As AI and customer service technologies evolve, so must ecommerce businesses if they want to stay relevant and match the level of support quality and customer satisfaction of their competitors.

If you’re running an ecommerce business and you haven’t looked into how AI and automated customer service software can make your life easier and your business more efficient, now is the time to get started.

Automation and AI can slot into an ecommerce business's overall customer experience (CX) to give customers premium experiences and interactions with your business without necessitating large customer service or sales teams. As we know, satisfied customers become return customers very fast if they’re treated well and their issues are resolved quickly and efficiently. 

In this article, we’ll break down exactly what these tools can do for you, as well as explain the four main KPIs you will see incredible improvements in after switching to an AI/automation-focused customer service stack.

Customer Service Automation: The Benefits

When talking about customer service automation, we’re talking about flows built into your CX that enable visitors to your site and customers to essentially “self-serve” their CX. 

Think of a chat window with a series of frequently asked questions such as “Are your products vegan?” or “How do I cancel my order?” Selecting options takes customers through a series of clickable paths to ultimately provide them with the information they need.

60% of the average ecommerce business’s customer service tickets are simple, repetitive questions that, while easy to answer and resolve, add up and take away a lot of time from your customer service team. 

This time can be otherwise spent on addressing the more complex customer service issues they encounter with care, giving your return customers the VIP treatment, or learning new skills to serve the business better and grow professionally. 

Automated flows can handle routine inquiries like order status updates, shipping information, or simple returns, freeing your team to focus on more complex issues. This leads to faster response times, lower operational costs, and happier customers.

Customers shouldn’t have to speak with a human agent just to get an update on their order status or to ask a pre-sales question about an item you sell. Instead, they can click through a quick automated flow to get the answer they need in a few seconds, anytime–day or night. 

AI-Powered Conversations: Enhancing Customer Experience

AI and CX are a match made in heaven. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can take automation a step further by managing more nuanced customer interactions. These AI tools can understand and process natural language, allowing them to handle a broader range of customer inquiries. 

Working alongside any automations you have built into your CX suite, AI-powered chatbots don’t replace humans but help take the load off during peak times and outside regular business hours. 

Unlike automations, where customers must select from a set of pre-defined options, AI chat functionality allows users to speak with AI bots that are “trained" to respond to questions about your brand and products or perform customer service actions for you without human intervention. 

With the ability to learn from each interaction, AI can continuously improve its responses, leading to higher accuracy and customer satisfaction over time. The result is a more personalized customer service experience that strengthens brand loyalty.

One of the biggest challenges ecommerce businesses face regarding CX is what happens while their human agents are off the clock. Before AI, you would either need to staff people 24/7 or live with significant gaps of time where no one was available at your company for customers to talk to. 

This resulted in customers who may have wanted to shop in the early morning or evening left waiting for your company to reply to their chat or email during business hours, and customer service agents logging in every morning to full inboxes and missed calls to rush to reply to. 

Today’s customers expect nearly instant responses to their messages. AI can provide that and, therefore, improve customer experiences. Remember, AI technology doesn’t sleep and can be trained to speak in your brand voice. This, in turn, makes it a team member who can reply to inquiries in nanoseconds and is available every hour of the day.

Key KPIs That Can Be Improved Through AI and Automation 

When considering integrating AI and automation into your company’s CX, you’ll want to track few metrics to gauge how well your new system is doing and find any areas that might need tweaking. 

Here are the KPIs that will improve tremendously if you choose to incorporate AI and automation into your customer service:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This is the average customer satisfaction score from surveys sent after tickets are resolved. This number quantifies how happy customers are with their interaction with your business. 

When customers are offered the ability to self-serve the resolution to their problem, they can quickly get an answer and return to shopping faster. If someone has a simple issue related to either a product they want to buy or an order they have open in your system, why make them wait for a human to respond, pull up the relevant info, ask any additional questions, and type a response when they can make a few clicks and get served within a minute? 

Giving customers the tools they need to solve their problems immediately leads to much happier customers, which, as we all know, turns them into return customers. 

First Response Time 

The amount of time your customer has to wait for an agent to respond to an inquiry. When customer service agents are in the office, they often have to juggle a few different tickets at a time. 

