The world has forgotten how to wait. And this lack of patience is putting businesses under strain. Customers expect queries to get an instant response — and if a company fails to deliver, they’ll often lose the customer for good. Where has this expectation come from?
In no small part, it’s down to the use of AI in customer services. And algorithms that can respond to customers 24-7-365. If you’re yet to join the trend, we suggest you read this article, then consider your next steps.
AI in Customer Service: Why’s It Important?
Customers run into problems every day. When they do, they’ll invariably reach out to customer services to voice their concerns. “I ordered Product X last week, but it still hasn’t turned up?” “Why doesn’t Product Y work?” “Why can’t I access my account for Service Z?”
The nature of the queries can vary wildly. But the issues themselves are less of a concern. It’s how your company solves them that impacts your Customer Lifetime Value.
If you fail to resolve a complaint, if you offer an impersonal service, if you fall short of expectations in any way — you will lose out on revenues. That much is clear from a report from customer service specialists Zendesk:
- 97% of customers say lousy customer service alters their buying intentions
- 89% say a quick response to a query is vital in convincing them to buy
- 46% say bad customer service will still affect their choice two years after the fact
That’s why companies look beyond vanilla services, like phone lines and email, to serve customers. They’re leveraging text messages, self-help solutions, social media, and most of all, live chat to offer an instant response wherever, and however, a customer demands.
To do this effectively requires more than mere human-power. Genuine ‘on-demand’ customer service needs help from artificial intelligence.
But if you get it right, it can transform your business — here’s how.
5 Ways AI Can Transform Your Customer Services
There are plenty of reasons to use AI in your customer services. But the most significant benefit of all is that the technology will help boost your revenues. It does this in several distinct ways, including the following five:
1. Answer Customers Faster
Some two-thirds of consumers prefer self-service support over talking with an agent. The approach allows them to get near-instant responses both day and night. But companies can only offer this by using NLP in customer services in the form of a chatbot.
AI-powered chatbots can service thousands of queries simultaneously. In doing so, they avoid anyone ever waiting for an agent to become free.
2. Give Real-life Agents Time To Handle Complex Queries
Artificial intelligence can solve up to 80% of routine queries. That not only translates to a great customer experience. It offers agents a morale boost. In place of answering the same questions day-in, day-out, they get to tackle the job you hired them to do.
Troubleshooting more complicated issues that require specialist knowledge: the type of support your customers prize most of all.
3. Personalize Every Touchpoint
Support services can extend beyond mere troubleshooting. If you integrate your solution with other CRM systems, you can personalize everything you say.
Imagine an eCommerce store offering a warm ‘Welcome back’ message to returning customers or pre-empting a query with an instant ‘order status’ update. You could even ask first-time visitors if they’d like to ‘see your most popular items’ or ‘learn about your store.’
4. Leverage Multiple Channels
These days, customer service spans social media, live support, chatbots — and more. 95% of customers use at least three channels in any single interaction, including the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
It would take an army of agents to service omnichannel customer service. But AI lets you serve as many channels as you like, all without hiring.
5. Continually Improve Your Customer Service
Customer service can be a USP for any company, but it takes time to make it so. That said, AI is always crucial, as machine learning tracks customer interactions over time, analyzing conversations before revealing meaningful insights that improve your service.
And as your AI better understands customer sentiment, it will pick better responses, delivered in the perfect tone, to send once-frowning customers away with a smile.
Use Cases: AI in Customer Services
You can see the benefits of using AI in customer services. But in which part of the customer support experience should you deploy it?
In truth, the sky’s the limit.
You can use AI to manage omnichannel support, directing customers to the channel best-suited to their issue. Suppose your live-chat reps are all busy: AI can suggest you call to get the quickest response.
If a customer is already on the phone, AI can use past interactions to suggest what a rep should say in real-time. AI can even find appropriate upselling or cross-selling opportunities, provided they make sense given the context of the call.
Or let’s assume your team receives a high volume of email queries. In this case, you can use a tool that reads and tags emails based on the context. The solution analyzes the problem, the tone, and the customer history, before assigning a tag and a representative to get each query dealt with both effectively and quickly.
Then, there’s chatbots: the tech that most people think of when they hear about AI. Chatbots are masters at leveraging NLP in customer service: something you can learn more about in this article on the benefits of using NLP in business.
…and now, to bring the whole piece together, let’s consider how to automate your organization’s customer service.
How to Automate Customer Service?
Artificial intelligence is integral to automation.
Algorithms use training data to learn a process, then perform set tasks while continually optimizing the approach.
But it takes a specific skill-set to develop service-centric AI. How can you access such expertise? Well, there are two ways. You can go on a hiring spree to bring the right skills in-house.
Or you can outsource your AI development to a specialist team. Clients across the world outsource their AI development to DLabs.AI.
You can read how AI outsourcing works by clicking here.
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Use AI to transform your customer services function: schedule a free consultation with a DLabs.AI specialist today to find out more.
