By Catherine Heath (Freelance Technical Writer and Marketing Advocate)
Catherine is a freelance writer based in Manchester. Blogs. Copy. Documentation. She believes in ditching the jargon – just give her plain writing.
In collaboration with Syed Abdul Qadir Gilani (a Python developer and data scientist),
Find Syed on LinkedIn.
Customer service has traditionally been provided by people. Even if augmented by technology such as telephone systems, humans would still have offered the primary service. All that is changing with AI (Artificial Intelligence).
AI is playing a much bigger role in customer service than it previously did. Just think of a chatbot interfacing with a customer before passing the inquiry onto a colleague. That’s AI in customer service. AI can interpret the intent of a customer and offer a solution much more easily and in a more sophisticated manner than it could before.
People are unsure about the impact of AI.
The question is, are these changes good or bad? That’s the question we attempt to answer in this post.
AI Improves Customer Service
AI improves customer service in a number of ways:
1. Solving simple questions quickly – customers can obtain very fast answers to the simplest of questions using an AI chatbot or AI knowledge base.
2. Understanding emotions – customers can have their emotions understood by the chatbot for example, which will provide a sentiment-based answer to a question.
3. Providing 24/7 support – AI never sleeps, meaning you can significantly broaden the level of support you offer customers, even in different time zones.
4. Offering personalised experiences – customers feel like AI is offering them personalized experiences because the technology is at the level of interpreting what they want.
5. Frees up your agents – agents are able to work on other important tasks while AI is dealing with customers.
These are the benefits of AI
1. Increased efficiency – customer service is more efficient when you have AI bots and knowledge bases supporting your agents because they are less constrained by their workload.
2. Reduced wait times – bots can get through way more queries than humans can meaning that you can reduce wait times significantly with AI.
3. Improved customer satisfaction – customers will be more satisfied with the intervention of AI because you know it can accomplish more than humans.
4. AI is a huge part of self-service – with the inclusion of AI customers will be happier with your self-service offering because the business can be more helpful.
Future of AI
Next, we’ll take a quick look at the future of AI.
1. Collaboration with voice assistants and virtual reality – AI will become more and more “real” as the technology develops and is able to simulate virtual reality.
2. Improvements in emotional intelligence – AI will get better at interpreting customers’ emotions and giving the correct response during an interaction.
3. More natural interactions – the chatbot interacting with the customer will sound more natural and customers will feel like they’re interacting with a human.
Tips for Success
There’s potential for Artificial Intelligence to go wrong. It’s not guaranteed to grow your business or make your customers happy. But there’s things you can do to ensure success is more likely.
1. Start small. Make sure you don’t implement AI everywhere all at once but consider just a basic AI knowledge base first. Get your customers used to using artificial intelligence in your business.
2. Regularly track and improve artificial intelligence. This is the best thing you can do if you can measure the success of your AI customer service tools.
3. Train humans to work with AI. Make sure your existing employees have the skills needed to work with these new tools to reduce the risk of job attrition.
4. Inform customers about AI benefits and limitations. Let your customers know exactly why you think it’s a good thing to use AI, and how it will benefit business, employees, and customers.
What do customers think?
What we should be looking at is what customers think about AI in customer service. It’s their opinion that matters most, after all.
- Some customers are concerned AI will make it harder to reach a person, and some feel it will lose jobs.
- Some customers are excited about using Generative AI and some already feel it has changed their customer service experiences.
- 80% of customers that have interacted with AI have had a positive experience.
- 73% of customers prefer text–based channels over voice IVR, which is something for businesses to bear in mind.
So overall, customers are a mixture of positive and negative about AI in customer service. One thing’s for sure, though – AI is growing and there’s no stopping it. But we have the ability to shape how customer service is affected by the impact of AI. We can ensure that customers have positive service experiences with AI.
Source: Talkdesk’s blog for more information on AI in customer service.
To learn more about how AI is reshaping customer service, research Talkdesk’s blog.
Amazing!!! Loved it!!!