For customer service professionals, every day is full of challenges, trying to meet customer demands. What has changed in the past few years is that the expectations of customers have increased, making it more difficult to keep up with them.
Customer service teams are constantly trying to figure out how to do more with less. How to keep customers satisfied without going overboard? The answer might lie in using AI for customer service.
While customer service has been using predictive AI for a while now, generative AI is new and is showing huge possibilities. In this scenario, service professionals and customers alike are curious about how AI will drive their experience.
You also need to know how AI can help improve customer experience and what services you can expect AI to provide.
In this blog, we will touch upon what exactly AI can do in customer service and what are its benefits.
How Does AI in Customer Service Looks Like
You can use AI in multiple ways to enhance your customer experience. One simple way to do it is to use an AI-powered chatbot and integrate it across channels.
This bot can do a lot of things to streamline your customer experience. It can greet customers, answer common queries, guide them through common business processes, or route the most complex queries to the right person.
From the customer’s perspective, it’s like a boon. Say, a customer wants to return a product. In the absence of AI, it connects with the customer care representative in an online chat and might have to spend hours before completing the task.
But with AI, things are super fast and super smooth. It’s like having a customer service virtual assistant who not only possesses the required knowledge about your business but also knows what exactly you want as a customer.
Things like providing a tracking number, email, or purchase details are no longer required with AI. It already has that information and knows what to do. Just tell it what you want and it will be done smoothly and quickly.
How AI Can Help Improve Customer Service
Here are a few ways in which AI can help you improve your customer service and enable teams to operate more efficiently and effectively.
#1. Help Manage Higher Volumes of Customer Service Requests at Length
Using AI for customer service can help you manage a large volume of service requests at length. That way, you can satisfy your customers and build loyalty.
For example, AI tools can give agents proper insight into service requests so that they become more prepared to handle them effectively. AI can mark a service request by intent (the type of service), sentiment (positive or negative), and language. This gives the agents the right insight into the problem and what steps they need to take to solve it.
Businesses can deploy AI chatbots across channels like email, social media, messaging apps, etc. to scale their support across channels. They can also use AI bots to help support teams manage growing volumes easily.
#2. Provide Fast, 24/7 Support
Today’s customers are different. They expect fast, convenient, 24/7 service. In fact, studies show that 72% of customers say that they will stay loyal to a company providing fast services. So, providing fast services is a verified way to build brand loyalty, and who wouldn’t want that?
Here too AI comes to the rescue. You can use conversational AI to provide customers with human-like conversations, particularly when agents are off duty like late nights or holidays. Bots can answer common queries as effectively as humans and thus can free human agents who can focus on more complex issues.
In addition to providing 24/7 support, AI can also deliver prompt and elaborate replies. There can be pre-defined responses to queries that AI tools can deliver after gauging the context of the conversation.
Using generative AI, you can expect to deliver your customers detailed answers to queries based on a few terms. You can also integrate an AI text-to-speech converter like the Murf text to speech software to give your customers a flawless experience. That way, they will be able to listen to the answers as is the case with human agents.
Thus services become fast, decreasing handling time and waiting time.
#3. Improve Productivity and Efficiency
AI tools can increase the productivity and efficiency of agents. How? While AI-powered chatbots handle service requests like a pro and automated processes handle repetitive tasks, human agents can focus their time and attention on more complex issues and high-value tasks.
Some AI tools come with intelligent routing and triage features. First, the AI tool analyzes incoming conversations and gauges the intent, sentiment, and language of the customers. Next, the task is assigned to some agent by the tool itself.
Skills-based routing takes things one step further and the AI tool assigns the task to agents based on their expertise, availability, conversation priority, and more.
All these increase routing accuracy while decreasing ticket escalations and are a great way to enhance productivity and efficiency in customer service.
#4. Deliver Personalized Interactions
AI tools track and understand the history and unique preferences of each customer, thus acting like a personal concierge to them. Using AI, agents can understand their customers better.
Many businesses are already using AI tools to help their customer service agents deliver personalized messages, which is preferred by the customers. The tools are not replacing humans. Rather, it’s a collaboration between humans and AI to deliver personalized messages and tailored customer service to each customer.
#5. Predict and Prevent
AI-powered tools collect unstructured data, like customer sentiment, that agents can analyze and see who is at high churn risk and give them immediate attention. AI algorithms use predictive analysis along with NLP (Natural Language Processing) to analyze thousands of different keywords from various customers and can accurately predict case escalation or customer churn. You can use these analyses from the AI tools to prevent such occurrences.
Note: If you’re not sure what keywords are, the term emerges from the field of SEO, meaning specific terms used by customers on the search engine to look for specific items.
Go through this glossary for more such SEO terms.
Other Advantages
There can be a hundred different uses and benefits of AI tools and integrating them into different channels of your business. One thing is for sure. They surely do improve customer experience to a large extent.
Apart from what is mentioned above, AI can also benefit customer service in the following ways:
Onboard Customer Service teams faster by providing new hires with real-time tips and feedback while navigating their training sessions.
Anticipate needs and potential issues with customers. AI tools analyze a large volume of data from customers, like order history, behaviors, and preferences to anticipate customer needs and identify potential problems, which can help you in customer retention.
Reduce operational costs. Integrating AI into your customer service operations helps you reduce costs by automating low-value tasks, and eliminating the need for extra tools or staff.
Drive long-term business growth. AI helps you attend to customers' needs on time, allocate resources effectively, and enhance customer satisfaction, thus boosting customer retention and driving long-term business growth.
Final Words
AI is here to stay and is slowly but surely making its way into different facets of businesses. For customer service, AI has some really magic solutions that are effective and help satisfy customers to a large extent.
edge CRM understands the benefits AI can have. Thus, we have various functionalities harnessing the power of AI to revolutionize customer service provided by a salesperson.
Discussed above are some of the more common advantages of integrating AI into your customer service operations. In reality, the benefits of using AI in customer service extend far beyond what is mentioned. Hopefully, the future will make the best use of AI and we’ll see a healthy collaboration between humans and AI to simplify the tasks and help businesses grow in their intended direction.
