Start from your real conversations
Before choosing what to automate, read last month’s conversations and group them by what the customer wanted. In most businesses a short list of requests makes up most of the volume: where is my order, why did my transfer fail, what do I need to open an account, when are you open.
Start with requests that have a clear, checkable answer. Leave the rest to your team for now.
Write down what good looks like
AI can only be as good as what you give it. Three things matter:
- Approved answers. Your policies, fees and requirements, written plainly. In Texa, nothing is used until someone on your team approves it, and every change is kept as a version.
- Processes. How your best agent handles a request, step by step: what to check, what to ask, when to stop. Texa turns your description into steps and points out anything unclear.
- Limits. Which actions need the customer’s yes, which need them to be verified, and the largest amount Texa may refund or reverse on its own.
Also decide what always goes to a person, whatever the AI could say: fraud, a death in the family, legal threats, and customers who have already complained twice.
Run it in shadow mode first
In shadow mode the AI writes a draft for every conversation, and your team decides: send it, change it, or write their own. Customers only ever see what a person sent.
Watch one number above all: how often your team sends a draft without changing it. Then read the drafts they changed. Each one points to a missing answer, an unclear process or a limit that needs adjusting. Fix those, and the number climbs.
Every business starts in shadow mode in Texa Desk. When Texa can’t answer a question, it lists it with the answer your team gave, so you can approve it for next time.
Go live in small steps
Don’t switch from drafts to answering everyone in one day. Let the AI reply to a small share of conversations first, compare the results with your team’s, then widen it.
Texa Desk does this in three steps: 10% of conversations, then 50%, then all of them. Each step lasts at least three days, and Texa goes back to shadow mode by itself if too many lookups in your systems fail. You can turn it off for the whole business, one inbox or one conversation, and your team takes over straight away.
Check every reply before it goes out
A safe system checks each reply before the customer sees it, not afterwards. The checks that matter most:
- The reply is based on your approved information or a lookup in your systems, not a guess.
- It doesn’t promise anything your policy doesn’t allow.
- It doesn’t repeat card numbers, PINs, BVN or NIN.
- It says it is an AI, and only talks about your business.
See how Texa does this on the automatic answers page.
Hand over without making customers repeat themselves
Customers don’t mind talking to an AI that solves their problem. What they hate is being stuck with one that can’t, or explaining everything again to a person.
- Tell the customer a person is taking over, and roughly when.
- Give that person a summary: what the customer wants, what was checked, what was already tried.
- Out of hours, open a ticket, give the customer its reference and a promised time, and keep that promise.
Measure what customers feel
The easy number is how many conversations the AI handled. The honest numbers are how many problems were actually solved, how many came back, and how customers rated the help. Track them separately for AI-answered and team-answered conversations. Our guide to customer service metrics explains each one.
Numbers won’t catch a polite reply that was wrong. Read a sample of conversations every week, or let quality checks written in plain English do the first pass, as analytics in Texa Desk does.
Look after customer data
Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, you need a lawful reason to process customer data, you should collect only what you need, and customers can ask to see or delete what you hold. Choose tools that let you export or delete a customer’s data on request, and that keep data where you need it to be. Texa Desk’s approach is on the security page.
