Introducing Unthread AI: Not Your Average Support Bot
We started Unthread in 2022 to help teams scale up their customer support in chat apps like Slack and Teams. Providing great support means quick responses and strong relationships at scale. To further this mission, we couldn't be more excited to be launching Unthread AI, a completely new approach to how AI fits into customer support by keeping a human touch in a world of bots.
Chatbots of the Past Have Failed Us
You may find it hard to remember what times were like in the old days – the old days being prior to November 2022, the launch of ChatGPT – but fortunately, we can remember for you. Chatbots are everywhere, but you've likely encountered the situation like this reddit user found when trying to contact his bank about an unusual charge:
The Shift to Human Support in Slack
Tired of this dystopian world of pre-scripted robot gatekeepers of information, companies quickly gravitated towards support over Slack. In Slack, you have direct access to the people who can help, you can chat with them anytime, and you know they're human. The problem, however, is that unlike chatbots, human support capacity can't be scaled up by simply increasing your AWS budget for the month.
The Dawn of Actually Useful Chat AI, But With Caveats
ChatGPT's launch sparked a new interest to explore what AI can really do for us. When harnessed correctly, AI can help us cure diseases, it can reduce depression and anxiety, and it can generate a never-ending episode of Seinfeld rendered in 8-bit.
This isn't without its problems. Even the world's best AI has common instances of hallucinations (i.e. making up examples and telling them as truth), as a lawyer found out the hard way when he cited fake cases generated by ChatGPT in court.
Despite these drawbacks, 2023 was the first time that we saw conversational intelligence in AI good enough to pass as human, and it has changed the way people think about what software can do.
🚀 Unthread AI: The Best of Both Worlds
Customers want the speed and efficiency of AI with the accuracy and personalization of human responses. Unthread AI bridges these two worlds in a way that adjusts the needs of your business.
🤖 The Best of AI
One of AI's greatest strengths is its ability to distill long-form text into its most important parts. ChatGPT itself describe its abilities as "useful for extracting factual information or generating text based on patterns." It's almost guaranteed that the most basic of AI can write a better book report on "To Kill a Mockingbird" in a matter of seconds than I could in a month's time. How can we apply this to customer support?
Instantly Understand Customer Issues
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but try telling that to your customers. What may take a human minutes to parse through and understand, the Unthread AI bot can do in less than a second. Once we can distill entire conversations into quick bullet points, what can we do next?
Connect Helpdesk Docs for Additional Context
Connect your helpdesk or knowledgebase to Unthread AI to get a richer understanding of how your product works. Unlike other chatbot solutions, Unthread AI uses a smart parser to work with any helpdesk from Notion to Confluence to a hodgepodge of disjointed Google Docs.
Generate Product Insights
Some Unthread customers process thousands of tickets every month. While understanding each individual ticket can be helpful, understanding the broader trends is critical. Unthread AI can provide clear, concise insights to guide key roadmapping decisions for product and sales teams.
🙌 The Best of Humans
Until we live in the world of Her, humans are still better than AI at relationship-building, and this is especially important for B2B SaaS companies. In world where contract values are 5, 6, or 7 figures, your customers expect a level of personal touch that a typical chatbot cannot provide. And with Slack Connect, your customers will have direct access to your reps over shared channels and DMs.
Superpowers for Support Reps
The average customer support rep is managing over a dozen open conversations at one time. Humans are notoriously bad at context-switching and multi-tasking, so we provide AI tools at their fingertips, right inside of Slack.
Control Quality with Suggested Responses
For companies that would rather not risk the chance of an AI hallucination giving incorrect responses, you can instead empower the rep with the recommended answer, and let them edit before sending.
Loop in the Right Person Every Time
Unthread AI can detect the type of issue being reported and and can automatically loop in the subject matter expert (SME) into a Slack thread, minimizing distractions and keeping your team focused.
Are We Human, or Are We Chatbot?
The level to which you supplement your support team with AI depends entirely on your business, and we give you the power to choose. Whether responses are gated by humans or entirely AI-driven, you'll provide human-like responses from human accounts, sent directly from Slack.
Unthread AI is Available Today
The new world of customer support will bring human-level relationship-building and AI-level automation together in harmony. To learn more about Unthread AI, you can read more on our website, or schedule a demo with the team to see it in action.