In the age of chatbots and social media, it's easy to dismiss email as the dinosaur of customer service channels. But here's a hot take: sleeping on email automation could be costing your business more than you think.

Despite the rise of flashy new communication tools, email remains a preferred method of communication for customers. To this day, 93% of customers use email to engage with companies, and according to McKinsey, email is nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in acquiring customers.

While automating email responses for customer service comes with its fair share of complexities, the advent of AI-powered solutions is giving email a much-needed makeover. We’re finally starting to see email automation for customer service go from a slow, resource-draining channel into a lean, mean, customer satisfaction machine.

Let's dive into why email deserves your attention, and how AI is revolutionizing this seemingly old-school medium.

The email paradox: Why customers can't quit it

Despite the proliferation of instant messaging and social media, email remains the go-to channel for customer support. Why? It's familiar, it's universal, and it creates a paper trail that customers trust.

But here's the kicker: while customers love the convenient and record-keeping nature of email, businesses often struggle with the time and resources required to manage it effectively. One email can turn into many at a quick pace, and it can easily spill over into long threads spanning multiple questions with a growing and complex backstory. This makes it a major bottleneck for customer service teams.

Despite this, agents are expected to keep up, even when queues become unruly. In an attempt to decompress, companies will sometimes turn off their email channel altogether, or create multiple email addresses to manage routing — making this channel even more complicated to manage.

The issues accumulate and the costs swell; in 2021, email support alone cost businesses over $169K/month (https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2021/understanding-cost-per-ticket), with average cost per ticket at $16.13. This means one of the most popular channels is also one of the most underserved.

But fear not, with the right AI agent for customer service, businesses can turn their love-hate relationship with email support into fruitful friendship.

AI to the rescue: From inbox nightmare to customer care

Imagine an email system that doesn't just respond quickly but actually understands and resolves customer issues. That's not science fiction — it's the reality of email automation when you’re using the right AI agent.

Unfortunately, solutions like this are hard to come by. Existing automation solutions today are pretty simple, capable only of running simple article searches and link regurgitations. An AI solution that can act autonomously, that’s even more rare.

We’re not knocking other automation tools that have tried (well, maybe just a little) — the truth is that building an AI solution for email that works universally across unique business support flows comes with unique challenges.

Unlike other customer service channels — like web chat or phone — email inherently has multiple input sources. Customers can reach out directly to a support email address, or they may contact a company via form on their website, for example.

Direct to email inquiries need to be routed to the AI Agent from mail providers in order for a response to be generated, while inquiries submitted via contact form are likely to create a ticket in the company’s agent platform before it’s sent to an AI automation solution, like Ada’s AI Agent .

This means you need to build a solution that’s compatible with various input mechanisms and integrations and that can communicate with different agent platforms. Many solutions don’t do this, limiting their offering to businesses by only supporting integrations with certain agent platforms, like Zendesk or Salesforce (but not both).

Not only does your email automation solution need a way to generate responses based on an input, it also needs a way to receive and deliver replies back to your end user. You can build something to do this, but you likely need a third party intermediary with a solid suite of security functionality and built-in authentication methods to ensure that your automated reply gets delivered in your end user’s inbox and not marked for spam.

To add an additional layer of complexity, some companies want to track all their automated conversations in their agent platform, rather than having conversation volume in two places — inside the automation tool and the agent platform. A lot of businesses prefer to send their responses through the agent platform, instead of having the generated response coming straight from the email automation tool . Ada’s built a way to support this with a daily conversation sync, so that all your conversation data can be viewed in one place, facilitating comprehensive reporting.

And, of course, emails are distinct in how they’re formatted, so there’s more consideration in what an automated email response should look like compared to other customer service channels.

How AI is changing the game

With the right technology in place, your email automation tool can not only respond to inquiries in seconds (humble brag, Ada’s AI Agent typically responds in 25 to 35 seconds) and can handle multiple questions in one email. It’s ability to communicate back and forth sounds so human-like people likely won’t know the difference between an AI agent and a human agent.

This is because generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning can actually deliver personalized responses at scale. Our AI tool can easily integrate with your tech stack, including your email system, CRM, agent platform, and knowledge base, it will have the best success for returning quick and personalized responses.

Closing the omnichannel circle: Email's starring role

To be fully omnichannel as a business, you need to have an avenue to handle conversations with automation for every way that your customers can reach out to you. But true omnichannel support isn't just about being everywhere – it's about being everywhere effectively. Email, with its unique characteristics, plays a crucial role in this ecosystem.

The businesses that embrace AI-powered email support now will be the ones setting the standard for the future of customer experiences. Those who don’t, may suffer the cost of inaction:

• Longer response times leading to customer frustration
• Missed opportunities for personalization and upselling
• Inefficient use of human resources on repetitive tasks

Email is evolving (finally), and leveraging AI solutions like an AI agent can transform this traditional channel into a cutting-edge tool for customer satisfaction and retention.

So, the next time someone tells you email is dead, just smile and nod. You know better.