Machine learning in customer service is used to provide a higher level of convenience for customers and efficiency for support agents. Support-focused tools enabled with machine learning are growing in popularity thanks to their increasing ease-of-use and successful applications across a variety of industries. Gartner predicts that by 2021, 15 percent of customer service interactions will be handled completely by artificial intelligence.

Social media is growing in popularity as a support channel. Customers love it because it allows them to get help right where they’re already spending time, and all companies should love it because it’s an excellent way to gain insights about your customers and cultivate brand loyalty. Paying attention to your customers on social media, also known as “social listening”, allows you to do a few key things that can help build lasting relationships with your customers.

Most customer service systems keep customer data siloed within each channel, i.e., in chat, phone, or email. A customer’s information and history with your company could be locked up in their chat history, but now that same customer is trying to solve their problem over the phone.

What if there was one customer support channel that helped cut down the number of support tickets and delivered faster customer service, without relying on customer support staff? It exists — and it’s entirely powered by a network of users who volunteer their time and knowledge to help other users, building what’s known as a customer community.

Creating a solid business case for customer service initiatives has been difficult in the past. There’s still a mindset in the workplace that customer service is a “necessary cost” and that’s it. You need customers to have a business, and they require customer service to stick around. That’s the way the relationship has been viewed for decades. But, over the last ten years, the dynamic has changed. Why?

For most companies, the largest segment of users are those who are on a trial or using the free version. In fact, as your company grows, your free user count will likely grow even faster than your paying customers do. But, every support interaction costs a company something, so as your customer base grows, how can you handle support for a group that doesn’t pay you anything for your product?

Sales and support teams aren’t meant to be in silos—both have too much important information on the customer to keep them apart. Sales teams provide crucial context into who their customers are and what they want, and support has critical insights into how expectations are being met.

If long-term predictions about artificial intelligence bear out, the way we work will soon be upended in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution—but in the meantime, AI is already helping humans work better and smarter. And in customer service, AI stands to help support teams emphasize that most human of skills, empathy—a trait that no software program can match (well, at least until the singularity).

You know the value of helpdesk software, but it all comes down to allocating budget for your team. You’ll have to convince your boss to invest in a helpdesk software—or even better, show them how a helpdesk software can enable your support team to achieve more return on investment (ROI). We’ll show you how a helpdesk brings unique value to your support team, with lots of evidence to back it up. Your boss will be wondering why you haven’t invested in a helpdesk already.