AI Customer Support Software: The 10 Best Tools for 2024

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet or you’ve consumed any news lately, you’ve heard a thing or two about AI. And though it seems to be ubiquitous in essentially every aspect of life these days, customer service teams were actually some of the earliest adopters of AI technology.

As companies across all industries strive to enhance their customer experiences, AI-powered support tools have become increasingly valuable for businesses to deliver fast, effective assistance and even potentially save some money.

This guide examines the top AI customer support solutions for 2024. Whether you're looking to upgrade your existing support processes or exploring AI integration for the first time, we'll help you navigate the options and choose the right tool for your organization.

What is AI customer service?

AI customer service is a method of supporting customers through the use of customer service software that relies on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and generative AI technologies.

Using AI-powered support software allows teams to offload tasks that don’t require the expertise and finesse of a human support agent, as well as provide assistance to the agent for the jobs that do. Having this extra help can improve customer experience as well as lighten agent workload.

The benefits of AI in customer service

Adopting AI-powered tools will make a significant impact on the way your customer service team operates. Here is a short list of some of the benefits.

Decreased response times

AI tools reduce response times by automating routine processes — such as answering FAQs or processing simple tasks — through chatbots and AI assistants. As a result, customers receive immediate assistance, helping to boost customer satisfaction.

Improved accuracy

AI tools with smart language processing and machine learning capabilities enable improved accuracy in responding to customer inquiries. They can give customer support teams the details they need to provide precise, relevant, and consistent responses by understanding the context of a customer's inquiry and quickly providing answers and suggestions based on previous customer interactions and other relevant data sources like knowledge base content, websites, or internal documentation. 

Actionable insights

Enhanced data analysis is another significant benefit of AI tools in customer service. By processing large volumes of customer interactions and conducting detailed analyses, an AI solution can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. Customer care teams can leverage this data to anticipate customer needs and troubleshoot issues more effectively.

Personalized experiences

AI tools excel at enhancing personalization in customer support by analyzing and understanding customer behavior, preferences, and histories. By enabling support teams to provide more customized experiences, AI technology makes it possible to foster stronger customer relationships, boost loyalty, and ensure a positive brand perception.

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Examples of AI in customer service

As outlined above, AI has a lot to offer the world of customer service. Here's a closer look at different types of AI-powered tools you can use and the jobs they can do to streamline customer service operations and help your team reap some of these benefits.

AI-powered chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are becoming increasingly common as an option for handling frontline customer support. By giving AI access to your help desk, it can learn from past interactions, use natural language processing and conversational AI to converse with customers, and provide immediate responses to common questions. A chatbot can’t answer everything, but using one to handle things like returns, refunds, or answering FAQs can be a great way to keep easier items out of the queue.

Automated tasks and workflows

AI can take over many routine tasks like routing conversations to the team member best suited to answer the question or tagging tickets to help with organization and reporting. While these jobs may not seem like a big deal, over time they can bog teams down and increase cognitive load. Relegating them to AI gives teams the opportunity to focus on more interesting and valuable tasks.

AI-powered writing assistants

With the advent of better large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s GPT-4, generative AI tools can give support teams help in the queue. Using data like knowledge base articles and customer service tickets as a reference, AI writing assistants can help teams edit their replies or translate them into other languages. AI can even draft original responses that teams can quickly review and send, reducing response time.

AI-powered sentiment analysis

Two things AI is really good at are recognizing patterns and analyzing large amounts of data. That savvy for pattern recognition and data analysis also helps in another area: sentiment detection. AI-powered sentiment analysis can help you discover customer pain points and give you insights that you can use to improve customer experience and quickly turn negative interactions around.

Conversational knowledge bases 

Another way to use AI in customer service is to implement a conversational knowledge base. These are similar in some ways to chatbots, but there is a difference. Chatting with a conversational knowledge base isn’t meant to feel like a human interaction. Instead, you can think of it more as an enhanced search engine that returns results based on its understanding of a query’s intent rather than just matching keywords.

Conversational reporting   

Though it’s easy to think about AI tools for customer support simply in terms of customer-facing capabilities, it can help with internal projects, too. One strong example of that is conversational reporting. With it, teams can use plain language to query AI to generate different reports in real time. Many tools can generate visual assets like graphs or provide summaries of the data with suggestions of things you can do to improve.

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Top AI tools for customer support

Every AI tool comes with unique capabilities intended to address the challenges you may face when delivering customer service. By understanding all the different types of AI available, you can make an informed decision on which AI tool will best align with your customer service objectives.

