AI-Driven Strategies to Reduce Customer Support Costs in 2025

Updated on June 2, 2025

Earlier this year, Zomato, a leading Indian food delivery company laid off 600 of its customer support staff, within just a year of hiring them. 

Unfortunately, they are not alone. In uncertain times, companies look at cutting costs, and quite predictably so, customer support staff are among those who get laid off quite often.

The reason for this is quite simple – in most organizations, customer support is viewed as a cost center. Unlike profit centers like sales or marketing, customer support teams doesn’t directly bring in revenue. But that mindset is outdated. Today, customer experience drives retention, and retention drives revenue.

In this article, we are going to look at actionable strategies that can not only reduce support costs, but also turning your customer support team into a strategically redesigned to be a profit center.

Understand Why Support Is No Longer a Cost Center

Most modern business acknowledge the importance of good customer experience. The use of “Customer Lifetime Value” as a North Star metric to measure business success is good testament to this evolving line of thought.

Poor customer support and experience can contribute to the downfall of businesses, no matter how big. Woolworths was a retail giant in the UK with over 800 stores at its peak. This company is now no more, and poor customer service has been identified as a leading cause of its demise.

It is important for business leaders to understand that while customer support may not bring in new customers like sales or marketing does, they drive retention. And while it may be a cost center on paper, poor customer support may directly contribute to higher churn, and lowering business income.

This change in leadership perception is vital for investments into your organizations’ customer support team. This could be strategic – should you really outsource something that’s vital to your business revenues? Or, it could be functional – how can you help your customer support team achieve more with better tools?

Ultimately though, the value of customer support is based on the ROI it offers. Higher returns (in the form of better retention) needs to go hand-in-hand with lower operational expenses. 

Achieving a lean and mean customer support team is thus quintessential.

Build a Lean, Remote-Ready Support Team

Gone are the days of massive office-based teams. Today with cloud-based tools, the truth is teams are becoming smaller and more efficient across the globe.

Lean and mean is the name of the game. 

Cloud-based technologies cut down costs of supporting customers massively. Also, because they are web-based, an office space for your support team becomes unnecessary since anybody with a phone and internet line could answer your support calls. 

Invest in a virtual number for your support line. A virtual number is a phone number that is not tied to a telephone line or a SIM card. Instead, it exists entirely online and lets businesses forward any incoming calls to one of many phones that are tagged to it. Some of the popular virtual number providers include Unitel Voice, OpenPhone, Exotel, and CallHippo.

Automate Repetitive Support Tasks with Chatbots and Voice AI

Do you feel your customer support team is overwhelmed by answering a lot of repetitive queries? Such queries can be easily automated to save on operational expenses.

Try Kommunicate’s Kompose Chatbot Builder:

A good example of this would be the Kompose Chatbot Builder. This is an easy to train chatbot builder that requires no coding skills. Upload all your email tickets as a PDF, or simply connect to your knowledge base to train the chatbot. You can also use the ‘flow builder’ feature to design the conversation flow.

A chatbot can efficiently replace most of the repetitive tasks and questions customers have for your business, thus ensuring that your customer service agents are only required to work on the high value support requests that are out of the ordinary.

While similar AI-driven tools for the call center are still emerging, there are still plenty of opportunities to bring down operational expenses here with automation.

One popular strategy is the use of virtual auto-attendants. 

A virtual auto-attendant (or simply “auto-attendant” or “virtual receptionist”) is an automated message that greets callers and can transfer their call to the right department, or take a message, or even handle multiple callers simultaneously. Popular virtual auto-attendants in the market are Unitel Voice, Grasshopper, and Nextiva and they cost less than $30 a month.

Furthermore, you can make use of Kommunicate’s Voice AI and take it to the next level by answering customer queries with a 99.9% accuracy.

That’s a saving of several thousand dollars each year on a human receptionist and even a support person.

Turn Support Interactions into Marketing Content

The average customer support agent handles anywhere between 20 to 60 tickets each day. While a large chunk of these tickets are likely to be routine requests like balance enquiry, or resetting of password, there are still a ton of requests that require personalized attention.

Such tickets are a goldmine for marketing. They help build a ton of ‘assets’ that can be repurposed for marketing activities. 

The most popular use-case is the creation of knowledge base articles. A knowledge base is a repository of all frequently asked questions that can be answered through helpful articles or videos. 

Not only does it help improve operational efficiency of your customer support team, they serve as valuable organic traffic magnets to draw in potential new customers to your website. 

Customers also tend to ask very insightful questions about your product – whether it is to satisfy a particular use-case, or to understand ways to make their process more efficient. 

These are nuggets of information that even long-time users of your product may have sometimes not realized. Your customer support team’s response to such queries may be repackaged into a newsletter and sent to your subscribers on email marketing platforms like Mailchimp.

There is a lot more you can do. 

Support requests routinely require your team members to walk the customer through video calls and screen recordings. Many times, these videos become a part of the knowledge base of the organization.
However, these walkthroughs are also brilliant marketing assets that can be used to build a library of ‘how to’ videos that can be published on YouTube. And it may not even need a lot of enhancements. You can also dub these videos with AI voiceovers and make them YouTube-ready at minimal cost.

Use Analytics to Maximize Customer Support ROI

Customer support remains a cost center only as long as you do not realize the potential value you derive from this activity. Investing in analytics can help turn this around. 

Studying metrics like First Contact Resolution (FCR), Average Handle Time (AHT), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) can help understand how efficient your team is with regards to resolving customer complaints. 

Target high FCR and CSAT scores while bringing down AHT to achieve optimal performance levels of your team.

In addition to this, it is important to tie in your customer support with the overall customer experience. Meticulously track your Net Promoter Scores (NPS). This tells you how happy your customers have been on a weekly or monthly basis. 

A drop in score calls for an immediate investigation into the causes behind it. Rectifying issues, no matter how minor, early on can go a long way in ensuring happy customers, which translates directly into higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) as well as higher Lifetime Value (LTV).

Streamline Support with Omnichannel Integration

Do you have separate teams to handle your email and call support? This may be contributing to a bloated OpEx. 

It’s 2025 and you really do not need separate teams handling these various channels. Modern teams invest in omnichannel integration that can tie in all your different support functions under a common umbrella. In addition to making your team members more productive, this is also a better experience for the customer.

Here is a common inefficiency observed in customer support workflows – a customer calls in support and goes to length explaining the problem that they are facing. The support member is unable to identify the issue and asks the user to send a screenshot of the problem they are facing. 

Now when the customer sends in a screenshot, it reaches the email support team who do not have context of the issue. This leads to unnecessary frustration and misdirected anger that could be easily avoided with better internal workflows and omnichannel integration of your support requests.

Future-Proof Your Customer Support Strategy

The different functions in your organization do not operate in a silo. A poor product can increase customer service requests while a great product can reduce them. Similarly, an untrained support team can make the job of after-sales difficult making subscription renewals a challenge. 

As a business leader, it is important to identify the factors that link the success of these different teams and not view them as disjoint entities. While reducing operational expense is a critical need, especially during times when the cost of capital is high, it is still important to recognize the utility that your customer support teams bring. 

The best way to optimize your customer support function is not by shrinking the team size. Instead, it is through better integration and automation. This is the only way to improve productivity, efficiency, and ROI of these business investments.

Ready to Lower Support Costs and Deliver World-Class Support? Start automating with Kommunicate. Build no-code AI chatbots, integrate support channels, and save on operational costs, without sacrificing CX. Book a Demo Now!