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AI Agents Taking Over Customer Service?
The Value of AI Agents integrated with Online Customer Service
Jackie Golden
June 20, 2025
Customers work with many different technologies that are always changing or being upgraded. It makes it hard for employees to keep up with how to use these technologies to do their job better. What helps them achieve a productive state with new technologies faster is an easy to use, well organized self-help center with robust, accurate and comprehensive content that gets them the answers they are looking for quickly.
AI Voice Agents Are Ready to Take Your Call
“Gartner predicts that generative AI capabilities, from voice to chat, will be present in 75% of new contact centers by 2028. “
Customers want to be independent and use online resources to find answers quickly. Many software users prefer to find answers on their own without calling Support, a CSM, Account Executive or Consultant.
WSJ/CIO Journal By Belle Lin May 21, 2025
“There are multiple opportunities for developing AI-driven software that optimizes processes. Software driven by AI provides useful information, improves decision-making, and improves user experience by minimizing human error.”
One of the keys to a successful growth plan for any CX model is designing an amazing online Customer Self Help Center that enables customers to find the answers they need easily. The design of the online support center becomes the gateway to creating loyal, independent customers.
The Top 7 Customer Self-Help Center Elements
Easy to Find Help
Get Content Quickly
Quality and Accurate Content
Hot Buttons for Common Information Requests
Get Started Guided Tour
Feedback Button on Every Page
Automate Customer Communication
1. Easy to Find Help
A top customer request is having the ability to get to online or in-product help quickly and easily.
Customers don’t want to hunt around a software solution trying to find where to get help. Every software solution should have a question mark or help button at the top right or left to make it quick and easy for customers to access help.
If a software solution has in product help or a DAP solution integrated, then the same concept would apply; make it easy to find the help button on each solution page to get the specific help for the processes, functions and capabilities.
“Self-service offers your customers a much faster resolution to their problem.
Great self-service allows your customers to find answers instantly instead of having to wait around for customer support to respond. This is a huge deal. 73% of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online service, and you can honor that desire by delivering with self-service.”
2. Get Content Quickly
Keeping the number of clicks to a minimum for customers to get to a topic is key to improving utilization of the online content and customer satisfaction in finding answers quickly.
What does this mean? It means customers generally don’t like to have to click more than 3 times to get to their content. The more clicks they hit, the more often they bail on the process and give up on utilizing the online help in the future.
“I completed over 50 customer interviews; One of the most frustrating experiences reported was the use of online support centers. The main complaint was having to click through more than 3 to 4 clicks trying to find the right content and/or get an answer to their question.
The number two answer was the search engine not being robust enough to bring up relevant and accurate content to resolve their question.”
LandNExpand, 2022 - 2024 (over 50 customer interviews)
This is where AI agents can help improve the customer’s online experience. Just having a simple search bar for customers to ask any question they have will increase the customer’s use of the online help.
What will keep customers using the online help as their first line of defense, will be integrating your AI agents with all the documentation available on all products and services. When this information is kept up to date with every product release, services information and best practices updates, the more accurate the AI agent will be in providing quality and accurate answers.
Keep your process clicks under 3 clicks to get to their final content element to improve the customer’s engagement with your online support center. Spend the time to create a robust search engine on your online support center and have a team of employees across the company help you test it with finding answers to common questions they get from customers and prospects.
The most popular elements to include in an Online Self Help Portal
Single sign on enabled
Automated welcome letter and sign on instructions with credentials
Hot topics buttons to common information requests
Product updates
Product uptime and resolution plan for downtime
eLearning - Learning paths for learning the product, best practices and or sample designs for custom configurations
Tracking support tickets
Product Knowledge center - How to articles and videos
Getting started quickly
Integrations and Connectors
Admin, Account and contract information
In-Product Content versus Online Self-Help center content
Customers tend to prefer applications that provide help content from within the product as much as possible. A common customer expectation for in-product service capability is within the Admin or Security consoles. These are additional customer requests for In-Product self service capabilities for the admin role managing the solution:
Track license and contract information.
Renewal information and an option to manage their subscription agreement and licenses based on need.
Customer feedback surveys (NPS, CES, etc.).
Customer Analytics on software usage and business impacts.
“After just 10 minutes of searching online, 52% of customers will give up and call or email a company's support team instead. This means you need to make your self-service content readily available and easy for customers to find. Is your help center searchable and intuitively organized? Make sure it's easier to self-serve than it is to fire off an email or dial your phone number.”
