How Is Artificial Intelligence Useful To Enhance Customer Service?

Artificial Intelligence has been hovering over us for a long time in movies to real life, and the evolution of AI has been exciting and impactful. AI is such a common aspect now that we can find it influencing our lives, every day. If you own a business or a part of one, you would know what we are talking about. The welcoming of AI in the corporate world has revolutionized certain aspects of it. One cannot imagine the flawless customer support that contact centers provide, without the aid of AI.

From online retail to healthcare, from the entertainment business to hospitality, wherever the customer base is involved, AI can play a role.  Industries around the globe are already offering AI-based customer support, in the form of chatbots, forecasting, self-servicing, and more. Business owners have recognized the power of this technology and are equipping it at all levels.

Artificial intelligence promises seamless customer support. This function reflects on your customer feedback, securing customer retention opportunities. The co-dependency of these functions makes it essential for you to invest in a complete reliable ecosystem: a system with a mind of its own. Let us find out, how automated customer support helps your contact centers to serve better!

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Contact center agents are the pillars of customer support. They are humans with experience. It does tend to reduce the error but does not eliminate it. Human error does not always imply agents making mistakes, but also human reaction. The human reaction is always delayed as opposed to automated customer support. A chatbot will respond immediately while the customer will wait in a queue to reach the agent. These little factors add up to the customer’s woes. It often repels them to choose a better service provider.

However, with automation, there is less room for inaccuracies. The AI will read every prompt from the customer and will respond accurately. The AI is coded to respond the very moment the customer contacts your business with a query. This reduces response time and increases first-contact resolution. The very nature of communication is now more sophisticated, error-free, and efficient. It is more likely for the customer to feel satisfied and recommend your business in their social circles.

 

The year is 2023 and believe us, customers love to feel self-sufficient. Most millennial customers dislike interacting with multiple agents to resolve an issue. Instead, this technologically proficient generation prefers to solve their problems on their own. AI-powered knowledge bases are the way to go. Traditional FAQs often needed the customer to choose amongst a few questions with answers to them. This limited the customer’s flexibility and mostly it didn’t successfully resolve every issue.

AI-based knowledge systems use NLP and other text analytics capabilities. It immediately recognizes the customer’s intent and redirects them to the relevant answer. It is more intuitive and guides your customer accurately. Furthermore, the AI-based knowledge system can be altered into a growing system. Allow your customers to rate the utility of the information, to improve accuracy levels. As the AI is self-learning itself, it will refine its performance as well.

One such self-service product is AI-based Chatbots; the chatbot is one of the most pervasive applications powered by AI. It essentially reduces wait time and is always available to serve a customer. Chatbots are intelligent bots that extract information from the customer over a conversation, only to serve the customer better. It is independent enough to realize when a customer might need human assistance and will queue in an agent immediately. AI-powered chatbots can handle up to 80% of routine customer queries, leading to faster response times and reduced wait periods for customers.

Chatbots can be deployed across multiple channels like social media (WhatsApp, Messenger), mobile apps, and websites. Chatbots are quick to use and can deliver on less complicated tasks. For example A customer of a bank can always interact with the chatbot on the bank’s website/app to find out account balance, bank statements, and more. Instead of visiting the bank or an ATM or calling an agent, the task can be completed in a few minutes. In other words, automation is easing the lives of your customers. Such attentive and efficient customer support is bound to gain your customer loyalty.

 

As mentioned before, customer support is incomplete without customer feedback. AI-driven Speech analytic tools can be equipped to segment and understand various incoming customer feedbacks. Automation can easily bifurcate all reviews into negative and positive. This allows your team to improve on your shortcomings, be it in the development sphere, or poor customer interaction. Strategic use of these data can lead to proper insights necessary for customer retention. This way you can recognize the value you bring to your customers, which is imperative for scaling up.

Let me give you a real-life use case. An insurance company was constantly finding customer escalation. With speech analytics, it was very easy to analyze all the calls coming into the Call Center Solution, and with keyword spotting and sentiment analysis, the QA team found the root cause and could proactively stall the customer escalations.

 

While chatbots were built with the intent to resolve customer issues and provide uninterrupted customer service, the same technology can assist support agents to provide quick resolutions. This is what we call the Smart Agent assistant. Powered by NLP and Machine learning, the agent can be assisted with the best possible resolutions or any other suggestions that can help the agent quickly resolve the issue. This can also prompt the agent with any offer for the calling customer so that the customer experience can be personalized.

 

As a customer service team, it is necessary to plan and budget for the future. It all starts with workforce forecasting. As customer service level and workforce are directly co-related, one has to make an optimum decision. However, the fluctuations cannot be well managed by Excel files or even some archaic WFM tools. With AI-powered forecasting tools, the various fluctuations can be understood by the Machine Learning models and as it gets trained, it can provide far more accurate forecasts to help in better decision-making. 

Conclusion:

We are now aware of the potential of Artificial Intelligence and the impact it has on the customer service industry. Every customer-centric business must indulge and invest in AI now. Automation has enhanced customer support quality and now the customers expect nothing less. Many companies have adopted AI and are already innovating their way through it. If your brand does not deliver as efficiently as the rest, then you are bound to lag. To learn more about AI-based solutions for customer service, contact our team for a consultation.