Below, we’ve compiled some information on a few AI-powered customer service tools that might be a good fit for your business.

1. Help Scout

2. Yuma AI Ticket Assistant

3. Freshdesk

4. Tidio

5. Qualaroo

6. HubSpot

7. Balto

8. Kustomer

9. Zendesk

10. Brainfish

1. Help Scout - Best for human-centric customer interactions

Help Scout is a communication platform that helps teams across an organization have better conversations with their customers. We consider ourselves to be a customer-first platform that aims to introduce AI tools that focus on improving the experience of customers and support teams alike.

AI summarize enables you to spend less time getting caught up and more time providing high-quality support. With just one click, it offers concise summaries of email threads, enabling your team to quickly get up to speed.

Let's explore a few scenarios where AI summarize can enable your team members — both customer-facing and non — to provide even better support:

• Team member, shift, or channel changes: When customer conversations transfer between team members or across different support channels, AI summarize can help incoming support staff quickly understand what's already been discussed, ensuring seamless continuity.

• Support escalation: When a situation demands escalation, AI summarize can give managers a brief and clear rundown of the issue's history, enabling them to make well-informed decisions without getting stuck in the weeds.

• Quality assurance process: Teams conducting QA reviews can quickly get an overview of a conversation to help them identify areas of improvement or excellence.

• Cross-departmental collaboration: Sometimes it's necessary to bring in individuals outside the immediate support team. AI summarize allows for efficient catch-ups, regardless of one's familiarity with the support process.

Once your team is ready to respond, AI assist can help them polish their replies (or Docs articles).

With AI assist, your team can:

• Adjust tone: Use AI assist to modify replies to sound either friendlier or more professional, ensuring that responses stay consistent with your brand voice.

• Adjust length: Expand short sentences into full replies or pare down wordy first drafts into succinct messages.

• Check spelling and grammar: Check drafts for spelling and grammar errors.

• Translate: Easily translate text into another language for support in multiple languages.

Based on customer conversations and knowledge base data, AI drafts automatically creates responses to incoming conversations. From there, your team can review, edit the message if necessary, and hit send, providing some extra security that even when a response is composed by AI, it’s high quality and helpful.

In addition, Help Scout has another AI feature on the way: AI answers. AI answers is a conversational knowledge base tool that helps customers find answers to their questions quickly. At the moment it’s still in development, but you can join the waitlist to be one of the first to know when it becomes available.

Price: Free trial available. Plans with AI summarize and assist start at $40/user per month; AI drafts is available as an add-on across all plans.

2. Yuma AI Ticket Assistant - Best for Shopify merchants

Yuma AI Ticket Assistant is a cloud-based AI email drafting tool that integrates with help desks, shipping solutions, subscription tools, and review platforms to help Shopify merchants provide better customer support.

Using existing data like previous customer interactions and help center materials, Yuma AI has the ability to handle tasks throughout the customer lifecycle. It can autonomously respond to order inquiries, social media posts, and customer reviews. The software can also guide customers through the return and refund process, automatically tag conversations, and escalate issues that require human assistance.

In addition to the autonomous functionality, Yuma also offers agent productivity features like summary and translation tools.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $350 per month.

3. Freshdesk - Best for providing omnichannel support

Freshdesk is a customer service software solution that empowers support teams to serve users across popular messaging channels like WhatsApp, SMS, social media, and more. The platform can be accessed by both desktop and app solutions, making it a good choice for teams using mobile devices to perform support from a remote location.

At the heart of Freshdesk's AI-powered service is Freddy AI. Freddy offers solutions for self-service, agent assistance, and intelligent reporting. For self-service, Freddy AI powers chatbots that can help manage customer interactions 24/7. Freddy Copilot is an agent-assist tool that boosts productivity by summarizing conversations, editing and drafting replies, suggesting possible solutions, and handling repetitive admin tasks. Finally, Freddy Insights can provide real-time conversational analytics, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions.

The company also offers phone support AI-features, such as speech-enabled IVR (phone tree) systems. So, if that’s an important item for any potential service provider you consider, this platform should make your short list.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month. AI features can be purchased as add-ons, though not all features are available across all plans.

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4. Tidio - Best for real-time customer interaction

Tidio is a customer service software that focuses on live chat and chatbots.

Tidio’s customer service plans include Reply Assistant, which helps agents enhance their copy before hitting send. The company also has a separate product, Lyro AI, which is essentially a virtual support agent. It is designed to interact and engage with customers as though a real person is talking to them. 

