In the past, when customer bases grew, customer service teams would scramble to hire more agents. And when peak seasons like Black Friday hit, they’d resort to hiring temporary staff as a quick fix.
However, we’re seeing more and more companies keeping their support teams lean while still getting more done by augmenting their processes with AI.
This article talks about the ways how to use AI in customer service while making sure your customers don’t get spiraled by inefficient, robotic responses.
Key takeaways:
- AI helps customer service reps through workflow automation, chatbots, and self-service portals that deliver faster support to meet rising expectations.
- Proactive support, where every individual gets personalized attention, even in high-demand times, is solely made possible via AI-assisted customer service.
- The financial impact of AI is huge with cost savings, better customer insights, fast response times, and deflection of queries.
What is AI in customer service?
Artificial intelligence in customer service uses machine learning and automation to speed up operations. The purpose of AI integration in customer service is two-fold:
- For agents: It takes care of repetitive queries, so agents dedicate their time to complex tasks.
- For customers: It acts as a guide that retrieves quick answers and reduces wait times.
Learning how to use AI in customer service is a no-brainer for businesses because of how enormous the financial impact of AI is.
A 2020 McKinsey report estimated that customer service revamped with AI could deliver up to $1 trillion in additional value annually in global banking.
Every other business giant you can think of is already on the AI bandwagon.
Beauty retailer Sephora, for example, uses chatbots accessible via their website and app that helps customers with individual product recommendations and skincare advice in addition to order inquiries.
How To Use AI In Customer Service: 7 Ways To Do It Right
Around two-thirds of millennials expect customer service to be delivered in real time.
As service expectations soar alongside rising cost pressures, simply hiring more skilled employees to meet these demands is not a practical solution.
You can turn to AI to provide the proactive, and personalized service your customers want and deliver it exactly when and how they need it.
Here’s how to use AI in customer service the best way possible:
1. Workflow Automation
The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for resolving a ticket in customer support is a multi-step process that requires:
- Searching for information across multiple apps
- Querying databases
- Making updates
- Escalating issues
Agents have been following these steps manually for long, and as you’d agree, they are time-consuming and error-prone.
Workflow automation using AI for customer support can be used to compress these SOPs into a single command.
Many businesses are hesitant to allow chatbots or voice bots to handle customer interactions autonomously and rightfully so.
AI-powered automated workflows bridge this gap by only working on backend processes while still allowing human oversight for direct customer interaction.
2. Chatbots for Instant Support
Klarna, for example, is a global payments giant with over 150 million active users and two million transactions daily.
It uses an AI chatbot trained upon the licensed version of OpenAI to automate much of its customer service for instant support.
The chatbot handles customer queries such as payment issues, refunds, cancellations, invoice discrepancies, etc, in over 35 languages, available 24/7.
Over the past year, it has managed 2.3 million conversations that account for two-thirds of Klarna’s total customer service chats.
What’s even more impressive is that the AI Assistant currently performs at the level of 700 full-time agents and resolves issues in under two minutes compared to 11 minutes previously.
It also cuts repeat inquiries by 25%, so you can guess just how effective it is at addressing customer needs the first time.
You get an idea how helpful AI chatbots can be when it comes to providing instant support to your customers?
3. AI-Powered Analytics for Customer Insights
Customer data comes in many forms (support tickets, reviews, survey responses, interview transcripts, you name it).
AI can analyze this unstructured text to extract themes and trends. For instance, you can use topic modeling or clustering techniques to group similar pieces of feedback.
If you’re dealing with large volumes of data, here’s how you could effectively analyze it:
- Collect all your customer feedback in a text format
- Split feedback into smaller chunks and save them in a vector database
- Use clustering algorithms to group feedback by topic or sentiment
- Use AI to name and describe clusters and hence turn them into clear insights or problem areas
- Take your analysis a step further and create charts or visual summaries to make trends easier to interpret and share with your team.
ChatGPT can assist with basic analysis, or you could explore Dovetail or Cycle for deeper customer feedback processing.
4. Personalized Customer Interactions
Relying entirely on automation for customer support without any human touch is a risky move, but AI definitely comes in handy for personalization.
For example, you can set up a workflow using Zapier that gets triggered whenever a new customer message comes in. The workflow instantly pulls up the entire history of that customer’s past interactions.
Now, your agents do not have to start from scratch when dealing with this customer. They have a full picture of the customer’s journey at one glance that is needed to respond to the customer with complete context they need.
To make it even better, you can train the system to send the email content into a generative AI model that’s been fed your company’s data.
As a result, your agents will have a ready-to-go draft that will just need a few tweaks before sending it out.
5. Predictive Customer Support
Recurring problems reported or sudden drop in activity are some subtle ways the dissatisfaction or disengagement of a customer presents.
For example, if a subscription-based service notices a customer logging in less frequently, AI can nudge the support team to check-in with that customer or send a personalized offer to re-engage them.
You can entirely automate this process as well so your customer support teams will only get notified after initial attempts to re-engage the customer have been made with no results.
Besides, holiday sales or a new product launch are moments that overwhelm customer service teams. With AI’s ability to forecast peak times, businesses can have the right number of agents on standby.
