Gladly Automation: How To Boost Your Helpdesk With AI

Let’s start with the basics: 

What is AI automation?

AI automation is a form of artificial intelligence that uses large volumes of data, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. It enables computers to analyze, understand, contextualize, and measure the meaning and sentiment of language with accuracy. 

What is AI automation for customer service?

In the context of customer service, conversational AI automation facilitates human-like interactions with customers across support channels. Brands using AI automation can scale their support and sustain growth without sacrificing quality. It frees human agents to focus on high-value service queries and can reduce operational costs. 

What does AI automation in customer service matter?

By 2025, 95% of customer service interactions will be supported by AI. And 82% of CX leaders already agree that AI automation is becoming increasingly necessary for business success. 

Many leading brands have already joined the machine-learning revolution, so if you want to keep up with the competition then now is the time to familiarize yourself with AI for customer support. 

Learn (almost) everything you need to know about customer service AI automation here. 

AI automation is a game-changer in the customer service world. Brands that use customer support automation with their helpdesk see a drop in wait times, an increase in productivity, and lower operational costs among other value-adds. 

But don’t just take our word for it! Here is a Thankful and Gladly review from the CX Director of an expert DTC pharmaceutical company. 👇

"We love the combination of Gladly and Thankful. We’ve experienced major gains in efficiency, conversations are resolved faster with less effort!"

- Colleen Curran, Director of Customer Experience

Thankful, a customer service AI automation solution, makes the most of Gladly’s unique conversational strategy; seamlessly engaging with customers as they migrate channels and develop their relationship with your brand over time.

7  key benefits of leveraging Thankful’s AI automation with Gladly:

If Your Customers Are There, So Are We

Customers want to choose how and when they contact your brand. That’s why Thankful and Gladly’s deep integration empowers you to deliver AI-powered support across all text-based channels; email, SMS, live chat, in-app, and social.

Built for Ecommerce

Pre-trained for e-commerce customer service, Thankful’s AI achieves a high level of nuanced understanding and is capable of fully resolving over 50 ticket types. Since Thankful’s AI is tailored to each business, the responses and actions align with companies’ specific policies and brand voice. 

Do More With Less

Integrating Thankful with Gladly increases allows your service organization to support more inbound customer requests while also reducing wait times. With around-the-clock AI automated support, you're able to help your customers resolve common inquiries at any time of the day, seven days a week, allowing your agents to quickly address the more complex and pressing issues faster than ever before.

Expand Your Ability To Handle Surprises and Seasonal Surges

Scaling your customer service capacity through automation not only helps your team do more with less but also prepares your team for the turbulent, unforeseen events that occur daily and seasonally. provides your service organization more elasticity to ensure you're always prepared for anything without the costs associated with overstaffing or seasonal hiring. 

Personalized Support at Scale

A common misconception is that more automation means less personalization. But leveraging robust AI that aligns with your brand actually enables you to deliver more personalized experiences at scale! 

With best-in-class natural language understanding, Thankful better understands what customers want and delivers personalized service at scale. Never forgetting a customer or their history with your business, Thankful creates truly individual service experiences that strengthen the brand-customer relationship. 

Alleviates Pressure on Agents

While agents have a ticket capacity, AI does not. In fact, AI’s performance will strengthen as it collects more data. AI can get to tickets within seconds and easily withstand ticket influxes. It is optimal for time-sensitive customer service queries, especially when queues are high and agents are unable to get to them in time. AI’s autoscaling capabilities ensure customers receive quick and high-quality support while simultaneously reducing the pressure your agents are under and decreasing the risk of burnout.

Empower Your Agents To Do What They Do Best

With Thankful’s AI Agent fully resolving large volumes of tickets within Gladly, your agents are freed from repetitive transactional tasks and are empowered to focus their time and effort on high-value interactions and building meaningful relationships with customers.

Thankful’s deep and seamless integration with Gladly customer service software allows you to use AI automation across email, live chat, social media, and SMS support channels. 

When up and running, Thankful’s AI Agent acts as an extension of your team, operating within the Gladly platform and connecting with your existing business systems. It engages with customers and fully resolves queries just as a human agent would. 

It is important to note that you have complete control of what types of customer requests you want Thankful’s AI Agent to handle. Everything else will be assigned directly to your agents in Gladly. This allows you to optimize Thankful for your business’s specific needs. And since your AI Agent is tailored to your brand, responses and actions also align with your specific policies and brand voice. 

So, how TF does Thankful’s AI Agent do all that? 

Built from the ground up and pre-trained with over 50 million e-commerce customer support tickets, Thankful’s AI goes beyond surface-level intents to understand your customers, their contact reasons, motivations, and even sentiment. It is also trained to never forget a customer or their history with your brand and delivers individualized experiences based on dozens of parameters such as LTV and previous conversations. 

