, but also helps agents ensure their responses are consistent, helpful and accurate, and that they are meeting service level agreements (SLAs)
Customer relationship management (CRM) integration: Whether you use Dynamic 365, Salesforce, or another CRM, Copilot AI can integrate with your CRM to connect your customer support services with the rest of your organisation. For example, Microsoft Copilot AI can integrate with your CRM to retrieve information on customer order histories. Customer service agents can then use this information to make better business decisions.
Customer service automation: Copilot also excels at handling routine inquiries. Through its natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities, it can understand and respond to common customer questions without the need for human intervention. This frees up your customer service team to focus on more complex issues that require a human touch.
Draft email responses: With Copilot, customer service agents can select from predefined intents or provide their own custom intent to draft email responses. Copilot uses the context of the email conversation and case details to produce personalised and contextual emails. Human agents can also choose the tone of the AI-generated response, to fit appropriately with the purpose of the email.
Comprehensive data analytics and AI-driven insights: Additionally, Microsoft copilot customer service includes robust analytics and reporting tools. These features allow businesses to track human and automated customer interactions, monitor performance metrics, and identify trends. By leveraging these AI-driven insights, companies can continuously improve their customer service strategies and make data-driven decisions.
Implementing Microsoft copilot customer service into your customer support processes can offer numerous benefits for your business.
Improved efficiency: One of the main benefits of Microsoft copilot customer service into customer support teams is increased efficiency. Virtual support agents can perform routine tasks in a fraction of the time it would take human agents. Copilot can also analyse customer data and instantly suggest appropriate actions to customer support agents, improving the efficiency of support ticketing systems.
Increased responsiveness: Poor customer support response times can significantly damage relationships with customers. Virtual support agents offer 24/7 support, so customer inquiries can be handled even when business hours have ended. And if virtual support agents can’t resolve an issue, they can suggest follow-up actions such as booking a call with a human agent.
Through customer service automation, Copilot also frees up human customer service staff to promptly handle situations that require human intervention.
Improved consistency: AI customer support also enhances the accuracy and consistency of responses. Human agents can make mistakes or provide inconsistent or incorrect information. Copilot ensures that every response is accurate and aligned with company policies, reducing the risk of errors and maintaining a high standard of service.
Scalability: One challenge with growing a business is hiring and managing additional employees to accommodate more customers. With Copilot, the need for additional customer service staff is significantly reduced, as most customer inquiries are simple questions that can be resolved through automated virtual support agents.
Microsoft Copilot AI can yield significant benefits for your customer service department. However, implementing Copilot requires careful planning to ensure smooth integration and maximised benefits. Follow these steps to integrate Microsoft Copilot into your customer service operations:
Assess your current customer service operations and identify areas where Microsoft copilot customer service would be most impactful. For example, if your customer service agents spend most of their time answering routine inquiries, then virtual support agents that provide automated responses would have the most impact. While Copilot can improve efficiency in many areas, it’s best to focus on the most impactful areas first.
Once you've identified your objectives, the next step is to integrate Copilot with your existing systems. Copilot is highly adaptable and is compatible with a wide range of customer service platforms, including Microsoft’s Dynamic 365 and other third-party CRMs. Work closely with your IT team or a trusted IT partner for seamless integration.
While Copilot’s customer service automation and virtual support agents can handle many customer support functions, it’s still essential to train your staff on how to use Copilot effectively.
Comprehensive training and ongoing support can help your team feel confident in using Copilot. By continuously developing their skills and learning new ways to benefit from using Copilot, your team can ensure they leverage its full capabilities.
Once Microsoft Copilot AI is running and your customer support staff understands how to use it, it’s essential to track the performance of Microsoft Copilot customer service. Microsoft makes this easy by allowing users to track their performance through the Copilot analytics dashboard.
Track key metrics such as response times, customer satisfaction scores, and the number of inquiries handled by AI versus human agents. You can also see which support topics have the highest escalation rate, resolution rate and abandon rate.
Many businesses (across various industries) have successfully implemented Microsoft AI Solutions solutions like Microsoft Copilot AI. Here are a few examples:
Bader Sultan and Brothers Company (BSBC) is a leading regional supplier of high-quality healthcare and hospital equipment, based in Kuwait. They successfully used Microsoft Copilot’s AI-powered assistance to increase productivity and boost response times.
Microsoft Copilot customer service makes it easy for the BSBC customer service team to create and review emails, especially for emails regarding the delivery of their products. They also use Copilot’s support automation to remove the tedious, repetitive customer service tasks.
Swedish company Sandvik Coromat is a leading manufacturer of cutting tools. Their customer service team guides customers through the development of new tools, including planning, manufacturing and training, to ensure customers get the most from their products
By using Microsoft copilot customer service (along with Dynamic 365) customer service agents can get a full picture of every customer’s account history. Agents can also see conversation sentiment status and the system even provides the next steps to resolve issues quickly, resulting in enhanced customer interaction.
While customer service technology like Microsoft Copilot AI offers many benefits for customer support teams, it's important to address the challenges that businesses sometimes face when implementing intelligent support solutions.
Lack of human understanding: One challenge is ensuring that AI can handle the nuances of human language. There may be instances where AI struggles to understand or correctly interpret a customer's query, or is unable to detect flawed information.
To avoid this, human agents should use Copilot only as a tool, and continuously monitor automated customer interactions and provide feedback to improve its accuracy over time.
Privacy and data security: AI relies on customer data to provide tailored customer support, but this data must be handled with integrity. Data breaches can have serious consequences, including:
financial loss
legal recourse
reputational damage
Businesses must ensure their systems comply with data protection regulations and implement robust security measures to protect customer data.
Lack of Empathy: One of the pitfalls of Copilot AI is that it lacks human empathy essential for resolving some customer inquiries. For this reason, businesses shouldn’t use automated AI responses to handle all customer support functions. Instead, businesses must decide which functions AI can handle and which functions human agents are needed for.
Measuring the impact of AI on customer satisfaction is essential to understanding its effectiveness and making informed decisions about its future use.
Businesses can measure the success of Microsoft copilot customer service through channels such as social media comments and customer satisfaction surveys. After a customer’s interaction with AI customer support, you can prompt the customers to provide feedback on their experience, including the speed, accuracy, and helpfulness of customer support.
To track the impact of Copilot AI on customer experience, look at operational metrics such as:
response times
resolution rates
number of inquiries handled by AI versus human agents.
These metrics can provide valuable AI-driven Insights into how Microsoft copilot customer service affects the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer service operations.
The use of AI in customer service is still in its beginning phases, and its capabilities are only likely to increase in the coming years.
In the future, AI chatbots will likely be better able to anticipate customer needs. For example, by analysing customer data and behaviour patterns, AI virtual assistants may be better able to predict when a customer will encounter a certain issue and offer assistance before the customer even contacts customer service.
This kind of proactive capability could improve support ticketing systems, enhance customer experience (CX) and significantly lower the workload of customer support teams.
The future of AI-powered customer service will likely focus on personalisation because customers want customer service that feels personal (even if they are communicating with chatbots).
Exquitech is a leading provider of IT solutions and has extensive experience helping businesses boost their customer service processes through AI-powered solutions like Microsoft Copilot.
Contact Equitech today to serve your customers better with Copilot AI.
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