No matter how good your customer service team is, each member only has one brain and two hands. If someone is typing a response to one customer and a new shopper joins the queue, they will naturally have to wait until the agent is available to get a response. 

Even if it’s a minute or two, this time adds up. AI, on the other hand, can respond to multiple inquiries simultaneously in seconds, and automated flows are completed at the customer’s pace, shaving tons of wasted minutes off of your first response time with each customer service interaction. 

Now, we haven’t even touched on how much your First Response Time is affected by emails and chats sitting unread overnight when your human staff is asleep. AI and automation completely erase those hours from this KPI, as they can answer instantly. 

Resolution Time

Resolution time is designed to track how long it takes to resolve your customer inquiry. It’s usually calculated as the time between your customer’s first message and the agent closing the resulting ticket. 

Similar to how the minutes add up with the First Response Time metric, Resolution Time is also affected by the amount of time human agents spend typing up responses, looking up solutions to problems, pulling up customer/order information, and reading previous communication or customer requests. 

AI isn’t a human, yet it has access to all the same information that your human agents do, but unlike humans, AI can parse all this information much quicker and then instantly reply. When conversations are immediately started and resolved, as soon as your customer confirms that they’re satisfied, your average resolution time will skyrocket. 

This is also further improved when you consider all the messages and queries AI and automations handle for you outside regular business hours. 

Messages Per Ticket

An approximation of the customer's effort when interacting with you. This is an average of how many messages customers must read and write to get their inquiries answered. More messages generally mean the customer’s issue is either complex to resolve or the team member handling the ticket might need to work on improving efficiency or being more concise. 

Since your human agents will now be free to take on your most complex inquiries, AI agents and automated flows can handle the easy tasks and can do so extremely quickly and concisely, thus lowering the overall amount of messages required to close most tickets. 

As anyone who has worked in a contact center or handled customer service inboxes knows, there are almost endless possible KPIs to monitor and stress out over. However, these are the four you should be the most concerned with improving, as you’ll see the best overall results.  

Making the Case: Common Objections to AI and Automation Software 

If working with today’s large language models (LLMs) and AI has taught us anything, it’s that AI won’t be taking our jobs any time soon, but it can greatly improve them. Still, some ecommerce CEOs hesitate to let AI and automation into their CX stack.

Here are some common objections we encounter with some arguments for the use of this tech in customer service:

1. The Additional Cost of Another SaaS/Tool is Prohibitive: While there’s an upfront cost, automating up to 60% of support cases can reduce reliance on human agents, saving long-term labour costs. Additionally, faster resolutions enhance customer satisfaction, increasing retention and revenue growth.
2. Integration with an Existing Stack is Challenging:  AI and automated customer service software generally ship with triggers that are prebuilt to fire to your ecommerce platform’s existing API–but, even if your chosen system doesn’t have a flexible API (say, if you want your returns to originate in your ERP), CX platforms generally support custom triggers as well, which can integrate with existing or newly built APIs so that you can get everything easily linked and start benefiting from these tools. Either way, it’s a much simpler integration than it might seem.  
3. Facing a Loss of Human Touch: AI assistants are capable of handling repetitive, simple tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues that require empathy. This actually improves the amount of human touch your team can provide, as they can rely less on copy-pasting canned responses to save time. Automation can also be personalized by integrating customer data, thus creating tailored experiences and continuously improving your customer service
4. Concerns with AI Accuracy and Reliability: While it is fair to worry about your AI providing the correct responses to inquiries, tools like Gorgias, for example, use AI that continuously learns from customer interactions and can be trained with company-specific data, improving its accuracy over time. Plus, it offers fallback options for human intervention when complex issues arise. In addition, by working with an agency partner like Blue Badger, monthly or quarterly audits can be run to continuously tweak the integration.

How to Automate Chats and Leverage AI for Customer Service

By automating 30% of customer service cases through pre-built automated flows and another 30% through AI-driven conversations, businesses can drastically reduce the need for human customer service representatives while still maintaining or enhancing service quality. 

As an ecommerce agency that has helped countless businesses improve their customer journeys and CX, we love recommending Gorgias to our clients interested in setting up an automated CX platform for their customer service teams.