Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in customer service for more than ten years, it has recently gained prominence in customer support and experience technology, particularly with the advent of ChatGPT and other AI-powered solutions.
Rightfully so, company owners and executives in customer service are currently fixated on learning how to leverage AI to enhance the client experience.
According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 75% of executives think AI would significantly change their companies in the next three years. Companies that are slow to embrace AI are falling behind.
Not investigating the potential benefits of AI in customer service is a disservice to both your business and your clientele.
How can I use AI to benefit my business, one may wonder? In this post, we’ll address this query and examine the advantages that this quickly developing technology can offer to both your customer service department and your business as a whole.
AI In Customer Service: What Is It?
Let’s define AI first. AI is defined by IBM as follows:
The technology that makes it possible for computers and other devices to mimic human intelligence and problem-solving abilities is known as artificial intelligence, or AI.
Artificial Intelligence is the process by which technology carries out a cognitive task that is normally associated with human minds. It is the data-driven artificial intelligence that machines demonstrate and mimic.
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve customer experience and facilitate agent workflow is known as “AI in customer service.”
assistance teams may work more productively and efficiently by utilizing AI in customer care, which also improves customer assistance.
Today’s support teams use artificial intelligence (AI) for a variety of tasks, including sentiment analysis, ticket sorting and escalation, customer behavior analysis, and agent assistance.
Let’s take a closer look at how AI may enhance the client experience.
AI Applications For Customer Service
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be applied in a wide range of customer care scenarios, and its potential to support customer service teams is always growing.
Here are five applications of AI for customer service.
Ticket Prioritization
The process of classifying, labeling, ranking, and assigning support tickets to the relevant customer support representative or group is known as triaging.
A smooth support operation relies heavily on the triaging process to make sure everything is moving in the correct direction at the appropriate time.
Through the analysis of consumer data and requests, AI software can assist you in automating this process.
After classifying the ticket, the AI can assign a priority and request that the appropriate agent investigate and respond to it. AI systems can also elevate the ticket to the appropriate individual or group.
Agent Support
When AI surfaces pertinent knowledge to support agents, it is referred to as agent assist. A connected piece of knowledge helps agents solve problems more quickly.
The days of frantically flipping between screens, sorting through fruitless searches of internal wikis, and copying and pasting data from one location to another are long gone. By integrating this data directly into the ticket, AI helps agents save time.
AI is also useful for training and onboarding. AI might, for instance, evaluate each agent’s advantages and disadvantages and gradually assign them more difficult tickets as they get expertise.
Even the learning and development department of your business can benefit from using AI by having it recommend training programs, themes, and exercises for your customer service representatives.
Addressing Client Requests Head-On
Tools for AI-based Answer Generators can assist support representatives in giving customers’ requests or questions rapid attention. All they have to do is run the clients’ questions or topics through this kind of program, and it will assess and forecast responses that are human-like.
Support representatives can now concentrate on proactive tasks like updating knowledge base articles and spend more time on more complicated problems.
As a result, fewer tickets will be handled by human agents, which should increase customer satisfaction and lead to quicker resolution of more complicated problems.
Assurance Of Quality
By examining both the customer’s questions and the agent’s answers, artificial intelligence systems can automate the quality assurance (QA) process in customer care.
AI can help your customer care staff measure quality by using the data gathered by using a rubric to assess team performance. These lessons can be included into additional instruction or onboarding enhancements.
Teams can benefit from customer insights that AI can offer, which can enhance the overall quality of the good or service. AI can identify areas for product enhancement by evaluating user inquiries; the product and engineering teams can then take appropriate action.
By prioritizing the product teams’ roadmap and backlog based on these findings, the total customer experience and happiness can be raised.
Round-The-Clock Assistance
Chatbots driven by AI enable even the tiniest teams to offer 24/7 customer service. Email answers and live chat widgets can both be configured to react to the most typical client concerns.
them may have to wait for your staff to be available if they require additional assistance, but AI can assist in resolving many simple problems and repetitive, easy-to-understand requests. In the absolute least, it may tell them when to expect to speak with a human.
As a result, your support staff will have less work to do when they get at work in the morning and will be able to address more complicated problems more quickly.
AI’s Advantages For Customer Service
AI is being embraced by businesses all over the world at a rapid rate, and software teams are creating an increasing number of solutions centered around this technology for good reason—it offers these businesses a number of benefits that they did not previously have.
Let’s examine a few advantages of implementing AI in customer support.
Reduced Expense
Employing chatbots and other AI tools is less expensive than recruiting a larger crew. Having said that, integrating AI with a human touch is the most effective way to do it.
AI isn’t taking the place of people in customer service. It need to be viewed as a tool to enhance the productivity and quality of work performed by customer service representatives.
For instance, carpenters and builders did not lose their employment when the electric drill was developed. They could now perform their duties more effectively and with greater quality. Cost savings for firms begin when processes are carried out more efficiently.
When AI completes the most common, laborious, and time-consuming activities, customer service representatives have more time to assist clients with more complicated problems that AI is unable to resolve.
Quicker Assistance
Resolution time is a critical performance indicator tracked by almost all support teams, and increasing it frequently results in higher customer satisfaction.
AI can expedite the resolution of client requests by support personnel. Customers should begin to notice quicker response times, whether AI handles a customer issue directly or an agent receives assistance from AI.
Multilingual Assistance
AI can assist teams in providing support in different languages, much like it can enable teams to provide 24/7 service. This is one of the most crucial and challenging aspects of creating a world-class support team for multinational corporations.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables AI systems to interact with clients in a variety of languages, either by using preprogrammed answers or by enabling agents to speak with clients in real time in the language of their choice.
Proactive Assistance
With the use of AI machine learning technologies, clients can receive proactive assistance before they ever ask for it by analyzing user habits and starting the process.
In order to teach the AI program to predict a customer’s behavior, patterns are analyzed and found. The consumer can then receive a recommendation from the AI tool based on its knowledge of the problem.
In addition to being quicker, proactive assistance diverts incoming tickets—tickets that otherwise would have been created—and is a potent means of satisfying customers.
Lessens The Burnout Of Agents
The most tiresome jobs that many agents may find unpleasant or infuriating are handled by AI. Having to deal with them repeatedly can lower team morale, which can result in burnout and, worse, expensive staff attrition.
AI enables agents to concentrate their time and energy on projects that align with their interests and skill set, leading to more satisfying work. Customers will receive better service from agents and, as a result, be more satisfied if employee satisfaction is raised.
In Summary
AI in customer service and experience is essential in today’s corporate environment. Consumers have higher expectations than ever and are requesting assistance at all hours of the day from all around the world.
Using AI in conjunction with a group of knowledgeable customer service representatives is essential to creating a world-class support team. The use of AI and machine learning technologies strengthens, streamlines, and equips support teams to handle any issue that arises.
Numerous support teams worldwide have benefited from Partnerhero’s AI implementation, which has improved productivity while cutting expenses.
Visit our CX solutions Database for assistance in finding AI solutions for customer service, and get in touch with us to begin a conversation about how AI might benefit your company.