We all have experienced calling customer support and press hundreds of numbers. You might have lost your patience and be stuck in a situation where you can neither hang up nor wait because you’ve waited for so long and a couple of minutes more wouldn’t kill you. You will be put on hold for several minutes before someone resumes your call and you hear those words you’ve been wanting to hear from a long time, – ‘Hello, how may I help you today?’ The whole process seems annoying and a little time-consuming.
But have you ever thought about how difficult it is to be in their shoes? Imagine yourself being asked the same question throughout the day by different customers. The situation gets worse when you don’t know the answer to a few questions. This is one of the major problems that customer service teams deal with.
Today, the customer’s live in an omnichannel world. With the rise of technologies, customer expectations are increasing day by day. But how do businesses ensure that they provide the best in class customer services? The answer lies in Artificial Intelligence.
Let’s take a look at the five ways AI can improve customer service for businesses.
- Chatbots
Today, customer service teams are tasked to handle a great number of calls on a daily basis. They also face a challenge in reducing the average resolution time for every customer. Chatbots play a major role in addressing both these challenges. They can provide prompt answers in a flash in real-time. Apart from that, by resolving a high number off queries with the highest accuracy and human-like behavior, they reduce the burden on human agents.
- Cost Reduction and Optimizing Resources
Businesses can benefit from chatbots and cut the customer service costs by speeding up response times and it frees up agents to much more challenging work. It also frees them from answering up to 80% of the routine questions. Consider the example of call computerization. It combines Machine Learning and Advanced Speech recognition to improve conventional interactive voice response systems. It also delivers a 60% – 80% cost saving over human-powered outsourced call centers.
- Improves Human Interactions with Customers
Artificial Intelligence plays a major role in enhancing human interactions with customers. It is enhancing customer service through two of the most important ways, specifically, AI-augmented messaging and AI email tagging.
With the help of chatbots, AI-augmented messaging allows customer service agents to handle an ample amount of customer queries. On the other hand, Humans can save the time consumed in reading every email by the customer with AI email tagging. AI-powered programs scan emails, tag them, and direct them to the right office. As a result, this helps human agents to save time and concentrate on more complex tasks that cannot be completed without human intervention.
- Personalized user experiences
Most of the customers prefer to solve customer issues by themselves. And AI could assist the customers by helping them to find the right piece of information more efficiently. AI can analyze huge data sets, draw information such as weather and locations, and also suggests relevant content to customers. It also helps to analyze customers’ data and recommend products and services to the customers based on their browsing activities. It creates customer persons which in return helps businesses focus on individual purchasing patterns and have a better understanding of each and every customer. This allows them to send the relevant content to the customers right on time and through the right channels. As a result, customers can find solutions without calling customer service.
- Assisting customers to make decisions
Customers believe that AI-powered chatbots are assisting them in making better purchase decisions than humans. Nowadays, customers are engaging with brands across devices. As a result, personalized touchpoints are needed to help the customers to make a decision. Automated AI-powered assistants help customers make the right decisions by answering customer queries instantly, gathering complete details regarding the product or service and advise customers, reducing the time spent by humans and help them focus on other tasks.
It helps in reducing the resolution process by discovering and delivering the right solutions on time. The interactions can be handed over to a human, in case conversations between the customer and chatbot get complex. With their machine learning ability, these bots can learn from repeated issues and can provide accurate solutions to a particular issue. It also has the ability to sense human behavior patterns which is beneficial to both customers and human agents.