With great pressure comes Great Resignation. A customer service representative, also known as “customer support agent” or “customer service agent,” does not stay at one job for long: just over 1 year for employees aged between 20 and 34 in the US, with the average call center turnover being in the range of 30–45%, which is at least double the average turnover of other departments.

Additionally, a Salesforce survey found that 71% of customer service agents have considered quitting their jobs, with 69% considering a permanent exit from the customer service function; and that 50% of service leaders have perceived more resignations in their department. All these omens exist despite the criticality of customer service jobs.

On the bright side, another Salesforce survey found that workplace automation has made 89% of US employees experience greater job satisfaction. Such automation solutions also helped those employees reduce work errors (66%), lessen menial tasks in daily work (47%), and make faster decisions (86%). In other words, leveraging automation technology—with real AI chat being a cutting-edge example—will be key to improving both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).

If you want higher customer satisfaction alongside 24/7 customer service availability, plus happy customer support agents who go home on time, then you may want to consider using instant answers. An instant answer is useful information that is intelligently retrieved from your company’s knowledge base by Raffle, a search optimization engine powered by generative AI with large language models (LLMs).

Instant answers allow you to provide accurate and consistent answers to your customers’ and employees’ questions, using information from specific data sources such as your company’s website. In this blog post, we explain what instant answers are, how they work, and how they can benefit your business.

What are instant answers?

Instant answers are, well, answers that are given instantly to a question asked. With Raffle, this is a generative AI feature in the form of a type of temporary response—written by you as an interim content solution—to queries by your customers to give them (and your employees) quick insights that simultaneously highlight knowledge gaps: for example, content that should be on your company’s website, but which is currently missing due to practical circumstances.

Unlike the traditional search engine, which returns just a list of links or snippets, Raffle’s instant answers provide a more elaborative and relevant type of answer that addresses multiple variations of the same inquiry until you manage to implement a (more) permanent solution to the missing content. This quick patch to the knowledge gaps is invaluable in helping your customers find the answers they seek, no matter how they phrase their questions, while your business operations can continue with minimal disruption and your customer support agents can focus on more productive tasks.

How do instant answers work?

The future of conversational AI is now: Raffle’s generative AI can understand natural language and interpret the intent and context of a question. The AI chat analyzes your customers’ queries in relation to your company’s data sources to reveal knowledge gaps. These gaps can be seen in the Raffle back end as part of the “Instant Answers” feature, where you (the user) can input an instant answer into a text field to address a knowledge gap that has arisen from intelligent clustering of various forms of one type of question. Importantly, these instant answers are meant to be a temporary solution to missing content in your company’s data sources (e.g. the website). Ideally, you would eventually produce and put the missing content, which would logically be based on the instant answer you have written, into the relevant data source.

It sounds counterintuitive, but the point of such instant answers is to help you work towards having as few instant answers as possible.

How can instant answers benefit your business?

Customers prefer self-service, so instant answers are here to benefit your business in primarily three ways:

• Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty: Instant answers can help you provide a better customer experience by resolving your customers’ questions quickly and effectively. Customers appreciate getting the information they need without having to browse through multiple pages, click on links, or contact customer support. Thus, instant answers can reduce customers’ frustration and confusion, and increase their trust and confidence in your brand.

• Reducing customer service costs and workload: Instant answers can help you reduce the number of calls, emails, and chats that your (burned-out) customer support agents have to handle. By providing instant answers to common and repetitive questions, you can free up your agents’ time and resources, and allow them to focus on more complex and/or valuable tasks. Thus, instant answers can improve employee productivity and business cost savings while boosting your support agents’ job satisfaction and work-life balance.

• Gaining valuable insights: Instant answers can help you gain useful intelligence about your customers’ and employees’ search intentions or needs by flagging crucial information that you may have missed or not considered while creating content for your company’s data sources. Although they are meant to be a temporary measure, instant answers can prove their worth in unforeseen circumstances, such as if top management sets a new business direction that will warrant new website content that cannot be written and designed properly on short notice.

How to get started with instant answers?

Getting started with instant answers is swift and smooth with Raffle AI. You can integrate Raffle AI with your website, CMS system, or application in just 20 minutes, and start providing instant answers to your users. You can also customize and control how Raffle AI works, such as choosing how it appears, what sources it uses, and what topics it covers.

Furthermore, you can feel secure with Raffle AI because it complies with leading data security standards such as SOC 2 Type II, EU GDPR, and HIPAA. In addition, Raffle is an environmentally conscious AI solution that uses a fraction of the power needed by traditional AI solutions, thus contributing to the green software movement.

Learn more about instant answers and how they can enable insightful self-service for your customers, and compensate for the volatile staffing of your customer support function. Book a demo of Raffle Chat to see it in action now, and explore some of our customer success stories for social proof of the Raffle AI-dge.

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