What is the value of time in customer support?

When we say AI agent assist tools can help improve efficiency and free up agents’ time to focus on more meaningful customer support interactions, what is the real value of those time savings and efficiency improvements? And can you put a price on those more meaningful interactions? Let’s take a look.

The value of AI summary

Let’s start with the simplest example of time savings through AI automation of a repetitive, time-consuming task. Deepdesk’s Summarizer tool was built for this exact purpose, to take the tedious work of contact summaries off agents’ hands.

The scale of customer support means that time savings of seconds over a million interactions can translate to thousands of working hours reclaimed and a lot of money saved. And summaries take on average 2-3 minutes per interaction, which means they are either an enormous time drain or they just don’t get done.

So, clearly, there are time-saving benefits to automating summaries, but what’s the dollar amount of those time savings? Fittingly, we asked chatGPT to do the math for us. You can see the full equation and step-by-step reasoning here.

Based on some assumptions about hourly wages and operational costs, ChatGPT gave us $0.10 per second. At 1,000 contacts per day, one minute of time saved equates to $6,000 daily. So, using this math*, summarizer would save the hypothetical contact center $12-18,000 every day in reclaimed productivity.

Other tools like Knowledge Assist are great for getting back the seconds that slip away while an agent is manually searching a database that AI could query instantly.

*This is just an example based on an AI-generated equation. It’s impossible to know the exact time and cost savings for your business without your operating costs and contact handling data.

The value of optimization

The main problem with trying to put an exact dollar amount on customer support activities is that not all time is of equal value. Contact summaries are important from an admin and operations point of view, but they’re not a revenue-driving activity.

The savings from automation are likely much higher when you consider that the thousands of hours saved can now be put towards high-value activities like cross-selling, ups-selling, and solving problems that impact customer retention and, therefore, lifetime value.

Any model to work out cost-savings through AI and other time-saving tools needs to factor in the value added through these activities.

You can’t always put a price on customer satisfaction

The American online shoe store Zappos made history in the world of customer support when one of their agents ordered a pizza for a caller while on a support call. The value of that unconventional, totally unscalable act of customer delight adds value not only in customer loyalty but in free publicity at the highest levels and a major branding win.

This is the kind of next-level support you can achieve when you have better things to do than count seconds and tally resolution times. The real purpose of automating the small stuff and saving every second is so you can find better things to do with your minutes and hours.