HelpSpot's AI Help Desk

HelpSpot help desk combines email management & artificial intelligence with features that empower support agents to resolve requests more productively.

The addition of machine-learning AI in our help desk lets you optimize workflows; send timely, helpful (clear) replies; guide strategic decision-making; offer an unrivaled customer experience.

The Best Resources to Resolve Requests — At Every Agent’s Fingertips

Train new agents. Support low performers. Level up your entire support team. AI leads the way with suggested actions and helpful resources to guide agents through ticket resolution. Gather insights from HelpSpot reporting to see which topics your agents have trouble with, then stack your help desk knowledge base with everything agents need.

Note: You can also build self service portals to supply handy information for customers. Then customers can find answers to common questions without waiting for agent replies.

Put Your Best Foot Forward in Every Customer Interaction

Rely on conversational AI to double-check and polish customer replies. Create confidence among agents to represent your brand in the best light. Access HelpSpot AI when writing ticket responses to:

• Quickly insert the right canned reply, template, or relevant knowledge base articles
• Check grammar & spelling
• Adjust the tone of your writing
• Make your writing more concise & clear
• Expand & auto-complete replies
• Turn replies into tutorials & quickly work through complex requests

AI works hand-in-hand with agents to keep everybody on the right track: agents can send fast, accurate, consistent replies and resolve customer issues more quickly.

Expand Your Support Team’s Reach

HelpSpot AI translates customer emails and agent replies so you can offer helpful support to anybody who interacts with your brand — regardless of where they live or their language.

Our platform currently accepts English, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, & Hindi. But with HelpSpot AI’s custom prompts, you can add any additional languages you want.

These combined benefits allow agents to efficiently work through (and keep up with) incoming requests. Your staff can respond to a higher volume of requests sooner: agents are more available for customers, and customers receive helpful support in every conversation with your brand.

Benefits of AI in Customer Service (Pros & Cons)

As AI becomes increasingly popular, we hear common misconceptions about the technology. Some teams voice concern over reliability: can it consistently generate accurate information and write clear replies? Meanwhile, other teams worry about it being too advanced and replacing real agents.

But in reality, AI falls somewhere in the middle — it can work alongside agents to help them complete each step of their workflows faster, but it’s imperfect. So understanding how AI works and how to realistically use it in your operations allows you to reap the true benefits of the technology.

We wrote a whole guide on the benefits you can read here: How Can AI Help Customer Service Agents Improve Support?

In summary, AI is beneficial in help desk software because it:

• Supports workflows with tools to automate repetitive tasks and quickly respond to tickets.
• Trains new and low-performing agents, so they can improve response and resolution times and offer high-quality support.
• Improves the customer experience with your brand — AI provides insights to understand, resolve, and prevent customer issues. Then our help desk features enable agents to offer top-notch support.
• Offers deeper reporting insights — AI can analyze tickets to determine causes and patterns amongst customer issues so you can determine the best course of action.
• Can be trained to support a wide variety of teams — customer support teams, HR employees, IT teams, finance departments, and so on and so forth. It learns with you so it can continuously work better for you.

On the flip side, AI is not always reliable; it can spit out inconsistent or inaccurate information and illogical replies, which is why it’s not replacing real agents any time soon.

AI learns from the information you feed it: it can analyze your existing help desk data, and you can create automation rules that train it to take certain actions, but it’s not smart enough to just review historical help desk data and take over. It’s best used to help support agents.

FAQs

Will HelpSpot release additional AI tools as they advance?

Yes! We’ve already shipped several AI tools and have more in the works — we closely watch the space to research and design additional AI functionality within our help desk.

What AI language model does HelpSpot use?

End users can choose which OpenAI model to use — GPT 3.5 or GPT 4.0. (As you might be able to guess, GPT 4.0 is the upgraded, more current version, but they each have strengths.)

• GPT 3.5 is a less expensive, fast, fully-capable text-to-text language model — it can analyze large bodies of text and generate quick information.
• GPT 4.0 is slightly more accurate and has better multi-lingual capabilities, but is also a bit slower and more expensive.

