Working in customer support is well known to be stressful. The standard turnover for call center agents is 30-45%. Many workers burn out or look for a better opportunity.
Unsurprisingly, CX leaders have consistently struggled with staffing. Kustomer’s Top CX Challenges Report found that in 2024, 1 in 8 of CX leaders rated staffing as their top challenge. Given how much data is available about employee retention and engagement, there’s no reason why it should be so common.
AI poses the next big development for CX for many reasons. While there’s lots of talk of improving a team’s speed, efficiency, and output with AI, another valuable aspect to consider is how AI can impact employee retention and talent development.
Here, we’ll dig into some of the ways AI can make the CX employee experience better so agents will want to stick around.
Make the job easier with AI
Working in the front lines of customer experience is tough for many reasons. It’s often a demanding job with high pressure and little autonomy. Bad tech systems make any job harder.
In CX, agents commonly have to navigate a “frankenstack” of tech tools to resolve a single customer inquiry. Deloitte found that 76% of agents are overwhelmed by systems and information.
Fortunately, AI stands to make much of a customer service agent’s work easier. Deloitte also found that companies currently using generative AI are 35% less likely to report agents are overwhelmed by the information in front of them during calls.
AI-powered tools can make a customer experience job easier by:
- Helping agents find information faster
- Prompting agents on what to do next
- Automating followup work
- Reducing the number of tabs agents need to toggle between
- Better routing to relevant agents
All of these things make an agent’s job smoother by addressing many common friction points.
Use AI for smoother interactions
Tough customers are one common reason for attrition of customer experience workers. Interestingly, AI can help smooth out the communication between customers and agents which reduces strain.
One insurance company implemented generative AI for their agents’ email communication and found it:
- produced more empathetic messages
- delivered news with a softer touch
- used less jargon with customers
- Included offers to answer further questions
- gave customers the benefit of the doubt
All of these softened the communication and prevented conversations from derailing, while saving the agents time too.
An academic study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics backs that up. It found the usage of GenAI tools for assisting human agents positively impacted how customers treated the agents. Customers were more polite and less likely to ask to speak with a manager - likely as a result of smoother communication from agents. That’s a win-win!
Use AI for faster onboarding
Training and onboarding is a critical part of the employee experience, and AI can help in that too. Mastering a job faster can help employees build confidence and satisfaction in their work that encourages them to stay.
One company in Japan specifically uses AI to train customer service agents on difficult customer situations. For employees who are new to working in customer service, these enhanced training simulations can be especially helpful to better prepare them for the role (or help them see that this is not the industry for them).
The same economics study found that new agents who started using the GenAI tool reached higher-than-average levels of productivity (answering more customer inquiries) in less time. It took them only 5 months to ramp up instead of 8.
Allow for specialization
AI-powered customer service technology can allow your agents to specialize in more complex, higher-value inquiries rather than handling routine requests. Here’s how:
Deflect repetitive work
First, you know that AI can contain or deflect a significant percentage of repetitive conversations, like order tracking or addressing common policy questions. This frees agents to focus on nuanced problem-solving, technical troubleshooting, or VIP customer interactions. AI-powered smarter routing of incoming customer conversations can allow agents to specialize in certain types of issues or customer needs.
Identify areas for growth
After some of the easy wins, AI-driven insights can help companies identify patterns in customer needs and opportunities for growth. You may uncover that it makes sense to have agents specialized in certain areas, allowing employees to develop their skills and progress in their careers from being generalists solving repetitive, transactional issues.
This specialization makes the job more engaging and enhances career development, leading to better retention and a more skilled, motivated workforce.
Reinvest AI gains back in employees
Any discussion of improving employee retention has to touch on the core factors that influence a worker’s decision to stay or leave in any job. CX leaders invest a lot of time training an agent and getting them to ramp - 8 months on average. Yet, high turnover means many are leaving the job not long after they get up to full productivity. This is a losing combination that drives up your recruiting and personnel costs.
Fortunately, investments in AI will likely drive meaningful returns for your team and business. This presents an opportunity to reinvest some savings from AI into things that will directly benefit and retain your talent. Here are some possibilities:
Compensation increases
Workers typically make a bigger jump in pay by leaving jobs than by staying, driving attrition as workers seek to maximize their earning potential. The mean annual change in pay for a job stayer in the United States is around 5% and 7% for a job switcher. However, many are happy to stay and avoid the life disruption that comes with leaving a job as long as they are still growing in their compensation.
There are a lot of dynamics and data points that go into employee compensation decisions, and AI is a new factor to consider.
Evaluate how much you’re saving from AI. If it is deflecting or containing conversations, or your employees are solving more conversations faster with AI, your organization's operational costs and labor costs will likely go down (or your margins will improve). Using the data about the savings from AI can help make your case for compensation increases that can make your team feel valued and thus stay in their roles longer.
Paid time off
Extra paid time off will leave your team members refreshed and recharged. This leads to higher quality work and employees being more willing to stay in the role (especially if they would be taking a PTO downgrade by leaving). The founder of an insurance company detailed how when she gave her customer service agents additional PTO, their work quality improved and she curbed attrition of her employees.
Professional development
Lauren Riddle, Manager of Technical Support at FormSpring, shares:
"We allow for our team two hours per week of continuing education time. So it's really important for our company, for our agents to really grow professionally and personally."
That time sometimes had to be requisitioned when the queue of customer needs got too busy. However, once FormSpring implemented an AI chatbot, it saved enough time that the team found they were able to consistently provide the professional development time.
Reinvesting freed up time into employee compensation or benefits like PTO, professional development, or others shows your employees you care about their wellbeing and growth. This allows them to rededicate their commitment to your organization and improve their level of service for your customers.
Closing thoughts
The employee experience is highly related to customer experience; customers can tell and appreciate when a team member serving them cares about their job and has the tools to do it well. Taking some of the gains from AI and focusing on employee retention and engagement can keep paying dividends for years to come.
Some quick wins with AI are making the job easier by unblocking tech headaches, prompting action and communication, and facilitating better onboarding. Some of the key gains, though, are in the long game. AI can help CX leaders understand where specialization might create new opportunities for the team and reinvest back into employee benefits that keep them with your organization longer.
But to see these benefits, you’ll need a platform that allows the AI to work at its best - not throwing an AI app on top of an already pieced together tech stack. An AI native comprehensive CRM is your best bet.
Explore Kustomer to see how we can supercharge your brand’s customer service today!
