Generative AI offers many opportunities for organizations to make their customer support processes more efficient. While the digital assistant can answer common questions and execute routine tasks, support agents can focus on more complex queries. However, this also brings strategic challenges for companies. To what extent should companies automate customer service processes, and how can they prevent losing the personal touch in these processes?
Introducing HILAI
Our team focused on these strategic issues by proposing HILAI (Human in the Loop AI), an autocompletion feature for customer support agents to combine the advantages of genAI with human interaction for Tidio. Inspired by AI coding copilots like Cursor and Github Copilot, HILAI acts as a customer service co-pilot. It leverages advanced LLMs and NLP to analyze conversation context and proactively suggest responses to customer service agents. Agents can quickly implement these suggestions, maintaining human oversight throughout the interaction.
HILAI’s development is projected to launch in 2025, with a 6-12 month rollout plan. The project is divided into three phases: Development, Testing & Feedback, and Training & Deployment. Key performance indicators will include AHT reduction and CSAT improvement.
Figure 1
Business Model Tidio as-is
Value proposition
Figure 2 describes one of the main challenges companies face when implementing AI tools within their customer service processes. HILAI takes these decisions away from the strategic level to the customer agent who can decide to what extent empathy and customization are needed versus the advantages of AI, based on the context of each conversation. An interviewed company mentioned advantages such as faster response times, more consistent on-brand messaging, and the ability to handle a higher volume of tickets efficiently. However, disadvantages may be agents relying too heavily on AI assistants and the needed human review for generated messages. Summarized, the value proposition of HILAI consists of cost-effective AI-powered customer service with human oversight, enhanced agent productivity and happiness, and reduced ticket handling time.
Figure 2
Digital CX Pyramid
Note. From “AI-Powered Customer Service: Does it Optimize Customer Experience?” by S. Khan and M. Iqbal, 2020, 2020 8th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions) (ICRITO), p. 593.
Changing Tidio’s business model
The customer service software market is highly competitive, with established players like Zendesk and Freshdesk. However, the industry is experiencing significant growth, fuelled by AI advancements. Tidio’s HILAI is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth by addressing the limitations of existing chatbots and offering a more human-centric AI solution. However, to improve the outcome we suggest some business model changes such as partnerships with companies like Cursor.sh and LLM providers to leverage expertise and resources and an increased focus on customer support and marketing to educate customers about HILAI.
Conclusion
Although Tidio faces technical and organizational challenges in implementing this product, it represents a significant step forward in customer service. By combining the power of AI with the irreplaceable human touch, Tidio will redefine the customer service experience and strengthen its market position.
