Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Customer Service

0
452

Share on LinkedIn

As technology advances, so does everything else. No business is immune to this, and that includes the customer service industry.

Customer service roles are under much pressure these days to find new ways of dealing with complaints efficiently while still providing high-quality support

It’s also important for companies to monitor the stories being said about it across different platforms. These stories take the form of reviews, social media posts, forum discussions, and more. 

And if it isn’t challenging enough, you also need to provide adequate support no matter what device or app your customers might be using. You can’t afford to neglect your Facebook business page’s chat messenger, your email, or the contact forms on your site. 

Managing your customer support in the modern age is a job of its own. And if you want to scale it, then you need to seriously consider adding AI to the mix. 

In this post, we’ll look at the importance of AI in customer service, what you should know, and a few ways to implement automation in your own customer support services. Dive in!

How AI is being integrated with customer service

Let’s start by looking at the many ways AI is already getting integrated with customer support services. 

While AI is far from being perfect, it can be trained to perform better over time. With tweaks and careful monitoring, you can use it to serve more customers while maintaining your communication quality. 

Chatbots

Thanks to developments in machine learning and Natural Language Processing, tools like chatbots have appeared to offer a much-needed step up in the customer service industry. 

For many businesses, customer support tickets are backed up with complaints that can be easily resolved by extracting information from a database. 

Finally, chatbots aren’t just limited to messaging platforms—companies are also using them as a way of directing their customers to the right department or service within their site. And you don’t need a degree in computer science to implement this type of customer service either: Many websites offer pre-programmed responses for certain phrases which will help guide users through a process without having human input. 

In such cases, chatbots are a boon since they can simply use the right keywords and customer information to find and extract just the information a customer needs. There are many easy-to-use and implement chatbot tools available. Look for one that provides personalized support to ensure that you can set up one that works well for you. 

CRM and AI 

One great way that companies are using AI is by integrating it with their CRM software. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are a great way for business owners to keep track of interactions with clients. 

However, as a business’s transactions increase, it becomes harder to consume all the data that gets collected. Forget about analyzing it and finding out important patterns and trends. 

In such cases, using AI tools and integrations is a no-brainer. If there’s anything you should use AI for, it’s to make sense of vast quantities of information. And a good AI tool will look for trends and create reports you can apply to better serve customers in the future.

Analyze user-generated content

With AI, it becomes easier to maintain the quality of your customer support by getting feedback on how your customers feel about your services or products.

If you’ve sent a survey or a feedback form to a large number of people, you can use AI to quickly understand how people feel. You’ll track pain points and understand what people like faster. 

AI can also help you collect and organize an endless quantity of social media and forum posts related to your business. And it can pick up the sentiment related to such content such as positive, negative, or neutral. Imagine how easy it’ll be to figure out your business’s standing in the community. This is powerful information to work with and you can leverage such data to grow your business faster. 

Schedule demos and meetings

Let’s say you want to schedule a demo or a feedback call with your audience. You don’t want to waste a lot of time going back and forth fixing a mutually convenient time. 

AI can help by scheduling support calls, demos, and even launching helpful content at the right time for customers. 

You can make things easy for yourself and for your customers by using AI to schedule and manage direct interactions with customers. 

Sentiment analysis in customer support tickets

In addition to all the ways AI can help, working with it is great for analyzing the overall mood of people writing into your customer support. 

You can apply AI tools to carry out sentiment analysis which will give a broad view of people’s interactions with your support staff. 

Today’s AI tools have grown smarter than ever. You can expect to get an even finer analysis of content such as detecting the exact tone of a conversation which can range from being funny to sarcastic to enraged. 

Conclusion:

With the progress that AI has made in recent years, it’s important to be concerned about its impact. And the smart thing to do is to understand how it works and what it does. 

Chances are that your competitors are exploring ways to improve their customer service using AI. And with the wide availability of tools out there, implementing AI in your customer support work is not out of the realm of possibilities. 

However, adding AI is not a catch-all solution. You still need to maintain and train real customer support staff to talk to customers about issues that AI tools can’t handle.

However, you can save time and resources by adding AI in support. Imagine how much time is saved finding information for customers. How many calls could be resolved instantly if your support tools simply found the link someone needed. 

Well, this is a sample of what AI can help you do. And it’s worth looking into before it becomes standard practice across all industries.

By focusing on positive improvements like improving response rates, delivering personalized plans, or setting up chatbots that use NLP, you can ensure that your company turns these changes into a competitive advantage. 

After all, if your competitors haven’t caught up yet, then you’ll be able to stand out from the crowd and deliver a better customer experience.

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here