Your support team may not necessarily be pitching products to customers, but they are definitely still sales enablers. When they have the tools they need to do their jobs well, they can drive sales - either indirectly or directly.

The companies that make big moves investing in tools for their team members can see big gains. McKinsey reports that companies that increase their market share by 10% annually excel in multiple areas of sales, marketing, and customer experience, including by delivering hyperpersonalization - both past and predictive.

AI is the next big innovation that makes that possible. But what kind of impact will investing in AI have specifically? McKinsey found that companies that invest in AI see a revenue uplift of 3-15%. This overall uplift comes from multiple different areas of the business using AI. 

Here, we’ll dig into how when customer experience agents have AI tools to help with their work, they can help your brand drive revenue, putting CX firmly in a profit center.

How AI is transforming support teams into sales enablers

Your brand’s customer experience impacts your customers’ willingness to purchase from you every time they make a buying decision. Half of consumers will stop doing business with a brand because of poor customer service, so your CX team needs to continually win their loyalty.

Repeat business is important for all businesses because it’s more efficient to keep a customer than market to a new one. Smile.io reports that the top 5% of customers generate 35% of an ecommerce business’s revenue - meaning the most loyal, repeat customers are the most profitable.

Delivering an experience worthwhile of returning falls on CX.

AI and automated customer service are already bringing about benefits to customers such as:

  • faster responses
  • more effective self-service options
  • more accurate service
  • better routing to relevant agents
  • more robust communications from the brand

All of these things help you deliver a higher quality experience to your customers, which makes them want to come back and patronize your business again. The question is: are you adopting tools to deliver these results better and faster than your competitors?

How can CX teams drive revenue growth with AI? 

AI poses opportunities to turn CX from sales enabled into active revenue drivers. Here, we’ll dig into how: maximizing customer contacts to and cross sell when appropriate, along with metrics you’ll need to know to demonstrate revenue growth.

Maximize when customers come to you

Some CX teams are taking advantage of the fact that customers are coming to them as an opportunity to drive revenue. Depending on the issue, customers may be open to solutions that involve spending more.

With the Kustomer Timeline, it’s much easier to see a customer’s whole history with a brand. That makes it easier for a support agent to personalize recommendations to what offerings might resonate with a customer. 

With Kustomer, Comrad significantly reduced the manual effort involved in managing customer data by automating tasks that used to be done manually. With Kustomer’s more comprehensive tool, they were able to increase the return customer rate by 40%, and drive a 26% higher average order value.

AI will continue to build upon and accelerate this motion. AI supports your agents so they can deliver the empathetic service that customers want and leads them to patronize your band more.

Upselling and cross selling

Max Wallace, the Customer Experience Director at Tommy John, shares how the CX team helped drive revenue by working product suggestions into their process:

“We wanted to be more more personal shoppers for our customers and really focusing on that with the added benefit of increasing revenue by cross selling or upselling. So that was a goal last year, and we did really well with it. We enforced that and made sure everyone was remembering to simply offer to add something a customer hadn't tried to their cart. We added that as a part of our QA rubric now, which has proven to be very helpful.”

Max Wallace

So what does that look like with AI incorporated?

Specifically within CX, 50% of respondents to the McKinsey research cited earlier said that generative AI would have a significant impact on upsells or cross-selling via usage patterns or customer support conversations. 45% report that generative AI will also likely have a significant impact on customer journey mapping, which can help CX operations teams identify the indicators that can lead to sales and retention opportunities.

When it comes to automation, McKinsey thinks that 20% of sales team functions could be automated. If that’s possible, there are likely many similar applications for customer experience representatives and their workflows, allowing them to drive revenue without taking away from their core function.

Measuring revenue impact from AI-enhanced support

Here are some of the key metrics that CX leaders should know and compare before and after investments in AI tools to demonstrate the impact:

Key performance indicators (KPIs) include:

  • enhanced CSAT
  • customer lifetime value (CLV)
  • upsell/cross-sell rates
  • customer retention

 
AI-driven efficiency gains include:

  • faster resolution times
  • increased first-contact resolutions
  • reduced escalations
  • increased agent capacity


You can use revenue reports in Kustomer to identify revenue from all orders that met the criteria for attribution to your team members, the percentage of eligible conversations that resulted in an order being attributed to your team members, and more. These metrics can help you showcase to what degree your investments in CX tools, like AI powered customer support, pay off!f


Implementing AI to drive revenue through support

AI in CX is not a plug and play solution. Sure, you can likely deflect a little bit of the tedious work with a simpler setup, but the real gains come from incorporating it holistically into your tech stack and workflow. Here’s what you need to consider to pull it off right:


Balancing automation with human touch

The Capgemini research cited earlier found that 71% of consumers feel like chatbots have improved in the past two years, but over 70% of consumers still prefer human agents when it comes to empathy and problem solving. You’ll have a better customer experience by implementing AI in ways that support your human agents rather than trying to automate them away. A human-in-the-loop model will strike the right balance.

Best practices for integrating AI into support workflows

If you want to get the most out of your AI-enabled support workflows, you’ll need to set the AI tools up correctly. That involves taking a step back and thinking holistically, but it can pay off to slow down at the beginning and do it right the first time.

Here are some best practices to get started with AI agents:

  • Define the core use cases that you're looking to solve for with AI
  • Know your audience and the entry points for them interacting with AI Agents
  • Optimize and structure your knowledge base materials
  • Understand how tools and actions work and how the system all works together

Keep learning with tips from one of Kustomer’s Technical Implementation Managers on how to get ready for AI Agents.

Training and upskilling agents to leverage AI tools effectively

For any AI tool you introduce to your CX team, invest in the time for training so the agents can maximize it.

Each AI tool is a little different. Some of them, like true AI Agents, are cutting edge technology that only the earliest adopters have up and running yet. Even though generative AI has been around a little longer, there are still new developments in it all the time.
Carve out time to train your agents on how to use the tools, but also why. A study on customer service agents using generative AI found that the experienced agents were less likely to use the AI because they already had mastery of the job. However, new team members that adopted the tool ramped faster and ultimately became more productive than the experienced agents without AI, solving more customer inquiries per hour on average.

Is your company AI-ready?

Accenture expected that as of 2024, 27% of firms would have enough AI maturity to see sufficient performance, superior growth, and business transformation from it. Some industries fared much better on the AI readiness scale, with tech, automotive, and aerospace & defense at the top while banking, healthcare, consumer goods were the lowest.

It’s still early, but organizations are running out of time to be an early adopter of true AI-enabled customer support. The ones who hesitate to act risk losing market share to competitors who beat them to it.

Foundational capabilities with AI - like having tools and data platforms - will just be enough to keep up with competitors. Accenture found that what really makes a difference in a company’s ability to achieve with AI is having a strategy around AI and a culture of innovation.

Equipping your customer experience team members with AI to help them drive revenue is the kind of thing that requires a willingness to shake up what roles and responsibilities look like in the era of technology that overhauls how people carry out their work.

Closing thoughts

For too long, CX was seen as a cost center. Now, there’s plenty of data to show that assumption was wrong, reporting to prove it, and tools to make it easier to drive revenue. It’s up to CX leaders to take action and it can drive meaningful results to your company’s bottom line.

Looking for a tool to bring AI into your customer experience workflow and help drive revenue? Explore Kustomer to see how we can supercharge your brand’s customer service today!