Outside of Lyro, the company also offers a separate product for rule-based chatbots. If you want a bot experience but aren’t quite ready to commit to AI, the standard chatbot product might be a good starting point.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid customer service plans start at $29 per month, while Lyro AI Agent plans start at $39 per month.

5. Qualaroo - Best for customer feedback

Part of the ProProfs suite of products, Qualaroo is a platform focused on customer feedback. The software enables businesses to gather feedback on things like web, app, product, and even prototype experiences and provide insights that can help drive improvements.

When it comes to AI, Qualaroo’s main offering is centered around its robust sentiment analysis feature. Powered by IBM Watson, the platform is able to sort through large amounts of data to identify keywords and whether each piece of feedback is positive or negative. The software can also recognize emotions present in the text (joy, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, etc.). Each factor is given a related score, which can be used to trigger a response, such as creating a task for your team to follow up with a customer who has left an angry response.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $19.99 for 100 responses per month.

6. HubSpot - Best for centralizing marketing, sales, and customer service

HubSpot is well known in the SaaS industry for its customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a network of software, integrations, applications, and resources for managing customer relationships across your business.

When it comes to the AI features included in ServiceHub, the platform’s customer support tool, you’ll find a conversation summary tool as well as a writing assistant that can help draft emails and customer-facing messages. The company also recently released a beta version of its AI-powered chatbots feature.

For companies that also want to bring AI to their sales and marketing teams, HubSpot offers features like predictive sales forecasting and content creation tools for blog and social media posts.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/seat per month.

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7. Balto - Best for real-time call guidance in customer support call centers

Balto is an AI-powered customer service tool that provides real-time guidance to contact center employees. The platform sends alerts to managers whenever there are coaching opportunities, allowing for real-time interventions. This strategy can promote immediate improvement in performance, helping ensure that every customer always receives the best support possible.

The software’s Real-Time Notetaker feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe calls in real time. This frees agents from taking notes during critical customer interactions and highlights key information that could impact the conversation.

Another way Balto can help level up the support your team provides is through the use of its QA Copilot feature. It is trained on your real customer data and scores calls using natural language criteria. Copilot partners with your QA team to provide customized suggestions, helping them tailor their training methods to each individual agent.

Price: Contact for pricing.

8. Kustomer - Best for unified customer views across all channels

Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform that streamlines the customer journey by providing omnichannel messaging, displayed in a unified customer view. In addition to the platform’s standard support features, AI tools are available as a usage-based add-on called Kustomer IQ (or KIQ).

KIQ helps teams speed up resolution time via an AI-powered chatbot that provides solutions based solely on your support content. It can handle many customer interactions on its own but can also seamlessly hand off support cases to human agents, providing a summary to help get agents up to speed when they hit their queues.

KIQ also has agent assist features to help with spelling and grammar, tone, and translations. Additional AI features, like a suggested actions feature to help with troubleshooting and AI-powered insights for better reporting, are in the works.

Price: Plans start at $89/user per month (eight seat minimum). KIQ is available for an additional fee.

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9. Zendesk - Best AI tool for enterprise teams

Zendesk is a recognizable name in the customer service world. Like most help desks, the tool centralizes all service interactions and customer history in one unified interface, making it easier for support teams to track, prioritize, and solve customer issues. 

The platform leverages AI to identify, categorize, and route tickets to the appropriate agent or department. For example, some might want to separate IT requests from customer service requests or sort messages by country. Zendesk AI also has agent assist tools and reporting, and it even has a feature to help you identify knowledge base gaps to help improve your self-service offerings.

Probably the most notable feature is its AI agents offering, which can directly respond to customer questions on its own. The bots base their answers on content from your help center and can be personalized to match your company’s brand and tone.

While teams of any size can use Zendesk, setting up your account can be a bit complicated. Smaller organizations should have access to developers or other technical service providers to help ease the implementation process.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month. The Advanced AI add-on is priced at $50/agent per month and is available on higher-tiered plans.

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10. Brainfish - Best for knowledge base functionality

Brainfish is an AI-powered help center platform that addresses customer inquiries quickly and accurately using your existing help documents.

AI in Brainfish is primarily achieved through natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. These technologies enable the platform to analyze customer queries and provide instant responses based on the context and intent of the question instead of relying on keywords alone. The search assistant can also easily route customers to a human agent if needed.

