When it comes to do less with more in customer service, the answer is AI. This article will set you up to success with the right knowledge of conversational and generative AI in the system. For a sales professional, its always hectic. The budget is in flux and customers expecting more. To cope up with this, service teams are constantly figuring out how to answer an important question: how do you actually do more with less? The answer is AI in customer service.
Customer service has become a truly roller coaster ride, more so in the post-pandemic era. Today, customer expectations are higher than ever. According to a recent report, 72% of consumers say they will remain loyal to companies that provide faster service. And 78% of service agents say it’s difficult to balance speed and quality, up from 63% since 2020. All of these pressures have led to a turnover rate of 19% in service organizations.
How Conversational AI is Foraying into the Scene?
Here comes the role of Predictive Analytics as well as the generative AI. While Predictive AI is not new to customer service, generative AI has recently got the limelight a year ago or so. Leveraging this powerful tool,organizations can strategically transform the customer interaction. Business leaders, these days are resorting to generative AI strategy, while remaining mindful of the ways to build emotional connect with the customers. And service professionals and customers alike are curious how AI-powered customer service will impact their experience. Let’s dive into what AI does, its benefits, and how you can get started.
AI can be applied in customer care in a variety of ways. For instance, you may quickly improve customer support by integrating chatbot with AI across all channels. In addition to responding to routine inquiries, these chatbot can also handshake, offer knowledge base articles, walk clients through standard business procedures, dispatch a field technician in response to field calls, and direct more complicated inquiries to the appropriate person.
Let’s talk about this from a customers’ perspective. Your customer needs help for troubleshooting some issues in your computer hard disk. So, he starts an online chat with a support agent and explained the problem to him. Now, if he needs to wait for another 30 minutes for a response things get frustrating.
Now imagine the same situation by involving customer service AI. It takes seconds to receive a customized response when served by a generative AI bot. It’s like a friendly superpower for the support agents who is not only informed but also aware of your particular requirements and preferences. Telling it what you need help with is all that is required; the rest will be handled by it. You don’t need to look up your tracking number, send it to it, or describe the specifics of your purchase—all of that information is already there, and it knows precisely what to do.
What are the benefits of AI in customer service?
Here’s how generative AI takes your customer conversation to the next level.
Increased productivity: AI tools, such as Einstein Copilot, can help service teams complete tasks more quickly. For instance, AI can function as an assistant that is integrated into an agent’s work flow. Indeed, according to a recent study, 84% of IT executives think AI will improve customer service at their company. Conversational assistants powered by AI can boost support agents’ productivity by 14%.
Increased efficiency: Service agents may find it difficult to handle manual procedures. This includes operations that are prone to human mistake, such as manually entering responses, routing field workers to service locations, searching for knowledge articles, and swiveling back and forth between systems and screens to check client history. AI in customer service can provide knowledgeable suggestions to agents based on conversational insights, client data, and knowledge sources. According to our most recent survey, 63% of service industry experts believe AI would enable them to provide speedier customer service.
Customized Service experience tailored to your needs: AI needs access to your company’s data in order to understand your customers, which is a prerequisite for its efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI) can instantly fill in key details like a customer’s name, location, account type, and preferred language when they start a chat with a chatbot. AI can deliver all the necessary information to a field service technician in case the request calls for one, enabling them to start providing individualized care as soon as they arrive.
Optimized operations: AI in customer service makes customer communication friction-free yet more hassle-free and efficient. From directly analyzing your customer calls, emails, and chatbot conversations, generative AI helps determine the customer mindset. it helps figure out whether a particular customer is likely to escalate an issue, how much time will be possibly required to resolve an issue, and more. These insights help find new ways to improve the customer experience. For example, if customers often ask for an agent when they want to return a product, a chatbot can proactively share a knowledge base article to minimize escalation or the necessary steps to make the process more seamless.
AI is also capable of examining the case history of your business and pinpointing the main causes of customer support inquiries. You can use generative AI to create new knowledge articles or update ones that already exist if there isn’t one for any of these topics. After the article is approved by your team, it may be used to divert cases to a chatbot or self-service site, enabling agents to offer prompt and outstanding support.
Less burnout and improved morale: AI powered chatbot helps rep get rid of the mundane, repetitive, time-consuming work and focus more the situations that need creative problem solving capabilities and complex critical thinking. This is clearly not possible for the AI chatbot to handle. No surprise why 79% of IT leaders say generative AI will help reduce team workload and thereby reduce burnout.
Proactive customer service: AI can mine contracts, warranties, purchase histories, and marketing data to identify the best course of action for your agents to follow up with consumers even after the service engagement has ended. For example, AI can notify users when it’s almost time to schedule a maintenance visit, when their membership needs to be renewed, or when a product upgrade or discount is available. Generative AI may also create knowledge base articles for future reference and summarize client chats, taking it a step further.
Wrapping Up
Customer relationship is built on nothing but empathy. While AI chatbots serve you with all sorts of ready information, it’s easier for the reps to establish more personalized customer connections. Before the arrival of AI, establishing customer connection by winning their trust was a difficult job. Thankfully generative AI makes conversational CRM a reality, while transforming customer interaction at every touch point.
