AI for Customer Support
Support teams were early AI adopters for good reason: lots of repeat questions. The trick is knowing which conversations should never reach a bot.
Where AI genuinely helps
Triage and tagging
Classifying inbound tickets by type, urgency and sentiment keeps queues moving.
Reply drafts and macros
Drafting first replies and refreshing your macro library saves agents time on the repeat questions.
Knowledge base upkeep
Spotting gaps from ticket themes and drafting new help articles is high leverage.
Summaries for handoff
Summarising a long thread before escalation means the next person doesn't start from zero.
Where your judgment stays primary
Escalate the sensitive stuff
Complaints, cancellations, refunds, safety and anything legal deserve a human, fast.
Don't let it promise
AI will invent refund policies and timelines. Ground it in your real policies and review before anything commits the company.
Tell customers when it's a bot
People are more forgiving of automation when they're told about it — and an easy route to a human matters.
Protect customer data
Keep payment details and personal information out of tools that aren't approved for it.
Automation and jobs is one of the most-debated AI questions. Read the ethics hub.
Prompts for customer support
Fill in the brackets and paste into any AI tool. Want more? Try the Prompt Generator.
Ticket triage
Classify this support message: category (billing / bug / how-to / cancellation / complaint), urgency (low / medium / high), sentiment, and whether a human must handle it. Then a one-line summary. [paste message]
Empathetic reply draft
Draft a reply to the customer below using only this policy: [paste policy]. Acknowledge the problem once, explain what happens next, and don't promise anything the policy doesn't cover. Under 120 words. [paste message]
KB gap finder
Here are this month's ticket subjects: [paste]. Group them into themes and suggest 5 help-centre articles that would deflect the most tickets, each with a title and outline.
Escalation summary
Summarise this support thread for a senior agent: the customer's issue, what's been tried, what they've been told, their current mood, and what decision is needed. [paste thread]