Determining the ROI of AI agents in e-commerce

AI is changing how e-commerce companies operate. With sales growing by nearly 9% in 2024 alone, e-commerce companies are turning towards AI agents to help their support teams deal with the increasing pressure. Hiring an AI agent can reduce labor costs, increase productivity, improve CSAT scores, and enhance the overall customer experience. But what’s the ROI of an AI agent and how do you calculate it? 

Calculating the ROI of hiring an AI agent for your customer support team 

For years e-commerce companies have been trying to manage huge amounts of queries, resolve complex issues, maintain a quick response time, and deal with fluctuations in their sales volumes. 

By hiring an AI agent, like a Neople, e-commerce companies can benefit from: 

• Reduced labor and recruitment costs for their customer support teams
• Increased productivity in managing customer queries
• Improved CSAT scores
• Stronger brand consistency in interactions with customers
• Continuous improvements to customer experience 

It’s also pretty simple to calculate the ROI of using an AI agent once you understand your goals, quantifiable benefits, and cost of hiring an AI agent: ROI = (Benefits – Costs of an AI agent) divided by Costs x 100%.  

Luckily for you, we've made this even easier by creating a ROI calculator to understand the profitability of working with a digital coworker.  

Why are e-commerce companies turning towards AI agents? 

By 2027 it’s expected that 23% of retail purchases will take place online. This is putting huge pressure on support teams that haven’t been scaled up to support this extra demand. And if your customers have a bad experience, there’s a one in three chance that they’ll walk away from your brand. will suffer and you’ll ultimately lose sales.   

E-commerce customer support teams must keep up with high volumes of queries while also being capable of resolving a wide range of complex issues. And add to this the pressure to provide fast, quality responses to customers who expect almost instant solutions. 

A support query left unresolved for too long can quickly lead to reduced customer satisfaction levels, missed sales opportunities or customers even bad-mouthing your brand.

Traditionally, e-commerce companies have had to constantly hire more support agents to keep up with growing customer demands. 

However this approach hugely increases costs for the company, and creates inefficiencies in times of lower customer demand. For example, an e-commerce company selling sunglasses will typically receive a lot more queries in the summer months than the winter.  

Instead of struggling to find and pay extra human support agents, AI agents can take on the job.

Benefits of AI agents: increased efficiency and cost savings

Hiring an AI co-worker, like a Neople, has a clear ROI; it helps you reduce labor costs without compromising on speed or customer satisfaction. 

Direct cost savings

Expanding your customer support team with an AI co-worker, such as a Neople, minimizes the need for expensive new human hires, while still allowing you to provide high quality (or even better) service. This delivers huge savings in both labour and recruitment costs, and also saves time. 

AI agents are also much faster and cheaper to onboard than human agents, as they can largely train themselves once the initial set up is completed. Each AI agent is built to learn over time so the more queries an AI agent handles, the better its problem-solving and responses become.

AI agents are not only equipped to resolve support issues but are also available 24/7, which is simply not feasible for human support teams. 

Increased productivity

By hiring an AI-agent to join your customer support team, you can improve the entire team’s efficiency. Our Neople can typically resolve customer queries far quicker than human support staff, which means faster resolution times and less risk of a queries backlog. 

But it isn’t only about speed, Neople also reduce the burden for the team by easily resolving simple queries and allowing these human agents to focus on issues that may be better solved with a human touch. 

Improved customer experience at a lower cost, who wouldn’t want that! 

Calculating ROI for AI customer support agents 

So now it’s time to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of using an AI agent at your company. Here’s a simple way that you can calculate your ROI: 

1. Define your goals:

What do you want to achieve by using an AI agent? This may be reducing your labour costs, saving time, providing better customer service or all of the above..but it’s important to figure out what matters most for your business. 

2. Put a value on the benefits:

Depending on your goals, what quantifiable benefits will you get from implementing an AI agent? For example, if reducing labour costs is your goal then how much would you have paid to extra human agents instead of hiring an AI agent?  

3. Hire an AI agent:

The quickest way to understand the impact of an AI agent is by adding a Neople to your team and seeing how it helps your customer support teams. 

4. Calculate the ROI of using an AI agent:

You can now easily calculate your ROI by using the following formula: ROI = (Benefits – Costs of an AI agent) divided by Costs x 100%. Luckily for you, we’ve made this even easier by creating a Neople ROI calculator! 

This essentially compares the cost of hiring an AI agent versus the benefits it brought to your company, in terms of your goals and KPIs. This data can then be analyzed further and tracked over time to create a fuller picture.

Beyond numbers: improved customer experience

The positive impact of an AI agent goes far beyond cost savings and efficiency benefits. In fact, you can actually improve your customers’ experiences by adding an AI agent, like a Neople, to your team. 

Improved CSAT scores

No matter the industry, customer satisfaction and experience are essential to the success of an e-commerce company. According to recent research by Mollie, 84% of European consumers are more likely to return to a site after a good experience and 82% are more likely to make a repeat purchase if support is available in their own language. 

These figures show just how important it is that customers receive timely and personalized service when making a purchase, and that they feel like a priority when they reach out for help. 

Adding AI agents to existing support teams helps improve the overall customer service provided, and gives the added flexibility of answering responses in multiple languages. This helps further boost the CSAT score. 

It’s a win-win situation: customers walk away feeling satisfied with their experience and are more likely to repurchase, resulting in higher revenues and brand reputation for the e-commerce company.  

Read how The Social Hub increased their CSAT score by 15% thanks to their Neople Taylor. 

Greater brand consistency 

Many e-commerce companies worry that their human support agents may go off-script and misrepresent the brand, especially when dealing with unhappy customers. 

With AI agents that’s no longer an issue. A Neople can be trained to interact with customers using language and a tone of voice that is consistent with the brand’s unique personality and values. Its approach to problem-solving can also be customized by the e-commerce company during onboarding. 

This helps build trust with customers, avoids potentially risky customer interactions, and also protects the brand’s style.  

Continuous improvement 

While AI agents are helping customers, they are also collecting valuable data to help shape future interactions, adapt their problem-solving logic, and ultimately continuously improve customer satisfaction over time.

However, it is also very important that whichever AI agent you use is compliant with the latest privacy and security regulations, including the GDPR. 

At Neople, we take careful handling of personal data very seriously. The value of the data collected by a Neople is that it simply makes it far easier for businesses to use learnings from customer interactions for future improvements.

Why Neople is the right AI agent for you

Work besties, productivity partners, support superstars— Neople are much more than AI assistants. We onboard each Neople based on your team’s unique needs, training them on your company data, brand, and tooling so your Neople is an A-player from day one. 

We also continuously fine-tune your Neople’s knowledge, skill, and overall performance throughout their time working in your team. We’ll handle your new employee’s performance, so your team can focus on your customers.

Neople integrate into your existing workstreams and messaging tools - from Slack to Zendesk and Trengo. Not only do they seamlessly fit with an e-commerce team from an employee side, but they operate as highly effective brand representatives for customers. 

Our Neople don’t need time off or holidays and can be available to customers and fellow support staff 24/7. Not only that, but we can generate hundreds of responses in just minutes which keeps customers happier and prevents system back-logs.

Ready to take the first step?

At Neople, we’re confident that hiring a Neople to join your customer support team will bring a range of benefits - from cost savings to increased productivity to better customer experiences - that far outweigh its costs.  

Ready for a new digital co-worker to join your customer service team? Book a free demo, in just 30 minutes we’ll show you how your Neople can integrate with your team and improve customer satisfaction.