GPT 4.0 might be worth the extra spend if you have customers in different parts of the world and need to easily translate tickets and replies.

Who is HelpSpot’s AI help desk recommended for?

Our help desk has always been the go-to for support teams who manage requests via email (and need better, clearer email management).

Our platform looks and feels like an advanced email account — you can add as many email addresses as you need, create multiple inboxes to divvy up requests, assign requests to specific agent queues, and track requests from the first email to resolution. Everything is recorded in the ticket history, and it’s clear who’s working on what.

The benefit of choosing HelpSpot vs. other help desk software is the ability to customize our platform for unique use cases:

• You can integrate with other software to monitor tickets in a single reporting dashboard — say if you use a live chat bot to field requests when agents are offline.
• Add or remove users as you go — all users can access HelpSpot’s complete feature set, and pricing is based on seats.
• Build knowledge bases and self service portals to supply resources for different end-user groups.
• Change the appearance of your help desk with branded colors and logos.

In the last decade, we’ve worked with IT support teams, HR, accounting, educational institutions, customer service groups, and more. We meet with you before onboarding to determine what you need in a help desk. Then, if we check the right boxes, we gameplan the next steps. (We even have complimentary White Glove onboarding for teams that want us to handle the move.)

How can you use AI and ChatGPT in customer support workflows?

Customer service teams can use ChatGPT to:

• Speed up replies — AI can perform a copy edit or auto-complete your replies.
• Draft canned responses or templates to save and use in the help desk.
• Write replies to customer reviews or answer questions about your brand.
• Build website content (write product pages, descriptions, blog posts, brochures, etc.) or write copy for social media posts.
• Gather ideas to improve customer satisfaction — you can ask AI tools like ChatGPT for tips to improve the user experience, build brand awareness, improve agent workflows, etc. Ask it any question, and it’ll give you a response.

Just remember, AI is like an (imperfect) virtual assistant, so although it is helpful and time-saving, you should still double-check everything it generates to ensure it’s accurate and polished. Be practical about your expectations for AI, and don’t cut corners.

What is an AI service desk?

The term “service desk” often refers to an IT help desk — or a help desk software designed for IT teams. There are two types of help desk solutions for IT teams:

• Teams that need traditional ticket management for service requests (internal or external, or both) can rely on tools like HelpSpot.
• Users who need features to handle behind-the-scenes IT operations often invest in IT service management (ITSM) software. These have features to manage physical assets, monitor user networks, and troubleshoot various IT issues.

When comparing these solutions, think about the:

• Request management features. What tools do you have to organize, assign, prioritize, and resolve support requests?
• Extra IT tools your team requires. In addition to ticket management, do you also need asset management, incident management, network monitoring, or other IT tools to handle technical issues?
• AI offerings. What can they realistically accomplish, and how can your teams leverage them?
• Usability and onboarding. How simple is it to learn the software and onboard agents? Does the solution make life easier or add complexity?
• Pricing and scalability. What packages does the brand offer? How does pricing work? How can you modify the software in the future?

What impact does AI have on customer service?

AI offers dozens of benefits to improve customer service and better brand experiences — it supports CS teams by giving them tools to:

• Automate repetitive tasks, like ticket routing.
• Improve reply times and create helpful resources, like templates and knowledge base resources, to send responses more easily.
• Guide new or low-performing agents — everybody can easily access training materials and use AI features to send better, faster replies.
• Understand customer issues and provide a better experience. You can identify common issues and resolve them at the source, cut steps out of support processes to find faster resolutions, and supply helpful website resources for customers to access on demand.
• Offer personalized experiences. When you leverage AI in tools like chat bots or eCommerce platforms, you can learn more about individual customers and take action based on their preferences.
• Provide consistent support. One sour experience can result in customers jumping ship to another brand, so staying on top of the support experience is critical in building and maintaining a solid customer base.

Get started on HelpSpot’s AI help desk with our free trial. It’s 100% free for 21 days — no automatic subscriptions or contracts, adjust or cancel your plan anytime. Or you can contact us to schedule a (free) personalized demo: see how our solution can be tailored to your teams, and get started with onboarding.