With its constant technological improvements, artificial intelligence (AI) can play a fundamental role in all aspects of your business, customer service in particular, where the system is being completely redefined. In fact, there is a marked increase in the use of AI in the customer service domain.

A Salesforce study revealed that 24% of service organizations are already using AI, and 34% plan to use it within the next year and a half. Experts project to witness a 143% increase in the use of AI-powered customer service over the next 18 months.

Today, to create a positive customer experience, organizations must serve and understand their customers. In this sense, it is necessary to know their behaviors, their preferences, their frustrations, their expectations, and understand their needs. It involves discovering how they perceive your service and identifying what your next challenges and opportunities will be to improve their experience. According to data obtained by Microsoft in its “Global State of Customer Service” report, 90% of those surveyed indicate that customer service is important to choose a brand and to continue purchasing its products or services.

For this reason, having a 360° view of the customers that provides the opportunity to fully personalize the experience of each user will allow building solid experiences, increasing loyalty and commitment to the brand.

All this will strengthen the relationship with the client, which in turn will translate into income and greater profitability for the company.
Therefore, each interaction with the client represents a new opportunity for growth. The key is to take advantage of the contact to listen and define each profile. This will enable us to count on the necessary information to respond to their problems and satisfy their needs effectively and efficiently.

According to the analysis offered by Microsoft, 58% of surveyed customers have abandoned a business relationship with a business as a result of poor service received.

A host of factors, such as the lack of knowledge and experience of the agent or the inability to solve a problem during the first interaction, contribute to weakening and degrading the customer experience.

In this blog, we will discuss how artificial intelligence helps to optimize customer service and what its benefits are so that you can incorporate this technology at a business level. Let’s get started!

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a set of systems or machines whose combination of algorithms allows them to simulate human intelligence processes. In this way, they are capable of making decisions, solving problems, and are carriers of another series of peculiarities.

In short, AI must have certain qualities that are essential requirements for its use in different industries. Those include:

Currently, many entities are responsible for investigating the broad field of application of AI, as it is a handy tool in effective problem solving, task automation, analysis, and information management, in many businesses and industries.

What is the Role of AI in Customer Service?

Talking about business, it is not strange to think about all the applications that AI has and the importance that falls on the customer experience. This is when it is convenient to worry about a 24/7 automatic service that allows immediate and personalized demands to be met in real-time.

Based on algorithms, there are endless systems capable of emulating human behavior through conversations, offers, and immediate solutions for the client.

Connected customers typically expect an omnichannel approach (email, direct messaging, voice calls, social media, mobile apps, websites), enabling online self-service access.

Despite this, on many occasions, users expect to make contact with a human agent when the problem becomes complex and confusing, whether when it comes to solving technical problems or acquiring a new product.

With this transformation to digital platforms, companies seek to achieve greater efficiency and competitiveness in current markets, thus consolidating an appreciable value within business management.

Insecurity, on the other hand, corresponds to an open field for companies to grow in the digital age, and understanding the entire environment is essential for sales managers. Customers want solutions to solve problems.

For AI machine learning to be carried out satisfactorily, it is necessary to have good data management sources, which include privacy and security, and whose management strategy must be defined from the beginning.

But, it does not end here!

Benefits of AI in Customer Service

Here’s a handy list to enlighten you on the ways how AI can be so beneficial with a handful of examples of AI in customer service.

     1. 24/7 Uninterrupted Customer Service

One of the biggest benefits of AI in customer service is that it is not constrained by scheduling issues, sick leave, or vacations. This allows customers to be provided with uninterrupted service around the clock throughout the year through AI chatbots.

Whenever they have a problem, your customers can interact with an AI bot and solve it in an instant.

In addition, AI customer service has the ability to process natural language and understand the nuances of human interactions. This allows you to quickly filter support requests to understand what each customer needs at that specific time.

In this way, even in situations where human intervention is necessary, an AI bot directs the customer to the appropriate department (sales, technical support, or other). This allows for fast scaling.

The AI also provides agents with all the necessary information about the customer and their past interactions. AI customer service will help your reps instantly get to the root of the problem without any unnecessary delay.

This is the level of responsiveness and uninterrupted service that helps improve the customer service experience to the next level.

A good service experience always yields higher customer satisfaction. Contemporary AI-based customer service solutions can interpret and learn the everyday language.

They understand customers when they use both formal and informal language. So, you know exactly when a customer needs to speak to a representative.

     2. Automating Repetitive Tasks

Dull, repetitive tasks can be the bane of employees’ lives. A UK health and safety consultant comments on the negative impact of repetitive tasks in the workplace.

“The impact of repetitive tasks on an employee’s mental health can be severe. Just as stress can contribute to mental health problems, extreme boredom through endless repetition of a menial task can begin to negatively affect a person’s mental state and well-being.

