Remember the days when customer service was all about resolving customer queries? Today, it has gone beyond that.
The digital revolution has transformed how businesses interact with their customers, raising the bar for customer expectations.
You will be amazed to know more than 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase the product or service again from the same company.
Thus, the need to build a strong customer service culture has become indispensable. However, there is always a rift between providing excellent customer service and what customers expect.
Can we bridge this gap? Yes.
Using AI in customer service helps you identify patterns and common issues that are not immediately evident to human agents. Moreover, AI-powered chatbots provide customers with a quick, personalized, and seamless user experience.
In this blog, we will understand how to harness the power of AI to improve your customer service and support. So, let’s get started!
What is AI in Customer Service?
AI in customer service facilitates handling routine inquiries promptly and freeing up human customer support agents.
Leveraging this technology makes the agents’ workflow seamless by automating the aspects of customer support.
One of the most common ways of using AI in customer service is through AI-powered chatbots. Using these tools across various channels improves the customer service experience by providing quick answers to customer inquiries and eliminating wait times.
Furthermore, AI chatbots offer multi-lingual support, an excellent feature for worldwide businesses.
Beyond answering common questions, these chatbots can:
- Identify the user’s intent to determine the customer’s desired goal and extract the relevant data
- Personalize each interaction
- Memorize user requests and store helpful information
- Help new agents onboard and guide them through the training process
The usage of artificial intelligence in customer service is endless, and the rewards are indeed exceptional!
Why AI in Customer Service Has Become Indespensable?
AI powered customer service can help your team and facilitate your business operations in numerous ways. Here are some of the benefits of AI in customer service:
1. Improved efficiency and productivity
AI agents offer instant support to customers without involving a human. It can handle routine inquiries, enabling agents to focus on complex activities.
Top AI chatbots offer quick resolution and efficient use of human resources. Thus, if you want to streamline various customer service tasks and improve productivity, you must implement an AI-powered ticketing system that reduces the number of tickets for human agents and enables faster resolution times.
2. Handle large volumes of data
AI can handle massive amounts of data, such as customer inquiries, survey responses, customer preferences, and behavior, and identify trends to predict users’ intent and suggest actions. You can analyze this data faster and more efficiently than a human can.
3. Personalized experience
AI uses real-time customer data such as name, location, account type, and preferred language. Furthermore, it uses predictive analytics and historical conversations to provide customers with tailored solutions and improve their experience.
4. 24/7 support
Here comes the trump card: AI-powered chatbots can provide round-the-clock support. This means that your customers can get assistance immediately without having to wait.
5. Reduce cost
Using customer support AI chatbots is incredibly helpful and cuts down support-related costs. By automating responses and handling an unlimited number of support requests, AI chatbots reduce the need to hire human resources for customer services, as they do most of the work.
6. Scalability
AI chatbots can handle large volumes of queries at once. This feature can be advantageous, especially for businesses expecting rapid growth in customer base in the near future.
The Role of AI in Customer Service
Before using integrated AI customer service solutions, businesses must evaluate their specific needs and desired outcomes.
By identifying these aspects, AI implementation will better align with the overall customer service strategy. Once you know your requirements, you can deliver higher customer satisfaction with these AI chatbots, further increasing your customer value.
Let’s straightaway jump into the top 8 ways illustrating how to use AI in customer service:
1. AI-powered chatbot
AI chatbots use machine learning to offer natural and personalized answers. They can handle basic customer queries, understand and respond to unstructured requests, provide instant responses, process payments, and guide users through website navigation.
With advancements in natural language processing (NLP), various advanced chatbots are available in the market that can access relevant customer data and provide more personalized and accurate responses.
This tool redirects the most common questions to FAQ chatbots and other self-service tools, which reduces your call inflow, ensures faster query resolution, and improves the customer journey.
This is how you can use the artificial intelligence customer service chatbot:
Step1: Identify your goals and use cases
Step 2: Opt for an AI chatbot that integrates well with your existing tools
Step 3: Customize your bot to tailor conversations based on the customer’s previous interactions, preferences, and purchase history
Step 4: Ensure seamless escalation of complex or sensitive issues to human customer support agents
Step 5: Implement continuous learning and adaptation
2. Predictive analytics
AI uses vast amounts of customer data to predict customer requirements, behavioral needs, and potential problems before they arise. This aids companies in addressing potential customer issues, optimizing resource allocation, personalizing customer interactions, and offering timely solutions.
This is how you can leverage predictive analytics techniques to forecast future trends, patterns, and behaviors:
Step 1: Define the problem
Step 2: Collect historical data on customer interactions, sales, and feedback
Step 3: Use AI tools to carry out the data analysis necessary for making predictions
Step 4: Compare the predictions with the actual results and feed the data back into the AI and machine learning algorithm to improve the outcomes
3. Sentiment analysis
AI has removed all the guesswork from customer sentiment analysis. These tools use NLP and machine learning to monitor and analyze customer feedback, reviews, and social media platforms to gain insights into customer satisfaction levels and other areas needing improvement.
These insights help businesses provide personalized experiences based on customer preferences.
