How to leverage customer service AI tools in your business

The more accurate and helpful the answers AI bots provide, the fewer calls and tickets contact centers receive. The most advanced chatbots harness ChatGPT alongside a “source of truth” derived from a company’s documentation –  including FAQs, user guides, product specifications, or a marketing knowledge base. In a recent report, Gartner predicted that 80% of customer service and support organizations will be applying generative AI technology to improve the customer service experience.

• For example, if a customer has a history of technical issues with a product, predictive analytics can anticipate when they might encounter a problem and provide proactive support.
• AI’s monitoring capabilities can be effective in other areas, such as in enterprise cybersecurity operations where large amounts of data need to be analyzed and understood.
• AI enables you to set up automated responses to customer requests—meaning instant replies where possible.
• The automation of customer service tasks through AI could lead to concerns about job displacement.

Pairing multilingual support automation software with your customer service solution gives the AI access to customer information that adds personalization to the conversation. This includes data like the customer’s location, the device they’re using, buying preferences, conversation history, and more. With access to the right data and customer context, bots can proactively make personalized recommendations based on a customer’s preferences, website behavior, previous conversations, and more. Rhythm Energy, a renewable energy company, uses bots to respond to customers quickly and reduce escalations to the support team. With Zendesk AI, Rhythm Energy deflected 46% more tickets and reduced escalations by 50%. 68 percent of EX professionals believe that artificial intelligence and chatbots will drive cost savings over the coming years.

Smart agent profiling

What was once a futuristic concept is now a critical component of modern business strategy. When faced with frustrated customers or a question they don’t know the answer to, customer service agents are expected to remain calm. According to Gartner research, 82% of customers who receive value during a customer service interaction are more likely to repurchase or renew, even when given the chance to switch to a competitor.

Reduce agents’ handle time with AI-assigned fields and help them resolve cases quickly, accurately, and consistently. Drive efficiency and boost agent productivity with AI-generated summaries for any work, order, or interaction. Save time by using Einstein to predict or create a summary of any issue and resolution at the end of a conversation. Empower agents to review, edit, and save these summaries to feed your knowledge base. The key advantage of AI-driven chatbots is can learn and use this gained knowledge to accurately anticipate and address customer needs independently from human interaction.

Multichannel Support

Furthermore, by leveraging generative AI, businesses can extract valuable insights from customer feedback and conversations. Call routing simply allows the customer to reach the right customer service agent. It is making the process hassle-free for customers and reducing costs for businesses. Featuring AI in the call routing tool determines the best available customer support representative depending on the call complexity, customer concern, and lifetime value. Several businesses also go for skill-based call routing which depends upon the possibility to reply to a promotion.

AI-powered tools might also create segments based on customers’ demographics, purchase history, and behavioral patterns. These profiles can help retailers understand their customer’s preferences, needs, and behaviors, which can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized recommendations. AI-powered image recognition tools can help businesses to detect and prevent fraud by identifying fake products and suspicious activity.

Ensure these objectives align with your broader business goals for a cohesive strategy. This allows businesses to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling them to make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and overall customer service improvements. These insights are crucial for businesses looking to adapt and thrive in a competitive space.

From trending topics to competitor insights, social media listening offers you actionable insights to improve your customer service across channels. AI-supported customer service helps businesses refine and scale their support functions without overwhelming agents. Intent Analytics will help you to prioritize tasks, assign them to relevant agents, and learn about the topics of conversations without even reading them. It allows you to quickly and efficiently take care of the most urgent chats without making clients wait. In fact, it starts communicating with customers and learning from its interactions from the moment you click “activate”. On top of that, it responds to visitors within the information from your existing knowledge base, so you don’t need to train the bot or set up conversation flows.

In addition to AI, a virtual assistant can also use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to better understand customer intent and develop its capabilities. We’ve compiled 50+ need-to-know customer service stats that demonstrate the growing importance of AI in customer care. Your reps can practice interacting with a “customer,” honing their responses, and getting familiar with common scenarios. When your support team faces an ever-growing number of tickets, you can leverage AI and text classification to manage requests. AI and ML-powered text classification automatically categorizes text based on past associations. If you need to talk to customer service, it typically means you have a problem.

Building effective interaction between a customer and a digital assistant at different customer touchpoints may be beyond the competence of the Customer Success team. In such cases, a new in-house support specialist or outsourced experts are involved. Businesses interested in working alongside AI can train employees to ensure they have the necessary skills and feel comfortable with new instruments. Cost savings is an important factor for businesses, and AI can help businesses to reduce manual processes and achieve cost savings. In addition, AI can also be used to qualify leads based on their behavior and likelihood of conversion. This allows businesses to prioritize their efforts and allocate resources more effectively, as they are only targeting leads that are most likely to convert.

This reduces your team’s workload and frees your agents to address high-value tasks and complex customer issues. AI bots won’t replace customer service agents—they are a tool that enhances the experiences of both businesses and consumers. Customers will always want to know they can talk to another human, especially regarding issues that benefit from a personal touch. But for the simpler questions, chatbots can get customers the answers they need faster than humanly possible.

Modern-day customers are picky and demanding, with as many as 79% claiming they wouldn’t complete their order if customer service was unresponsive. Customer service used to be limited to a phone line (or an in-person visit at your store). Now, customer experience and artificial intelligence together are empowering support teams to deliver a great experience—across digital and voice channels. Incorporating AI into customer service strategies empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences, and build lasting relationships with customers to stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

This is a great example of how artificial intelligence can help with coaching and training at scale—without requiring supervisors to personally help answer customer questions on every call with their agents. Bank of America has big plans for Erica — it looks to expand her capabilities so that she can handle more complex tasks, including identifying ways for customers to potentially save money. In this post, we cover the basics of AI for the customer experience, including its benefits, challenges, and real-life examples of how innovative companies are using it. By using the same chatbot across all of your brand’s channels, you can provide a consistent user experience every time, anywhere.

AI is also giving companies the opportunity to analyze customer data more accurately and quickly. Through these processes, companies can identify problems more accurately and provide solutions tailored to their needs, with a direct consequence on user loyalty to the brand. Another trend gaining momentum in the world of digital transformation is the use of AI for analyzing customers’ voice. This technology enables companies to analyze customer conversations to identify common problems and solve them as they arise more easily through customer satisfaction-focused interventions.

• In recent years, AI has transformed how retailers operate, interact with customers, and compete in the market.
• From trending topics to competitor insights, social media listening offers you actionable insights to improve your customer service across channels.
• AI can help customers with necessary self-service resources on every stage of their customer journey.

This will not only boost CSAT or increase sales, but it will also eventually enhance the brand reputation among the consumers around. By automating routine tasks and handing off more complex issues to human staff, AI saves customers’ time and improves their overall experience with the company. By creating an AI-powered chatbot to answer frequently asked questions with customer-specific information, your customers will be able to get answers to their questions more quickly and simply. In turn, this enables the customer support staff to focus on more complex issues and provide a better overall experience while lowering operating expenses. AI-powered customer support enables you to develop deeper insights and build a better user experience. This leads to improving online customer experience, retention rates, brand image, preventive help, and even the generation of revenue.

Read more about Key Benefits of AI-Powered Customer Service and Support here.