AI has been present in customer service for well over a decade, but especially with recent advancements in AI-powered solutions and the rapid development of tools like ChatGPT, AI in customer service is now at the forefront of customer support and experience technology.
Business owners and customer service leaders are currently hyper-focused on discovering how to use AI to improve their customer experience–and rightfully so.
A Harvard Business Review survey found that 75% of executives believe AI will substantially transform their companies within three years. Businesses resisting the adoption of AI are putting themselves behind.
It’s a disservice to your company and your customers to not explore the benefits of AI in customer service.
You might ask yourself: How can I use AI to help my business? We’ll answer this question in this article and explore the positive impact this rapidly growing technology can bring to your customer support team and your entire company.
First, let’s define AI. IBM defines AI as the following:
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human intelligence and problem-solving capabilities.
AI is the process of technology performing some form of cognitive function that we typically associate with human minds. It is the intelligence displayed and simulated by machines, based on data.
AI in customer service refers to the use of artificial intelligence systems to enhance the customer experience and aid the agent workflow.
Using AI in customer service enables support teams to work more efficiently (and therefore be more productive) and provide better customer support.
Support teams today are using AI to analyze customer behavior, automatically sort and escalate tickets, assist agents in answering questions, conduct sentiment analysis, and much more.
Let’s look closer at how to use AI to improve the customer experience.
There are many ways to use AI in customer service and the opportunities for this technology to help customer service teams are constantly evolving.
Here are 5 ways to use AI in customer service.
Triaging refers to categorizing, tagging, prioritizing, and routing support tickets to the appropriate customer service agent or team.
The triaging process is a critical part of a well-oiled support operation, as it helps ensure everything is flowing in the right direction at the right time.
AI software can help you automate this process by analyzing customer data and inquiries. For streamlined customer interactions, integrating SMS for customer service allows teams to reach customers quickly and efficiently, enhancing responsiveness and satisfaction.
Some of the attributes AI can help identify for triaging tickets include:
Once the ticket is categorized, the AI can prioritize it and ask the right agent to check on and answer it. AI tools can also escalate the ticket to the right person or team.
Agent assist refers to AI surfacing relevant knowledge to support agents. By presenting related information, agents can solve issues faster.
Gone are the days of sifting through failed searches of internal wikis, furiously switching between screens, and copying and pasting information from place to another. AI saves agents time by bringing this information directly into the ticket.
AI can also help with onboarding and training. For example, AI could analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each agent and progressively send them more complex tickets as they gain more experience.
You can even leverage AI to assist your company’s Learning and Development team by suggesting training courses, topics, and activities for your customer support team.
AI-based Answer Generator tools can help support agents promptly respond to customer's requests or queries. All they need is to pass the topic or queries of customers through such a tool, they will analyze and predict human-like answers.
This enables support agents to spend more time on more complex issues and focus on proactive work like updating knowledge base articles.
This means a decrease in ticket volume handled by human agents, which can also result in faster resolution times and improved customer satisfaction while more complex issues get quicker attention.
Artificial intelligence systems can automate the QA process in customer support by analyzing both the agent’s responses and the customer’s inquiries.
Using a rubric to measure your customer support team’s success gives AI the information needed to assist your support team in measuring quality. These learnings can be injected into further training or onboarding improvements.
AI can also provide teams with customer insights that can help improve the overall product or service. By analyzing customer inquiries, AI can suggest areas for improvement in the product that product and engineering teams can then take action on.
These insights can be used to prioritize the product teams roadmap and backlog, improving the overall customer experience and customer satisfaction.
AI-powered chatbots allow even the smallest teams to provide round-the-clock customer support. Live chat widgets can be programmed to respond to the most common customer issues, and email responses can be set up for the same.
While customers may have to wait for your team to come online if they need further help, AI can help solve a lot of the low-hanging fruit like easier issues and frequent, tedious requests–or, at the very least, notify the customer about when exactly they can expect to speak to a human.
This gives your support team less of a backlog to deal with when they start work in the morning and enables them to solve more complex issues faster.
Businesses around the world are adopting AI at a rapid pace, and software teams are building more and more tools around this technology for good reason: it brings companies a lot of advantages they didn’t have before.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of using AI in customer service.
Using AI tools like chatbots saves costs compared to hiring a bigger team. With that being said, the winning strategy for adopting AI is to combine it with a human touch.
AI isn’t replacing humans in customer support. It should be seen as a way to help customer support agents do their jobs better and be more productive.
For example, when the electric drill was invented, builders and carpenters didn’t lose their jobs. They were enabled to do their jobs better and more efficiently. Doing things more efficiently is where businesses start to see cost savings.
With AI solving the most frequent, time-consuming, and tedious tasks, customer support agents can use that time to help customers who have more complex issues that AI can’t solve.
Pretty much every support team has resolution time as a key metric they track, and improving this often has a direct correlation to improved customer satisfaction.
AI can help support teams resolve customer inquiries much faster. Whether through AI directly handling a customer issue, or an agent being assisted by AI, customers will start to see faster resolution times.
Similar to enabling teams to offer 24/7 support, AI can help teams provide support in multiple languages. For global companies, this is one of the most important and difficult parts of building a world-class support team.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) powers AI systems to engage with customers in multiple languages, whether through programmed responses or by helping agents communicate in real time with customers in their preferred language.
AI machine learning tools can analyze user patterns and initiate a proactive customer support experience, effectively helping customers before they even ask for help.
This works by analyzing and identifying patterns, and training the AI software to predict a customer’s behavior. Then, the AI tool can send the customer a suggestion based on what it knows about the issue.
Proactive support is not only faster support, it deflects incoming tickets (tickets that would have been created without it) and this is a powerful way to delight costumers.
AI handles the most tedious tasks that many agents might find annoying or frustrating. Dealing with these over and over can result in negative morale within the team, which can lead to burnout and even worse, employee turnover, which is costly.
With AI, agents can focus their time and efforts on tasks that match their skills and interests, making their jobs more fulfilling. With improved employee satisfaction, customers will get stronger service from agents and in turn your customers will be more satisfied.
AI in customer support and experience is a must-have in today’s business world. Customers are seeking help from various parts of the world at all times of day, and their expectations are higher than ever.
Pairing AI with a team of skilled customer support agents is a critical part of building a world-class support team. Leveraging AI and machine learning tools makes support teams that much stronger, more efficient, and ready to tackle any problem that comes their way.
Partnerhero has implemented AI for numerous support teams around the world, helping them do their jobs better while saving on costs.
For help researching AI tools for customer service, head over to our CX Tools Database, and reach out to us to start a discussion on how AI can help your business.