This is how you can use AI for customer sentiment analysis:
Step 1: Analyze what customers are saying about your brand on different social media networking sites
Step 2: Use an all-in-one AI tool that can assess emotions conveyed in substantial text inputs, such as customer reviews or feedback
Step 3: Monitor the data (SWOT analysis) and understand what customers feel about your brand
Step 4: Prioritize things that directly impact customer experience, such as personalized output, mapping customers journey, etc
Step 5: Turn the positive areas into your strengths, work on the improvement areas, and adjust your business goals accordingly
4. Self-service portal
AI-driven self-service portals can provide immediate assistance to customers. These platforms facilitate customers’ finding answers and resolving issues on their own without directly interacting with a customer service representative. They resolve routine queries swiftly, which can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This is how you can use AI for a self-service portal:
Step 1: Find out the most frequently asked questions about your product or brand
Step 2: Search for the best AI tool that can handle repetitive tasks
Step 3: Customize the AI self-service portal as per your business needs
Step 4: Monitor the results by seeing the reduction in the calls that your agent gets now as compared to before using the AI self-service portal
5. Omni-channel AI customer support
Customers no longer use a single channel to interact with your brand- such as email, phone, live chat, social media, etc. So, how will you deploy human resources to every possible channel? Well, AI handles this for you!
AI chatbots integrate data from all channels and provide a single central place. This improves the quality of customer engagement by providing a seamless experience across diverse channels.
This is how you can use AI for omni-channel customer support:
Step 1: Monitor what channels your customers interact from
Step 2: Choose the best AI platform that integrates with all the required platforms
Step 3: Personalize customer interactions through audience segmentation
Step 4: Analyze data from different channels to tailor your marketing strategies
6. Real-time language translation
AI provides real-time translation in numerous languages for global support. Various AI chatbots and conversational tools can generate content in multiple languages.
The primary benefit of real-time language translations is that you will not need to hire multilingual staff, which can save you a lot of money.
AI can detect the customer’s language and transcribe the message before it reaches your support team.
This is how you can use AI to offer real-time language translation support:
Step 1: Identify the languages you need
Step 2: Choose a platform that provides support for the language you require
Step 3: Analyze how much customization is necessary for streamlining workflows, integrations, and branding
Step 4: Determine the total cost, including any human translation services, and consider the potential (ROI) for your business
7. AI for real-time performance analytics and feedback
Businesses use AI-powered platforms to track the effectiveness of customer service interactions.
AI algorithms can process data at unprecedented speeds, providing instant feedback to customer service agents.
This is how you can leverage AI tools for real-time performance analytics:
Step 1: Create custom dashboards
Step 2: Evaluate the interactions based on predefined metrics
Step 3: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time
Step 4: Take the necessary steps to fix the issues
8. Round-the-clock support
AI never gets tired like humans. AI chatbots automate routine inquiries, reducing the need to appoint an extensive customer service team. This automated customer service and uninterrupted support also resolve customer issues regardless of the time zone or hour.
This is how you can use AI to offer round-the-clock assistance:
Step 1: Use generative AI tools that provide 24/7 assistance
Step 2: Do careful planning to ensure that the chatbot builder you use helps you reduce the wait times, unlike traditional AI
Step 3: Keep track of the AI chatbots to ensure accuracy
Step 4: Update AI tools regularly based on the business and target audience’s requirements
Successful Examples of AI in Customer Service
Wondering how can AI help in improving customer service? This section will walk you through the real stories of some big brands that have used AI for customer support solutions.
AI and customer service have become inseparable. From chatbots handling routine inquiries to predicting customer needs, delivering valuable messages, and recommending new products, AI is reshaping the customer support landscape across every industry.
These are real-world examples showcasing how AI is not just a futuristic concept but a present-day reality. These examples will make it clear how modern businesses are streamlining their operations, boosting customer satisfaction, and staying ahead in a competitive market using AI chatbot builders-
1. Netflix: AI-Driven Content Creation
Netflix uses Machine Learning to create personalized recommendations for its viewers. Its AI system considers various factors when making suggestions, such as:
- Previously watched shows and movies
- Viewing duration
- Completion rates
- User ratings
- Preferences of similar users
- Content popularity
This approach is so successful that 80% of the content streamed on Netflix is based on its recommendation system.
2. Myntra- MyFashionGPT for Enhanced Shopping
Myntra is a leading eCommerce store for fashion and lifestyle products. The company’s latest innovation, MyFashionGPT, represents a significant leap forward in personalized online shopping. This AI-driven tool allows shoppers to use natural language queries instead of traditional keywords.
For example, users can now input open-ended questions like “Show me clothes for a beach vacation” and receive relevant recommendations for beachwear, hats, and sunglasses.
Myntra analyzed numerous factors to create a tailored shopping experience for its users:
- Uploaded images of clothes from offline wardrobes
- Purchase history on the app
- Browsing history on the platform
- The trending and most popular outfits in its store
This remarkable utilization of AI has changed how people search and shop on Myntra, broadening customer queries and enhancing product discovery.
3. Decathlon: AI Powered Digital Assistant
Decathlon is one of the largest sporting goods retailers. Like the other two brands, it has revolutionized its customer service approach by using AI.
Decathlon implemented an AI-driven chatbot across multiple platforms.
The brand strategically guided customers towards automated channels by clearly stating that AI chat responses would be provided within an hour, while email responses could take up to a day.
This approach helped streamline customer communication and reduce the burden on human agents.
Future Trends of AI in Customer Service
As AI continues to evolve, its customer service role will grow dynamically. The AI chatbot is a prominent player that improves customer service by offering prompt responses, personalized solutions, and omnichannel support.
Tools that leverage technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision can help you create customized AI chatbots without using code and connect those bots to all the other apps you use. This can tremendously enhance your workforce’s efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Integrating the power of AI-based customer support enables you to engage with customers in a human-like manner. From AI chatbots handling basic inquiries to advanced analytics predicting customer needs, AI is changing the foundation of customer support.
AI chatbots can proficiently handle repetitive tasks, leaving your team free to focus on core activities.
Ready to elevate your customer’s journey?
Vanshaj Sikri is a professional content writer, editor, and strategist for B2B SaaS, Digital Marketing, and Web3 domains. He specializes in crafting impactful blog posts to drive traffic, engagement and conversions.
