Introduction
Customer service is one of the essential operations of any business as it defines customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand image in the market. Today, customers expect faster, smarter, and personalized services regardless of their contact medium. It shifts the burden on companies as excellent customer service is now a necessity to withstand strong competitive challenges.
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The advancement in AI technologies offers efficiency and productivity across multiple departments, especially in customer service. Reports show that positive experiences with AI customer support elevate buyers’ satisfaction by up to 20%. AI customer service offers automation of common FAQs, quick turnaround time for query resolutions, and assistance to agents in providing exceptional customer experiences.
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In this blog, we will explore the benefits of AI customer service and analyze the various ways of using it. So, without further delay, let’s understand it in more detail.
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service infuses artificial intelligence technologies to enhance customer service. It can be a chatbot or a voice assistant that promptly engages with customers, resolving their common queries, and assisting agents in responding to customers much more efficiently.
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AI customer service can be leveraged in multiple ways, whether it is by engaging customers through the website, social media, or through emails. The efficiency of advanced AI technology ensures that no matter where the customer is engaging, every interaction remains aligned with the context of the conversation.  Â
What are the benefits of AI customer service?
AI has a significant impact on various operations around companies, but its advantage for improving customer experience has been phenomenal. Let’s look at some of the benefits of AI customer service for customers as well as for internal teams.
Increased productivity
AI customer service tools are not just for customer interaction. They are also efficient tools for boosting agent productivity. AI tools and applications can enable agents to respond to or resolve customer queries in a minimum turnaround time. AI can help agents research vast knowledge pages to assist customers with accurate resources.
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When integrated with agent workflow, they can automate follow-ups, send reminders, schedule meetings, organize data files, create email content, or summarize articles for quick reading.45% of customer service reps believe AI helps them resolve customer issues, while 54% find it effective for complex tickets.
Higher efficiency
A lot of work in customer service involves repetitive tasks like manually typing responses, searching through the knowledge base for technical information, locating customer details, etc. All this gets even more challenging during increased business seasons. Increased workloads with manual processes may cause errors and cost time and money.
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AI customer service approach reduces the burden on human agents as it can assist them in finding resources, summarizing contents, extracting customer data, suggesting responses, or correcting grammatical errors.
Personalized interaction
One of the significant advantages of AI that has emerged is its ability to personalize conversations with users. This can be an advantage for customer service to engage users and satisfy them in difficult situations. Personalization connects both parties in a conversation, and using empathy, the chances of convincing a customer increase.
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As a customer reaches the support team for resolution, AI tools like chatbots or virtual assistants can engage them to understand their query. For regular FAQs, they can assist customers without outside intervention. However, for complex issues or situations where the customer wishes to interact with a live agent, AI can connect the user to its team.
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While the agent engages with the customer, AI can provide customer details and suggest options for diplomatic responses aligned with company protocols.
Streamlined operations
AI customer service technologies efficiently organize even the most complex workflows to ensure productivity and collaboration are at the maximum level. AI can analyze customer queries, past conversations, and feedback to understand the areas that need attention and proactively attend to them. It can also highlight areas that need agent attention to set up workflows that may improve customer experience.
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It can identify common FAQs, resource articles to create, or tickets that need urgent attention.
Automation
AI customer service is known to reduce manual tasks that usually lead to unproductive hours and burnouts at critical operational needs. AI can automate follow-up, ticket routing, ticket closer, schedule reminders, and auto-draft emails to allow agents time for more creative activities.
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When agents can dedicate more time to in-person communication with customers, it can help them strengthen relationships.
Proactive service approach
AI tools are available round-the-clock to attend to customers even beyond the standard business operating hours. Any common customer queries coming after working hours can be resolved by AI. However, any complex query needing human intervention can be tagged to be resolved immediately when human agents are available.
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Drawing on customer data, purchase history, and saved preferences, AI tools for customer service can proactively connect with customers to remind them to book maintenance appointments, check on restocked products, or renew their subscriptions before expiry.
6 ways of using AI customer service
Here are the top ways of using AI customer service to improve customer experience;
24/7 support
Allow an AI Chatbot to respond to any query beyond business hours. They can acknowledge and resolve common FAQs that do not require human intervention. For example, if a customer requests to troubleshoot a device, the chatbot can share the resources. It may resolve half of the queries that can be automated using AI.
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However, for queries that may require specialist attention, the AI can set the priority and schedule it so that it can be handled as soon as the agents are available in the next working hours. Â
Agent assistance
AI is known to augment agent performance by assisting them in task management under various circumstances. They are like a personal assistant who always has your back.
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While an agent is handling a conversation, AI can suggest pre-defined responses, correct grammatical errors, summarize past conversations, and quickly search the knowledge resources required for resolving the customer query. Often, ticket resolutions face unexpected setbacks due to a lack of knowledge by the agent or a lack of past conversation data. But, with AI, ticket resolutions can be achieved faster, leading to higher chances of customer satisfaction.
Respond to customers
Customer support can be overwhelming, especially during the busiest working season. It can overburden agents and compromise the quality of the conversation.