However, you can provide all these options as part of your online Customer Self-Help Center until the product team can add some of these capabilities within the product. I recommended asking your Product Management team to at least provide a link from within the product to the online Customer Self-Help Center using SSO, so it is a smooth experience to get to the information customers need quickly.
3. Quality and Accurate Content
The team members who own the content on the Customer Self-Help portal can be made up of employees who are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Technical Writers and Editors. The SMEs can be folks from any department, partners or other outside expert consultants depending on the type of content that is needed to help customers understand how to use and get value from your products and services. The goal is to create quality content that will provide the right level and detail of information to ensure a customer can continue moving forward in using your software.
Self-Service Customer Service: Key Capabilities and Strategies
Gartner, 2025
There is an art to transforming highly technical information into easy to understand content. This is where having good technical writers makes a difference in helping customers understand and consume the information easily enabling them to take the action needed to resolve their issue quickly.
“Definition. Content quality is how well your content achieves its goal(s). It refers to the depth of information and insight contained within a piece of content. Content quality goes beyond information to include formatting, readability, and grammatical correctness.”
It’s the beauty of simplicity that customers like when using an online support center. Having Hot Buttons for the most common requests and use cases in a logical easy to read format provides customers with the ability to quickly get the answers they are looking for.
Most software companies have a top menu bar that is a quick link to their support center which is highly desired by customers and easy to find.
Zoom has designed their online support center with a well organized, easy to read and simple design making it easy to find what you are looking for quickly. It also has “Hot Buttons” to the most common use cases and additional links to other common topics and questions. It’s easy to navigate and scroll down and see all the options without having to go into multiple clicks to find the topics you are looking for.
Here is an example of Zoom’s Support Center website that is well organized with the Hot Buttons at the top of the most frequent customer requests
5. Get Started Guided tour
Another top 10 customer request is a “Getting Started” option to guide customers through how to get started with a solution quickly. Many customers are excited to get started and are very technical astute and want to go explore on their own.
A “Getting Started” option should be straight forward and simple, showing a customer a few common tasks or processes to setup and start using quickly that enables them to get a feel for the menu options and where common capabilities are located. The self-guided tour can be a step-by-step program to establish a particular process or capability that shows a quick value.
These Quick Start programs can be in the form of an eLearning path, video or in screen guidance solution. It can also be with an interactive project plan with the links to relevant content in each task to help the customer complete their own onboarding plan and review the progress.
Customer feedback is what drives the innovation and evolution of any online customer self-help center. Make it easy for customer to give you feedback quickly and easily as they use the online center.
You will find the feedback is both positive and negative to help you understand various customer and user type needs.
I suggest adding a feedback button on every page to ask customers to share how to improve the support center content, organization and inaccurate or missing information.
The value of a Feedback button on every page is that you get feedback on how to improve more than just the content of a specific “How to” article. Customers will share what else they were looking for when they came to the website and where they were confused; providing suggestions on what would make it better. Customers usually have the greatest solutions!
At Workfront, we had a mission of “Tickets to zero”. We knew this would never happen, but this was our obsession to improve the customer experience. We spent the time to evaluate the tickets logged as well as the customer feedback to define quarterly goals that were specifically aligned to improve the customer experience and help our customers to be highly self-sufficient.
I would also interview customers each quarter during my customer tours to find out more about how they used the support center and what would make them use it more or never have to log a ticket into support. The data trends collected from these interviews showed the customer’s desire for us to improve the experience from within the product as a priority and a quick link to the online self-help center as the second priority to ensure they could get their answers quickly.
7. Automate Customer communication plan
Create a customer communication plan. Whether that is formal, passive, automated, manual or in person. These are opportunities to help educate customers on how to get information and answers quickly within your software company. Think of it as a training session for customer users to learn where all the resources are and how to self-help as often as possible.
It is also helpful to work with your Product Marketing team to develop a quarterly communication plan with the customer base that drives them to new or updated content on the online support center.
Using various Customer communication vehicles to bring customers through the online experience will teach them to self-help and develop the customer habits to become more self-sufficient in obtaining answers and solving their own problems quickly.
Customer self-service will be one of the top requirements customers will evaluate as part of their decision when looking to invest and continue to invest in a software solution. This can be a huge differentiator between you and your competitors.
The future of AI Agents integrated into Software Solutions
If you haven’t already, I suggest integrating an AI Agent with your online support center with access to all your internal content on all products, services and best practices.
The next generation of software will provide in-product guidance and recommendations pertinent to customers based on how they are using the product, their industry and specific business use cases the software is designed to improve.