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With the reducing attention spans the consumers are now demanding quick solutions to their queries. They are not ready to drop in a ticket and wait for a customer service agent to connect with them hours later. And this is the problem many companies have been facing in recent years.
These are the situations that made businesses use AI for customer service. Because AI can connect with the audience immediately without any delay. Now with the advancement in NLP technology, AI bots are also getting smarter day by day. And now many businesses are utilising the technology and are enjoying AI customer success.
But how are they using AI to improve customer experience? In this blog, we will share 13 use-case examples of AI tools that are helping businesses improve their consumer support. So, without waiting let’s start exploring the uses of AI.
What is the use of AI in customer service?
AI has many use cases in the customer service sector. For instance, you can utilise the power of an AI-powered chatbot that will help your customers find instant solutions without waiting for human support. An AI chatbot can also greet the visitors on your website, share knowledge base articles with them, and guide them through common business tasks. And if the situation gets a little complex, the AI bot can bring in human support without making it hard for the customer.
The use of AI for customer service can bring a positive change in your business as it can help you win the trust of the consumer immediately. According to a survey, 80% of customers who interacted with AI chatbots had a positive experience.
Customers like AI as it provides them with personalised answers within seconds. It is just like a virtual assistant who understands both the needs and the preferences of your consumers. It makes things easier for them as they don’t need to find many things manually on the website. They can just communicate with the AI bot and find their answers immediately within the chat.
There are multiple organisations that are already enjoying AI customer success. In fact, 9 out of 10 businesses are planning to increase their budget for AI customer service in the coming years.
What are the benefits of AI in customer service?
Better productivity: AI tools like Trengo can help businesses automate tasks and improve productivity. According to a survey, a good AI tool can boost your productivity by up to 40%. So, the use of AI in customer service can help your business in offering quick solutions to your consumers.
Improved efficiency: Some customer questions are so frequent that they end up taking too much time for your support team. Especially when an agent has to move back and forth on different dashboards to understand the customer's needs to locate the exact answer. However, using an AI tool can help them automate these tasks and reduce their workload.
Increased personalisation: Companies using AI for customer service can also add better personalisation for each customer. An AI tool can fetch data like a customer’s name, preferred language, location, and previous chat if any, and use this data to provide a more tailored response.
Less burnout: AI enables agents to complete tedious, repetitive tasks and concentrate on situations that call for critical thinking, social intelligence, and creative problem-solving – all of which will improve the client experience overall. Also, almost 80% of IT leaders believe that generative AI can lessen team strain and burnout.
13 AI customer service examples
There are many use cases of AI tools in customer service. Let’s have a look at 13 examples of using the new technology in your business.
1. Gather consumer insights
It can be difficult to collect and use consumer data from various platforms. However, the job becomes easier with AI tools as they can collect data from all consumer interactions across different platforms. They can help you implement the gathered data at the right time and help you make the communication more personalised.
2. Improved workflows
The combination of humans and AI support can streamline workflows. It allows humans to work on more complex tasks and AI to handle routine repeating tasks.
Examples of AI in customer service include handling appointment settings, information sharing, feedback collection, and troubleshooting simple customer problems.
In a chatbot like Trengo’s, you can create step-by-step guides for different tasks like booking appointments.
3. Quick agent training
Research shows that regular training for agents can improve their performance by 12%. And you can improve this training with the help of AI.
For example, the AI tool can analyse every interaction quickly without any biases. It can also thoroughly check the agent data for CSAT scores and handling time. Using this data the AI can generate a report that you can use to guide your agents for further interactions.
4. Modify tone
Tone modification is an important feature for achieving AI customer success. Not only do you need to follow your brand’s tone of voice guides, it is important to maintain a neutral tone that does not offend any individual.
Your agents can use the power of AI to generate moderate responses if they are somehow feeling offended. Also, you can train your chatbots to adapt the brand tone so they can also communicate according to your company culture.
5. Assistance for agents
AI-based customer service has improved significantly from the days when agents were hoping between windows to get data and knowledge base content. Now agents have less work to do thanks to the integration of AI in customer service tools.
The AI can communicate with the clients and help them find products or aid them in finding answers to other queries like appointment booking. It can also help agents in routine tasks like summarising large texts and reduce response time.
6. Available 24/7
Businesses should use AI for customer service as it works 24/7 without getting tired. And this is one of the main reasons that AI tools are becoming famous for customer service.
The AI bots can connect with your knowledge base and also communicate effectively with consumers, irrespective of your business hours. These bots do not sleep, don’t get sick, or plan a vacation. They are committed to working for your business all day, every day!