Since Thankful is working within Gladly, every service interaction is logged within the customer’s lifeline conversation timeline. This ensures your agents always have the context of past and present conversations. A single conversational thread gives your agents a quick and easy way to reference conversations from the past to better help customers and keep the conversation personal. 

If a customer starts a conversation with Thankful and follows up with something more complex or a request that requires the assistance of an agent, Thankful will add a note and assign the conversation to the next available agent.

To help save your agent time from tedious work, Thankful is even able to auto-apply a topic within Gladly based on the context of the conversation – as seen in the image above.

Want to see it all in action? Request a Thankful and Gladly demo here. 

To deliver a world-class customer service experience, Thankful integrates with the same tools your agents use. This starts by integrating Thankful into your Gladly helpdesk software.

Integrating Thankful with Gladly is a quick and easy process. The integration itself can take less than 20 minutes. Yes, it’s that fast! 

But what does the integration process entail and what is required of your team? Here are answers to some of the most asked integration questions:

What resources are required to integrate Thankful?

All Team Thankful needs is access to a few endpoints in your API. 

Why does Thankful need API access?

Thankful works inside Gladly just as a human agent would, so it needs access to your systems to read, route, translate, surface data, assist, and fully resolve customer queries.  The more information Thankful has access to, the more value it brings. Consider it the AI Agent’s tool for getting the job done. 

We’ll break this down a bit further. 👇

When integrating Thankful with Gladly and order management systems, it’s important to understand each integration tier and grant access based on the key functionalities you would like your AI Agent to have. 

• Helpdesk Integration - Thankful’s AI Agent gathers information from within Gladly to provide fast and personalized responses to customers when order information is not required in addition to delivering AI intuition to your human agents. 
  
  
• Helpdesk Integration + OMS Read Access - Further optimize your AI Agent by integrating it with your order management systems. With the ability to collate information from both your helpdesk and OMS, Thankful’s AI Agent can deliver even more personalized service. 
  
  
• Helpdesk Integration + OMS Read & Write Access - Get the most out of Thankful’s AI capabilities with full helpdesk and OMS integration and accessibility. Just like a human agent, Thankful’s AI Agent gathers information from Gladly and your OMS, fulfills change requests within those systems, responds to, and fully resolves tickets. 

To Maximize your AI Agent’s capabilities, the Thankful team recommends granting full OMS Read & Write Access. You can learn more about the functionalities here.

Is this secure? How do I know if I can trust this?

We are glad you asked! Data safety is Thankful’s primary concern. That’s why Thankful has advanced security protocols in place, is SOC2 Type 2 certified, provides SSO & SAML, and is fully GDPR & CCPA compliant. 

Any other questions? Feel free to send a message and a member of Team Thankful will be in touch soon.

To maximize the benefits of Gladly and Thankful, you’ll want to ensure that your business is set up for success. Not only will it save you time and resources, but it will help you get the results you’re looking for. 

5 Recommended Steps For Implementing AI Into Your CS

1. Revisit Your Policies

Thankful will align response flows to your brand and policies. So before starting the AI implementation process, take a deep look at your policies and ensure they are meeting your customers’ needs. The more customer-centric your policies are, the happier your customers will be.

2. Understand Your Automation Decisions

When implementing AI automation, it is important to keep the best use cases in mind. AI is best-suited for high-volume repeat tickets – like shipping and returns questions, password resets, and tracking help – because they can be handled with speed and precision. 

To meet your brand’s specific needs, focus on your top inquiries when making automation decisions. 

Also, be critical to be aware of where not to use automation. It doesn’t make sense to put your AI Agent in charge of unique tickets or resolve problems that haven't happened before. So be sure to understand when and when not to use AI. Because if you put AI where it doesn’t belong, it could create more work and errors for your agents to clean up.

3. Build Trust Between AI and Agents

AI is meant to augment human agents. Your support team should know why you've chosen to implement AI, know all about the AI system and its basic functionality, the purpose behind it, why it is being utilized, and how their roles will change for the better. 

Learn more about how AI automation can benefit your support team’s experience here. 

4. Refine Your Strategies and Processes

Thankful will enable you to easily test strategies, processes, and promotions. For optimal success, pinpoint your focus and create clear procedures and responses. This nuance includes naming conventions; establishing distinct terms for different actions and promotions will increase veracity for both your AI Agent and human agents. 

5. Test, Evaluate, and Adapt 

Ensure you maximize AI’s capabilities over time by continually testing the system, evaluating how consumers respond, and making adjustments. Thankful makes it easy for teams to create new workflows and modify existing ones. 

Integrating AI automation into your business is a process, but Thankful will guide you through the planning and implementation; providing expertise on how to best optimize AI for your business. 

Thankful and Gladly will not only make your customers happy, but your agents will thank you as well. When used together, you will get the best of AI automation services while continuing to allow your team to operate within a customer service platform that empowers your agents to place people at the heart of your conversations.