Brainfish integrates with popular help desk software, and in addition to providing customer assistance, it can also help agents. The agent assistant feature provides your team with suggestions for resolving customer issues, helping cut down time spent on troubleshooting.

Price: Contact for pricing.

Challenges to implementing AI customer support software

There are certainly a lot of upsides to adding AI capabilities to your support stack. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still challenges associated with implementing AI in customer service. Here are a few to be aware of before you get started:

• Initial setup: AI is a very powerful tool out of the box. That said, the large language models (LLMs) powering AI generally won’t have product and company-specific information built in — you have to train it. Training AI generally requires some amount of IT support to connect the LLM to your data source. It also often requires someone to monitor and rate initial outputs to guide the AI further. 

• Training the team: Getting people up to speed on the different features and functions of a new tool can be tough, especially when they still have their regular work to consider. Make sure you set aside dedicated time for training. You could even consider having some agents on your team do more in-depth training to serve as subject matter experts in case others have questions later. 

• Resistance to change: Once agents are trained and the AI is functioning, you might think that your team is ready to go. However, there are still challenges to face. Your team probably has a certain way of working, and utilizing the new AI tools represents a change to that process, which can be difficult. In addition, there may be anxiety surrounding AI's impact on the role of support agents that will need to be addressed in order to achieve team buy-in.

In the end, implementing AI comes down to arming both your tool and your team with the right knowledge and support so that AI can become a natural part of your support strategy.

Best practices for getting started with AI-powered customer service

Implementing AI tools in customer service can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your support team. Here's how you can successfully introduce AI capabilities into your business.

Assess your needs and goals

Before selecting an AI tool, you'll want to evaluate your business needs and desired outcomes. Here are some key questions to consider:

• What specific customer service tasks and challenges do you want to address by implementing AI?

• What are your goals for AI-enhanced customer support?

• How will you measure success (e.g., improved customer satisfaction, increased support team efficiency, or reduced response time)?

By answering these questions, you'll gain a clear understanding of your objectives and the criteria to look for in an AI tool.

Choose the right platform for you

As you saw in the previous section, there are quite a few AI tools for customer service available on the market, each varying in functionality and use case. To choose the one that best fits your needs, consider the following factors:

• Features: Evaluate each tool's capabilities and how they align with your goals. Some features you may be interested in include AI-driven chatbots, automated ticket routing, or sentiment analysis.

• Integration: Ensure the AI tool integrates seamlessly with your existing customer service software or exists natively within the software you're planning to use. This will enable a smoother transition and allow for improved collaboration.

• Scalability: Opt for a solution that can scale and accommodate business growth. The tool should be able to meet the increasing demands of your clients and your support team.

• Cost: Compare the costs of different AI tools, including subscription fees, setup fees, and any other additional expenses. Choose the one that provides the best value for your budget.

• Customer support and training: Look for platforms that offer comprehensive customer support and training options so you can quickly troubleshoot issues and maximize the tool's effectiveness.

• Customer needs: The AI tool you choose should align with your company’s support philosophy. Different tools focus on different goals like making the customer journey easier, more affordable, or faster.

Integrate the tool into your existing processes

Once you've chosen your ideal AI tool, the next step is incorporating the software into your existing workflows. Here are some strategies to consider:

• Gradual deployment: Start by implementing the AI tool for specific tasks and gradually expanding its use to other areas of customer support. This will allow your team to become familiar with the technology and minimize the risk of process disruptions.

• Training: Ensure your customer service team is trained in using the AI tool effectively. Identify educational resources, offer hands-on practice, and provide ongoing support to help them embrace the new technology.

• Monitoring performance: Consider AI an ongoing project and regularly review the AI tool's performance to ensure it meets your expectations. Keep track of key metrics aligned with your goals, and make any necessary adjustments to improve results.

• Feedback: Encourage your customer support team and customers to share their experiences with you. These insights can help you refine your AI’s functionality and contribute to the tool's continuous improvement.

By following these guidelines, your business will be well-equipped to successfully implement an AI tool.

Supercharge your support with AI

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The future of AI in customer service

The future of AI in customer service looks promising. With advancements in AI technology, we can expect more efficient automation, more accurate prediction of customer behavior, and more personalized and proactive customer experiences.

Whether you’re looking for writing assistance when writing a knowledge base article or are in the market for a drafting tool for your support inbox, the list above has something for everyone. For those interested in a company that embraces AI while maintaining a customer-first approach, Help Scout is a great choice. 

Sign up for a free trial of Help Scout today, no credit card required, and find out if we’re the right fit for you, your business, and your customers.