The buzz surrounding AI for CX is taking on a new tone. Leaders no longer question whether or not AI drives productivity. Instead, they want to know how to measure and quantify these productivity gains.
No matter the sector, we commonly hear, “How can my team track and calculate productivity? How can we ensure that our team uses the AI we deploy? How quickly can we expect to see improvements in our support processes and operations?”
To answer these questions, we sat down with Steven Davis, SR Director of Enterprise Support at Gainsight.
Like many Support orgs these days, Steven and his team are globally dispersed serving thousands of customers worldwide.
Agents had to navigate multiple sources to find information that was needed to resolve cases. To address this and other challenges, Gainsight implemented TheLoops AI. As a result, agents and managers now save up to 500 hours combined per month while ensuring personalized support.
Since the world of AI-driven support ops is still emerging, Steven shares how you and your team can integrate AI seamlessly into existing operations and workflows, leverage humans in the loop and stay ahead of your competition. Read more below.
Working Smarter: Intelligent Routing To Better Manage Queues
Before implementing TheLoops, Gainsight’s managers were spending 200 hours per month manually routing each case, a time intensive practice.
This SOP had been established with good intentions—Gainsight relied on managers to ensure the tickets of premium support customers were always routed to the right, premium support agents. But this was just ineffective long-term.
Traditional ticketing systems, being primarily transactional in nature, created a hurdle to efficient routing and personalization. While round-robin solutions were plentiful, they too would not work considering the complexity of Gainsight’s support structure.
By automating these time-consuming tasks, TheLoops helped Gainsight’s support managers redirect their efforts towards higher-value activities, such as coaching, strategy development, and improving customer relationships.
What’s particularly noteworthy is the speed at which this transformation occurred. Instead of a months-long implementation process, Gainsight was able to deploy and benefit from TheLoops Automated tagging and routing within weeks.
Maximizing Agent Efficiency and Productivity with AI Agent Copilot
While optimizing managerial processes is crucial, another area gaining significant attention is the implementation of AI Agent Copilot to help your agents maximize their productivity.
Gainsight’s experience with TheLoops Copilot provides an excellent example of the immediate impact these tools can have.
Steven reported significant productivity gains:
“We calculated a savings of approximately 300 agent hours a month and that was conservative.”
Now, Gainsight’s support agents have access to these insights directly within their system of record, eliminating the need to gather information from multiple sources.
What sets TheLoops Copilot apart is its ability to provide contextual information such as sentiment signals, topics, and subtopics, along with detailed resolution summaries. This significantly reduces the time agents spend on initial discovery and understanding of complex issues.
Steven does share that the role of AI isn’t to replace human agents but, rather, augment their capabilities and help them to focus on tasks more important for human insight and empathy.
As he put it:
“We’re using AI to make them more efficient. And the goal is asking them to reinvest that time back into the business in areas that have more value.“
This approach not only improves operational efficiency but also increases job satisfaction among support teams, as they’re able to engage in more meaningful, impactful work. Steven offers a few examples of work the team can do instead: edit knowledge base articles, write documentation and FAQs for technical support issues.
Here, Steven explains how to think about measuring productivity gains with AI:
Another AI Benefit: Help New Agents Ramp Faster
Many of our Fireside chat guests including Steven have shared how Support is often told to hire less, or wait to hire until a crucial tipping point and that teams are never short on work. Adding to these challenges is the amount of time and necessary training required to ensure new agents can learn their products, SLA’s and provide high quality support to customers. Gainsight was no exception to a lengthy albeit necessary training process, as Steven explained:
“When new agents come in, it used to take upwards of, I’d say, six months for us to get them onboarded, familiar with a product. Within another 6-12 months, they either move up or move to another part of the company.”
This endless cycle of onboarding, having agents work for 6 months to one year only to need to hire new agents was creating a vicious cycle.
“So if you have six months of onboarding time and you have 12 to 18 months of keeping somebody within that role before they move on to the next, you really have a struggle getting value out of the employees”
With these challenges, Gainisight needed a solution to improve this. They found their answer in AI Agent Copilot.
New agents now have instant access to real-time relevant information and suggested resolution summaries. This has significantly reduced the learning curve for Gainsight’s new hires, helping them to become productive much faster than the previous six-month timeframe.
Additionally historical resolutions and issue-specific insights at the agents fingertips. This not only expedites the onboarding process but also improves overall productivity.
By learning on the job through real-time access to relevant information, agents can quickly become proficient in handling complex support scenarios, leading to faster resolution times and improved customer satisfaction.
Driving Adoption and Change Management
With the mention of AI, most people are apprehensive about its impact on their jobs and as a customer support manager, we understand how critical it is for you to ease them with this transition.
And to make this process easier Steven recommends involving specific team members in the implementation process:
“We’ve given everybody a little piece of this project from the management perspective, and I think that’s really helped drive the stakeholder alignment and ownership between the group.”
This collaborative approach not only ensures that the solution meets the needs of all stakeholders but also fosters a sense of ownership and enthusiasm for the new technology.
Setting the right context for employees is equally crucial. Steven noted:
“As managers, we set the example by telling our team, ‘This is not going to replace you. This is going to help you.’ We want to ensure that the low-value activities are getting done for you automatically. You’re going to be focusing on high-value activities only.’”
By framing the AI implementation as a tool to enhance their work rather than replacing it, Gainsight was able to overcome potential resistance and drive enthusiastic adoption.
Wrapping Up
Steven and his team have shown that successful AI implementation in customer support goes far beyond just adopting new technology. It’s about fostering a culture of continuous improvement, where agents are encouraged to upskill and adapt to new ways of working.
Gainsight’s success in saving 200 manager hours per month and increasing agent efficiency by 5% within the first 30 days is a great testimony for what’s possible with platforms like TheLoops.
Gainsight’s AI implementation journey in customer support is ongoing, and this approach highlights the importance of choosing a scalable AI platform rather than a narrow, single-point solution.
By choosing TheLoops, an AI platform that can grow with their evolving business needs, Gainsight is able to continuously improve their support operations.
Their next step of rolling out AutoQA further proves that the benefits of a flexible AI platform are well worth the effort, allowing them to add new capabilities that align with their expanding business goals.
Interested in watching the entire webinar? Access the recap here.
To learn more about how TheLoops can help your organization achieve similar results, set up a call with our team.
