AI is rapidly transforming the way companies interact with their prospects and customers. An exclusive MIT Technology Review Insights’ survey of over 1000 business leaders, “The global AI agenda,” noted that customer success and service is the area where AI deployment is highly active. By 2022,73% of respondents said it will remain the leading area of AI use in companies.
Artificial intelligence has become a reality that is impacting the world on a daily basis and the most effective ways to harness AI is through customer service and support– the fast 24/7 functionality of AI to solve customer queries any time of the day.
AI is hugely impacting every business and transforming business processes from data collection to customer onboarding and retention. It saves time, cost, and is highly meaningful in terms of returns to the customer and client.
Customer service is the root of any digital transformation and with AI in it, one can improve everyday experiences for customers. Gartner once declared that 89% of businesses will compete only on customer experience on a battlefield.
This can be impacted heavily if AI and machine learning makes an entry. But let’s see three important features of AI in customer service.
Features of AI in Customer Service
Efficiency
Companies have invested in AI to improve efficiency, decrease complaint resolution times in Customer support. Top organizations have also looked to connect with customers seamlessly and provide a personalized experience. Experience is the ultimate differentiator between brands. AI facilitates quick transfer of information, right and rapid resolution, and creates interactions that feel personalized.
Building Connectivity
AI algorithms lead to better connectivity, cross-device sync, and collaboration between data sets and make it easier for organizations to connect across cloud platforms. AI also makes it easier to connect to technologies, CRM systems, contact centers, and more.
Empowering Self-Service
AI eliminates the need to wait. Imagine, being ‘on hold’ for the next 30 minutes. It simply has changed customer success equations by answering common questions in a jiffy. This leaves a happy, satisfied customer and agents who are available to handle more complex queries. It doesn’t even get upset and gives customers the feeling of ‘self-help’ which is highly loved and intuitive.
5 AI Trends in Customer Support
Here are some important AI trends to look forward that will change the face of customer success and support:
1. Simple Solutions to Everyday Issues
Poor customer service can have grave ramifications to any business. Any failure to meet customer service expectations and requests with accuracy and friendliness can cost companies billions.
Therefore, customer service agents are mainly AI-driven. To deliver in less time with high-resolution capabilities that can increase customer satisfaction scores.
Since AI agents are built with language understanding capabilities, they can reinforce learning in a better manner and communicate faster.
2. Chatbot Evolution
Chatbots are so common that even we interact with them frequently. A simple popup on a computer screen shows the company or brand is willing to answer questions. Chatbots have driven solutions to save time as well as cut costs.
Though chatbots lack contextual awareness and emotion. The benefit is high as they answer most customer queries and continue to impact our lives. Alexa and Google Assistant are now hugely popular and are utilized to enhance the customer experience. Though chatbots are still improving, there is no doubt that the future has a lot of them, it has been estimated that almost 91% of users on the internet will use chatbots as part of their daily lives by 2021.
3. Reduced Response Time to Customer Queries
Mostly customers ask questions an AI agent can answer. These agents offer a quick and easy resolution to customer issues and queries. With reduced time, the customer feels important and satisfied that queries have been met and stays invested. This is vital to improve customer retention via customer experience.
It also comes with predictive customization which will improve customer experience to create automatic, hassle-free, and quick responses. Errors and delays in handling clients are lesser with AI and machine learning tools.
4. Improved Customer Journeys
Customer Journey is now important to determine and this is where AI will play a major role. Data integration powered by AI is increasing and it’s important to harness the potential. Integrating the right communication with AI can improve the customer journey. Relying on machine learning and AI can help make smarter decisions for customers and improve overall efficiency and personalization. AI also helps in crafting customer journeys based on the questions they ask, issues they face, and thus aids early warning detection of customer churn. AI can zone out areas where a customer is likely to ask questions or have an issue based on predictive analysis which improves the customer journey.
5. AI-Authorised Analytics for Customer Perception
AI plays an important role in feeding information into marketing automation, CRM, and other operational tools. AI makes customers understand employee behavior, product usage, and other opportunities. Tools such as text analysis, face identification, and machine learning can provide more insights on customer behavior. AI can organize different sources of data both structured and unstructured to identify trends, meet expectations, and fulfill customer demands. With these analytics, employees can understand what customers perceive of them and aid with the right targeting to increase upselling and sales.
Conclusion
AI is the future and the demand is increasing rapidly as they can deliver the best customer experience to customers. It is also important to maintain a proper dataset and regularly update algorithms to make sure everything is efficient. As it simplifies the delivery of a meaningful message to a customer, AI is here to stay and help bring a revolution in customer success. However, there is a lot of cynicism due to privacy issues, lack of human emotions, and human interaction.
Studies have shown that overreliance on human customer support agents is responsible and that aspect will wane with time. If a chatbot is not able to answer a query, companies are now directing it to a human customer success representative to figure out the issue.
DepositPhotos – ai chatbot
