Every single customer interaction is an opportunity to create a valuable connection with loyal customers. However, creating a perfect customer experience every time can be a challenging task. Customers expect real-time answers to their queries which mean it is necessary to offer services that are more efficient, effective, personalized, quick and real-time.
Artificial Intelligence makes all this possible as it seamlessly blends within the customer journey and helps in creating an effective & efficient customer service. Before we move into the blog post, let’s see a few customer service challenges that businesses need to overcome and how AI can help in addressing them.
Some of the Customer service challenges include:
- Limited sources for the customer to reach
- Delayed response time
- Limited or NO Expertise available
- Multiple or Bulk requests to handle by the customer service agents
- 24/7 availability of customer agents for response
Customer satisfaction is the key to increase the customer base and considering today’s informed and intelligent customers, it’s not easy to satisfy them. Understanding customer needs and responding to them accordingly is a necessity for businesses today.
Artificial Intelligence helps in automating the customer engagement processes and thereby, allowing businesses to provide enhanced customer service.
Some of the salient features of implementing AI in customer service include:
AI allows brands to be available in real-time
From a research study, it seems 75% customers believe that it takes too long to reach a human agent in real-time. Through Conversational bots or Chatbots or by implementing Natural Language Interface, brands can easily communicate with customers and stay connected 24×7.
According to a report by Jay Baer, 32% customers look for response within 30 minutes on various social media channels and 57% customers expect similar kind of response on any time of a day and on weekends as well.
Conversational bots or Chatbots are built using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, which helps them in understanding customer intent with fairly good accuracy and thereafter provide relevant responses. Using Chatbots will not only allow brands to be available 24×7, but also helps in providing valuable information to the customers’ just-in-time.
AI-based self-help customer service
In most cases, it was observed that customers prefer self-help as opposed to waiting for answers/ solutions to their problems from the brands. Self-service is faster, customers need not wait to resolve their issues. Neither they have to be dependent on a customer service agent to respond nor they need to wait in long queues. Self- help service will allow less errors to be made, sometimes highly trained agents can make mistakes but customers themselves will be careful while filling their information or resolving their query. Thus, Artificial Intelligence powered tools like virtual agents, automated forms, applications implementing natural language interface and Chatbots will create more engagement, increase brand reliability and encourage error free self-help customer service.
AI personalizes customer service
Artificial Intelligence driven tools provide intelligent customer insights and when combined with Machine Learning, these insights will become an advantage for the brands to understand customer interests and offer them a more personalized service. AI helps in matching the entire information (customer choices, geo data, sources, on-site interactions etc…) with customer’s behavioral pattern and provides the exact detail.
Increase customer response through AI
Artificial Intelligence powered tools allow maximum use of data to learn more about customers and respond accordingly. When these AI tools are combined with CRM they help in generating automated reports that further help in refining the sales funnel and move the leads up. The ‘intelligence’ in AI helps in generating automated responses and suggestions to customer enquires allow customer agents to handle bulk of requests with more speed and precision.
AI helps in making Big Data accessible
AI helps in utilizing all the customer data efficiently and learn about them. When you have all the necessary customer data and you know what your customer wants, you can relate to them easily. It also helps in determining customer trends. Using AI you can integrate existing data with the new one.
The customer service operations team receives data in various formats, like audio, texts & live chats. With the help of Deep Learning in AI, we can now recognize human emotions and their tone while on calls. Using this emotional tone the calls can be re-routed to the appropriate human agents for proper query handling.
AI improves Business operations and reduces operating costs
AI helps in streamlining all the business processes by reducing repetitive tasks and speeding up the overall processes. When the business processes speed up, there is also improvement in efficiency and productivity which further leads to more profits. Using AI, businesses can handle more workflows leading to more conversions and increasing revenue. All these eventually reduce operating costs helping businesses to provide efficient and effective customer service.
Artificial Intelligence powered customer service agents are scalable and can be deployed with 24×7 access from anywhere. Further, Artificial Intelligence helps in streamlining the entire business functions, thereby improving overall productivity.
AI could offer limitless opportunities in the future, as it can simulate what humans do and with more speed and precision. Businesses can harness and channelize these opportunities towards providing efficient and effective customer service.