6. AI for Sentiment Analysis
When you’re a small business owner, it’s relatively easy to read through a handful of reviews and get a feel for how your customer experiences are.
But as your business grows, it quickly becomes overwhelming.
AI, on the other hand, evaluates large volumes of customer feedback in seconds.
Build an AI based system to detect the language of the user reviews using language detection models.
If the comment is in a foreign language, have it translated to English using translation models.
Then, use AI to run a sentiment analysis on the translated text. Take into account both negative and positive aspects of your product/service.
Know where your business excels, speed of shipping or a popular product feature for example, and keep crushing it. Spot recurring pain points and address them to improve customer satisfaction.
7. Self-Service Portals with AI Integration
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 61% of customers prefer resolving simple issues on their own. An AI-powered self-service portal lets them do just that.
Portals are secured, so customers need to log in to access personalized services that can include:
- Account management where they view and update their account details, track their transaction history, manage personal information, etc.
- Checking the status of a support ticket
- A collection of FAQs and articles that help customers troubleshoot and find answers to common questions
- AI-powered recommendations based on their activity, similar to Salesforce’s AppExchange
5 Benefits of AI in Customer Service
Customer service is one of the world’s most stressful jobs, with annual turnover rates reaching as high as 45% for agents.
Given the high demand for these roles and ongoing talent shortages, AI isn’t likely to replace human customer service jobs anytime soon.
Instead, learning how to use AI in customer service the right way will aid the reps and help them build faster, and better connections with their customers.
Here are the top 5 benefits you will get if you know how to use AI in customer service:
1. Understanding your customers better
The real value of AI lies not in replacing conversations but in understanding the views, insights, attitudes, and beliefs that the customer holds.
This data enables merchants to provide engaging and personalized customer experiences across multiple channels and stages of the customer journey.
Gorgias reports that businesses using AI in professional services experienced noticeable improvements in:
- Repeat purchase rates
- Response times
- Resolution times
- Tickets per order
- Customer satisfaction scores
2. Handling Basic Queries
One of the most practical applications of AI in customer service is handling simple, and repetitive questions that the customers would easily have found online had they looked it up.
I’m talking about customers calling you to ask about opening business hours or your refund policy.
For larger or growing companies, such “generic” tickets eat up 70-80% of customer service reps’ time. And frankly speaking, these are scenarios where a customer service rep really doesn’t need their time wasted.
You can easily set up AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants for such queries.
They will provide accurate, instant answers to basic inquiries without making customers wait on hold or requiring human intervention.
3. Round-the-clock customer service
When customers reach out outside of business hours, AI will be able to handle basic questions and collect info for more complex issues.
It also reduces the strain on your customer service teams. Upon starting the day, your agents have a jumpstart when they step in to help customers.
4. Fast response times
Even when dealing with very simple issues, it’s hard for humans to match the speed of a computer, which can process thousands of keywords per second.
Gorgias’s data analysis showed a:
- 37% decrease in first response time
- 52% reduction in resolution time
- 27% drop in the ticket-to-order ratio
- And a 1% increase in customer satisfaction when customer service was automated.
The speed of AI models makes them a great complement to your knowledge base and community forums.
5. Cost savings
You can scale up your customer service without the added expense of hiring more staff and needing to pay for extra shifts or seasonal employees.
Businesses have been reported to reduce their service staffing requirements by as much as 68% during peak seasons and 51% year-round.
Over time, you’ll save not only on hiring costs but also on the time your team spends answering repetitive questions.
The Future Of AI in Customer Service
AI has come a long way in a short time, but we’re just scratching the surface of what it can do in customer service.
Improvements over the past few years have been massive.
We understand that early chatbots had their limitations which used to frustrate customers sometimes instead of helping them like in the case of Air Canada’s chatbot.
But today, AI has advanced far beyond just answering basic questions, and companies like Teammates.ai are one prime example of that advancement.
Companies like Teammates.ai are building AI agents with capabilities far beyond basic chatbots.
Apart from solving basic customer queries, these customer service AI agents can fully manage customer interactions, schedule meetings, and handle entire workflows without human oversight.
So, it won’t be a stretch to say that AI is gradually becoming a trusted teammate in customer service, making it faster, more efficient, and more reliable than ever before.
And like I said above, we are just scratching the surface, and the coming years will show us what more wonders AI can do in customer service.
Use Teammates AI for Exceptional Customer Experience
The time to introduce an AI-assisted customer service team, if you’ve not done it yet, is now.
Teammates.ai is a great all-in-one AI-powered CX solution that delivers exactly what we learnt today, i.e., how to use AI in customer service the right way.
It provides AI teammates that deliver natural, context-aware responses connected to your CRM, email, chat, and other tools your team already uses. Here’s what it offers:
- Connect to 30+ platforms and go live in hours, not weeks
- Respond to customers worldwide, in any time zone or language, including over 50+ languages and Arabic dialects
- Manage calls, emails, chats, and social media inquiries
- Automatically identify and prioritize high-value leads
- Gain real-time, actionable feedback
Teammates.ai doesn’t require any lengthy onboarding or coding. Get started today!