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Often, customers complain of a longer turnaround time in resolving queries. However, with AI customer service, support teams can overcome such challenges.
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AI can respond to customers when they send a query, ensuring them that their query is looked after. They can follow up with the customer, mentioning the status of their ticket and informing them of the expected deadline. In addition, advanced AI chatbots can interact with customers with human-like fluency in multiple languages. It reduces the burden on human agents and improves the quality of their tasks.
QA support
AI tools can improve the quality of customer support operations. They can analyze customer feedback and categorize them specifically to understand the quality of the response they received. In addition, by analyzing agent responses, AI can report on the agent’s performance.
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By setting up a pre-defined quality standard, AI is trained to assist the agents in reaching the expected quality. It also allows the AI to train the agents to improve their performance by setting them lessons.
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Customer feedback is a great way to understand product quality, design, and ease of use. AI customer service tools, which have access to customer queries and feedback and help analyze different aspects of the product, will allow for further product development.
Smart ticket routing
An efficient ticket routing system is essential for a good customer experience. It involves categorizing, labeling, prioritizing, or routing tickets to specific teams so that each customer query can be handled efficiently. An AI tool can analyze the customer query to assign it to specific teams and follow up on the progress.
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Criteria that can define ticket routing depend upon specific businesses. However, common types may include product type, agreement type, specialist requirement, support channel, etc., to name a few.
Agent training
AI customer support tools can assist in training agents to improve their quality and productivity. For that, AI can analyze the agent performance based on key quality and compliance metrics such as turnaround time, customer satisfaction rate, number of queries handled, quality of the responses, empathy, steps involved in resolving the query, etc.
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AI can score each agent according to pre-defined criteria and set a target. It can provide real-time data to support supervisors in organizing training activities and offer guidance while the agent handles customer queries.
Factors to consider while implementing AI customer service
Ushering in AI workflows is a huge change for any organization and may require large-scale adoption by the workforce. A skillful handling of the change will ensure the successful implementation of AI systems and the optimum result. Some factors to consider while implementing AI customer service are;
Workforce adoption
AI presents a skill gap for a large workforce. You may introduce them to AI technology through regular activities and training. A large section of our workforce believes that large-scale AI adoption can replace their jobs, which is not the case in most scenarios. Companies going through AI transformation should convey to their teams how AI may improve their productivity and efficiency in performing their tasks.
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Live agents are an integral part of customer service that adds a human touch to users and can be communicated to the teams for the successful adoption of the technology. As the team is less apprehensive of the technology, they can better adapt to using it in their operations, ensuring smart productivity.
Security and reliability
AI technologies are advancing rapidly in our lives and workplaces. However, security and reliability remain a major issue in using AI tools. Since AI is entrusted with customer data, any security concerns must not be overlooked.
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Schedules should be maintained to regularly check security around customer data with designated teams consistently monitoring them. If you have recently implemented AI adoption, it is essential to monitor its adoption consistently, accuracy, and understanding of industry-specific knowledge. AI adoption requires monitoring and constantly reviewing its operations.
Customer feedback is a source for understanding the quality of AI tools.
Budget and resources
AI implementation is a costly affair and should be thought out prior. It involves not only the implementation but also regular maintenance and training of the workforce responsible for using it. Compromise on the maintenance and efficient training on its usage may pose a threat to customer data, and it should be planned accordingly.
Conclusion
Drawing from the advancements in AI technology, it is easy to forecast for even more enlightening service in customer service.
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The future of customer service is looking even better with predictive AI, from proactive support to hyper-personalization. AI solutions are one of the optimal ways to enhance customer relationships and ensure their growth among companies.
Frequently Asked Questions
• No human touch: There is a problem with how to include people while at the same time automating some processes as much as possible.
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Concerns of data privacy: Policies dealing with customer information addenda must meet stringent security standards.
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• Challenges in implementations: The implementation of AI technologies is normally challenging in a stable system without compromising it.
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• Workforce training and adoption: One is to train such systems adequately, and the other is to achieve acceptable usage from the end-users.
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Ethical operations: Two crucial tasks are in front of researchers: first is to deal with bias, and second is to make artificial intelligence ethical.
With the intention to adopt AI in Customer Services, the first steps that should be followed are the following: First, define the use cases; second, choose a good AI provider; third, incorporate training for employees; fourth, go through a trial phase; fifth, review and evolve based on the results got.
- • Personalize product recommendations: Thus, AI can be used to make personalized product, service, and solution recommendations to customers.
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• Customized messaging: AI can communicate targeted messages and deals with customers in regards with their past actions and exposures to certain products.
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• Prompt support: It is possible to predict the customers’ needs with the help of AI, which might help to provide them with support before they have problems.
Nisha Sneha
Nisha Sneha is a passionate content writer with 5 years of experience creating impactful content for SAAS products, new-age technologies, and software applications. Currently, she is contributing to Kenyt.AI by crafting engaging content for its readers. Creating captivating content that provides accurate information about the latest advancements in science and technology has been at the core of her creativity.
In addition to writing, she enjoys gardening, reading, and swimming as hobbies.