It can also cause the employee to be extremely unmotivated, unhappy, and desperate to leave the company, leading to hiring costs and wasted time as a new person is brought on board and given all the induction training needed to get started.

Again, creating a continual spiral of recruitment, wasted time, and increased costs.”

So, here is a list of common customer service-related repetitive tasks in your organization that could be handled by AI:

As a brand, it’s critical to consider how much time do your customer service agents spend on these tasks and where could their efforts be best directed?

     3. Empowered Customer Service Agents for Better Support

Perhaps the biggest impact of AI customer service is seen in the quality of service that human agents are providing.

First, AI gives agents instant access to customer data, giving them more context, which helps them understand the customer and their process, so they can ensure a personalized experience every time.

Instead of making the customer repeat their problem over and over again, agents can instantly provide relevant solutions. In other words, AI customer service can help them take more informed action.

AI is also capable of helping agents find solutions and answers faster and, therefore, improve your response time and resolution.

For example, modern chatbot agents are offered automatic suggestions for predefined answers to frequently asked questions.

In this way, they can select the corresponding answer and thus provide answers and resolution of problems more quickly. This is critical because responsiveness not only affects the customer experience but it’s also one of the biggest factors influencing people’s purchasing decisions.

Sprout Social conducted a study and found that people are more likely to buy products or services from a brand that offers answers.

Moreover, AI also has an indirect impact on the quality of support by diverting some queries through intelligent chatbots. Since bots can solve most basic problems, the number of tickets each human agent has to deal with is significantly reduced.

This lends them additional time to redirect their focus, attention, and energy on each client, preventing them from overworking and minimizing the burnout chances over time.

A happier, more focused agent translates to a better quality of care and a genuine desire to help their customers. This makes AI customer service a great option for a small business that may not have the budget to hire more agents.

     4. Developing Information Database to Augment the Support Experience

The data mining power of customer service with AI is another redefining factor, one of the best uses of AI in customer service for sure. Brands can collect core insights from customer ratings and behavior to provide more personalized experiences.

AI customer service makes use of every interaction with the target audience to learn new things under any circumstances. So, you gradually improve the quality of support with each chatbot interaction. It also helps gain actionable insights that can be used to optimize the support system in its totality. ‍

Such artificially intelligent customer care systems offer you dashboard displays with comprehensive information about support interactions. So, you can stay in control of the customer experience. They allow you to view and manage performance data in one place and discover meaningful insights from it.

With this data, you can personalize the flow and paths of conversations across channels and devices to create a consistent customer service experience powered by AI.

     5. Making It Easier to Find the Right Answers

AI allows you to create a centralized knowledge base where you can store and organize all the important information concerning your business.

It may include various different things, such as details about your products and services, pricing plans, and answers to other customer inquiries.

An intelligent knowledge base also allows you to easily and instantly provide the right answers to all your customer queries. Not only that, but you can also empower your customers to assist themselves with the help of an automated self-service section.

When you do this, you can also conveniently understand the context of your customer’s queries, easing them to find the answer they are looking for.

     6. Making Omnichannel Support a Reality

With the multitude of channels available to engage with customers, there is a growing need to provide a consistent omnichannel experience. In addition to marketing efforts, you should also extend the same experience to customer service.

First, customers should be able to easily engage with your brand through the channels they prefer.

Zendesk shared the results of a survey, according to which 28% of consumers agreed to have a good experience if they have multiple options for contacting customer service.

27% of the respondents also revealed that not being able to use their preferred method of contacting customer service means they have a bad experience.

At the same time, simply providing customers with the option to choose from multiple channels is not enough. They must be able to continue their interaction seamlessly when they switch to a different communication method.

For example, an inquiry that started via email should be easily completed via a phone call without causing additional inconvenience to customers.

AI customer service has made this possible by allowing all service channels to be integrated into a unified approach to improve customer service. It enables customers to enjoy a consistent support experience, regardless of the method they use.

How to Embrace What Future Holds for AI in Customer Service?

While there is a long list of use cases for AI in customer service that enhance the overall customer experience, it cannot completely replace humans. There are still complex problems that need human intervention. Keep in mind that some people prefer to talk to one person.

So instead of using AI customer service as a separate tool, you should take a unified approach and use it to optimize existing systems. AI has the power to simplify tasks and streamline certain processes to help your support agents, and that’s exactly how you should use it. In fact, you can make the most of it for your brand when you combine it with AI in marketing.

RevolveAI makes all this possible by providing you with essential AI customer service tools to optimize your omnichannel service experience. It allows you to provide automated customer service through chat and voice conversations while supporting agents to improve their response time and accuracy.

So, if you think it’s about time you set up an AI customer service system, request us a demo today and outsmart the competition with unmatched customer service.