7. Easy send-off
Customers don’t like to wait a lot when they are being transferred from agent to agent. The AI smart routing can help you eliminate this stress. Artificial intelligence can match the right agent with the consumer and connect them instantly, ensuring no delay.
8. Response compliance
The automation of response compliance with brand rules and regulatory requirements is another excellent example of artificial intelligence in customer service. AI carefully examines agent/bot responses and highlights, among other things, off-brand tone, grammar mistakes, bigotry, prejudice, sexual undertones, and business jargon. This can help you stay out of trouble with the law and prevent PR disasters that could damage the reputation of your company and spread like wildfire.
9. Multilingual support
Serving a global audience means dealing with customers from all over the world, which can be challenging due to language barriers. However, with conversational AI, your business can now offer seamless multilingual support.
Advanced natural language understanding (NLU) technology detects a customer's native language and translates conversations in real time. For example, if customers from Japan and Spain contact support simultaneously, your AI system instantly recognises and translates their languages, ensuring efficient support regardless of language.
10. Deliver meaningful conversations
In customer service, authentic conversations can significantly impact interactions. Integrating generative AI into chatbots enhances their naturalness and engagement. Tools like Trengo leverage generative AI to offer more than just conversational improvements. Trengo’s bot can streamline tasks such as drafting emails, adding contacts, or generating reports with simple chat commands.
11. Sentiment analysis
Well-trained AI chatbots can evaluate reviews, customer feedback, and also social media trends to find the overall sentiment of the audience for your brand or product. This type of AI feature can help you identify customer behaviour and improve the customer retention rate.
You can use the collected sentiment data to improve your service and marketing campaigns to gain better results.
12. Predicting customer service
The AI tools can collect customer data and share insights via charts and reports. You can use this data to predict customer needs or issues and address them before they arise. The use of AI for predicting consumer problems can help gain the trust of your prospects and grow your business easily.
13. Recommending products
If you are in e-commerce, you can use this feature and step on the route of AI customer success. A well-trained AI bot can study consumer behaviour and start recommending products based on their history of purchase. You can utilise this feature to get more upsells even without the interference of a human agent.
How to use generative AI to improve customer service?
Here are some tips you can use to maximise the use of AI and improve your workflows:
Use AI as a trusted assistant: When you use AI for customer service don’t limit it to just consumers. Your support should use it as a personal assistant to maximise their productivity. For example, you can use it to create personalised replies quickly, find data quickly, or understand the context of the consumer’s query.
Create summaries: Your agents can also use them to handle time-consuming but crucial tasks like creating wrap-up summaries about case studies and the history of a client’s experience.
Share knowledge easily: You can use an AI tool to create first drafts of your knowledge base articles according to the conversation details and the provided data for your agents to review. This use case can help create your articles at a faster pace.
💡Here’s a tip: You can upload these knowledge-base articles on a self-service portal where consumers can locate their own answers to their queries. Like the Trengo Academy.
Quickly find answers: Your consumers or your agents can easily find answers as AI can create a generated answer according to your knowledge base. This feature can save crucial for both your clients and agents.
What to consider when implementing AI in customer service?
Training of staff
Service leaders are facing a skills gap because AI, particularly generative AI, which is a relatively young discipline. For instance, according to many leaders, their team lacks the expertise necessary to handle AI.
Similarly, service industry workers may be reluctant to adopt AI because they fear it will replace them in their line of work. As you integrate AI into your service organisation, make sure to explain to your personnel how it will increase productivity while still needing their human talents to deliver a first-rate customer experience.
Trust the new technology
AI technology is improving rapidly, still, it is not perfect. You cannot trust it as it is not emotionally intelligent. Also, it cannot potentially secure sensitive information. And there are concerns regarding the accuracy of AI systems in understanding and solving difficult customer queries.
One thing you can do to avoid such issues is to select an AI tool that is trained properly and also knows how to protect sensitive data. Plus, have a support team ready to jump in to handle complex issues or problems associated with emotions.
Cost and deployment
It is possible to create your own chatbot for your customer service. However, creating and integrating an AI can require a significant investment and a lot of time. You can save time and money by implementing an AI tool that is already created and is ready to become an efficient part of your team through effortless customisation.
How to get started with AI in customer service?
The use of AI in customer service is not rocket science. However, you can easily start by understanding what it can bring to the table for your business. Check how AI personalises each message for each customer and how it boosts the productivity of the support team.
Now for implementation, you can start with small changes. For instance, initially use AI for standard actions like answering FAQs, summarising, or updating records. When your team gets comfortable with the flow of AI you can start using it on a larger scale.
And if you are planning to deploy AI in your business you can schedule a demo with Trengo to learn how it can enhance your customer service.
So, are you ready to give the bots a go?
