AI agents — what they are, and how they’ll change the way we work
An agent takes the power of generative AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf.
All in on AI is a series featuring interviews from Microsoft executives across the company about what transforming work with AI means to their teams. Through these conversations, we’ll highlight the challenges each industry faces and the lessons we learned that our customers can use in their own AI journeys. In this episode, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work sits down with Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to explore the integration of AI in customer service.
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index, a study exploring into the global trends affecting employee work and wellness, employees are struggling to keep up with the pace and volume of work. Many employees report feeling burned out and as a result, staff turnover is on the rise.
These trends have profound implications, underscoring a crucial shift: employees are now prioritizing their health and well-being over work. This is a pressing concern for all business leaders, particularly in customer service.
At Microsoft, we recognize the vital role our customer service agents play in delivering world-class care. As the front line between our business and our customers, the quality of our customer care directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Recently, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work joined Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to discuss how our customer service teams are using AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot to ensure our customer service employees are empowered to focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. Here’s what she had to say:
Adapting to the customer service surge with the power of AI
Since 2019, Microsoft’s customer service teams, like many in the industry, have been managing a rising surge in calls from customers with complex needs.
As a service industry veteran and leader of our customer service organization, Mala and her team realized that just adding more call-handling capacity wouldn’t suffice. Their goal was to help teams at scale—to empower them to manage more inquiries, address more complex customer needs, and to more rapidly onboard new employees to help with the surge. They also saw an opportunity to reduce case volumes by introducing self-service options for customers.
AI strategy roadmap
Get the e-bookThe team began exploring the use of generative AI to enable a more consistent and seamless experience. Already one of the world’s largest support organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, harnessing new AI capabilities could help the organization to automate and augment common support scenarios. As customer zero for our products, turning to Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 Customer Service would enable us to quickly adopt the transformative power of generative AI, and share those learnings with business leaders to implement and improve their own customer support experience at scale.
Reimagining the customer experience with the power of AI
Stay competitive in today's market with AI
Transforming the employee experience with generative AI
As Mala explains in the interview, adopting Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot Studio created an opportunity to transform work across four key areas of Microsoft’s customer service landscape.
First, the Customer Service and Success team needed to speed up how quickly new hires could start helping existing customer service agents. Second, they wanted all support teams to access accurate information quickly and spend less time working across tools and data sources to collect customer and incident details. Third, they aimed to cut down on mundane tasks like data entry and paperwork so that customer service agents could focus more on complex issues that require empathy and judgment. Lastly, they aimed to improve self-help options for customers to handle their own questions, reducing the need for support requests.
AI has the potential to drive operational excellence, nurture customer loyalty, and grow value through the entire customer journey—making it one of the most valuable tools for enterprises to create a consistent, differentiated experience, build meaningful relationships, and deliver better customer care.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
1. Supporting new hires with better onboarding
The Microsoft Customer Service team introduced Copilot’s case summarization feature to break down complex information into simple summaries, helping new hires understand customer issues more quickly. By surfacing relevant information from diverse sources such as internal documentation, knowledge bases, and websites, Copilot accelerates the learning curve, enabling agents to resolve customer queries faster and deliver superior service.
What’s more, Copilot supports new hires with ongoing learning and skill development by providing real-time assistance and insights. By using AI capabilities integrated into platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can more easily access tools and diagnostics and recommend optimal solutions. This empowers agents to deliver highly personalized customer experiences across all customer support needs, at a global scale.
2. Helping employees find the right information faster
With Copilot, agents can now find important information quickly, even if it was spread across different systems. Dynamics 365 Knowledge Assist helps agents zero in on the relevant information and articles faster than traditional search. It not only can suggest relevant information but provides context about the specific relevance of content and cites the source.
Having a more comprehensive and streamlined method to seek information not only helps agents solve issues more quickly—it gives them a more complete understanding of information relevant to the issue they’re trying to solve. Agents can now use this context, with Copilot, to craft a more thorough and accurate response to customers.
3. Automating burdensome tasks
Before Copilot, creating detailed case summaries could take up to 30 to 40 minutes. Now, with Copilot, it’s done in 15 minutes or less. This not only speeds up how quickly customer service agents can handle customer requests but also lets them manage more cases without sacrificing quality.
Automating summaries and common email and communication tasks allows agents to spend much less time on repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on the more meaningful and often more rewarding aspects of their job.
4. Transforming support with self-service
Prioritizing self-service by integrating Copilot Studio into our customer-facing experiences is starting to make a big difference in how Microsoft handles customer service. Now, customers can use the power of generative AI in Copilot Studio to access self-help resources.
This change has reduced the amount of work customer service teams have to do and lets agents concentrate on more complex issues where customers require assistance. As a result, they’re getting things done more efficiently, working together better, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.
Harnessing the business impact of Copilot
As Mala explains in her interview, generative AI and Copilot have played a pivotal role in transforming our customer service organization at Microsoft, enabling teams to achieve more with fewer resources. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:
- Improved collaboration: Collaboration required among customer support agents decreased by 13%, making case resolution smoother and operations more efficient.
- Enhancing efficiency: With Copilot, average chat case handling time reduced by up to 16%, giving agents better access to knowledge and improving overall efficiency.
- Increasing productivity: Agents using Copilot became more productive, handling up to 12% more cases, which allowed them to serve more customers effectively.
And that’s just the start. Mala sees a future for Copilot that will revolutionize the customer services industry, making it more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric.
These include things like automatically connecting customers with appropriate experts, helping customers solve complex problems on their own, predicting issues before they happen, and personalizing interactions based on customer information and preferences.
Join Microsoft on our AI journey
By automating routine tasks and helping teams find information faster, Copilot helps our employees focus on what really matters to them, allowing them to dive deeper into the parts of their jobs they love.
The speed at which AI is transforming business today is unprecedented, reimagining the way we work. We envision a future where AI alongside human expertise reduces and eliminates the seams in the support experience.
Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft
Today, the power of AI is revolutionizing how companies innovate and create large-scale impact in all areas. Leveraging generative AI throughout the customer journey enables businesses to foster enduring customer loyalty by improving the overall experience, adding value at each interaction.
This interview is part of our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across different areas of our business. Next, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer, sits down with Jared Spataro to share how AI is helping human resource teams do more with less and to share the transformative best practices she used to drive some of the highest, fastest AI adoption rates Microsoft has ever seen.
