When you think of customer service, you normally think of human-to-human support. Perhaps an agent with a headset picking up a phone to answer a call.
But recently, AI has been spreading throughout customer service so that machines are handling many queries. Sometimes AI is so clever that customers aren’t even aware they’re being handled by AI.
Nevertheless, customers are coming to expect a certain level of automation and businesses are obligated to provide it. It’s not enough just to provide human agents to take care of their queries. Humans are often busy or customers are getting in touch outside of business hours.
AI doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as an AI-powered knowledge base which is driven by content in the knowledge base. Same goes for chatbots which serve customer queries based on company content. Nearly 50% of CEOs see increased customer expectations that will accelerate the use of new technologies like generative AI.
What all this means is AI is increasing in customer service. Both customers and businesses expect increased use of AI in customer service.
The types of AI in customer service
There are multiple types of tools that use AI in customer service.
Self-service
Self-service platforms are knowledge bases that use AI to answer customer queries. They use natural language processing to understand what the customer types in the search bar to return the most relevant information. On the authoring side, they also use generative AI to help technical writers create content.
Chatbot
Chatbots also use natural language processing to understand customers and simulate natural conversation through text or voice. Customers can use a chatbot to book tickets, order products, or book hotels.
AI help desk
Help desks use AI to manage customer tickets and automate repetitive tasks. Help desks can do things like summarizing messages, changing the tone of a message, or turning bullet points into more detailed answers. In a help desk, the AI works alongside the agent to help customers.
AI CRM
You can use AI CRMs for marketing, writing, emails, chatbots, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, and more. A CRM is a hub for engaging customers with emails and is typically used for sales and marketing.
The future of AI in customer service
The future of AI in customer service means only more AI will be incorporated in the future. Automations will become more prevalent as tickets will become handled by AI and require no agent intervention. While some interactions are automated now, up to 100% of customer interactions will involve AI in the future.
Customers will come to expect the use of AI in customer service and will be disappointed if they don’t get it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every interaction has to be self-service but agents will utilize AI even behind-the-scenes as they solve customer queries.
AI will become a mainstay of customer service so that customers will not be able to imagine customer service without it. Every interaction will involve AI and customers will experience the automation of their queries.
The benefits of AI in customer service
AI has many benefits for customer service.
Faster service
AI enables agents to deliver faster service by instantly addressing basic queries and solving them. Self-service can deflect customer tickets and chatbots can handle incoming inquiries so that agents are free to deal with more complex inquiries faster.
Solves more queries
By addressing the bulk of inquiries self-service and chatbot platforms can enable customer service teams to solve more queries. Offloading more queries onto self-service means you can get through more tickets than you otherwise would.
Improves writing
AI tools usually have automations to help you improve writing through turning articles into summaries, turning bullet points into articles or responses, and writing meta descriptions. This can really help with writing tasks.
Eliminates manual tasks
AI automates many tasks that you would otherwise have to complete manually such as the writing process, analyzing data, answering customer queries, and more. Tasks that took hours to complete will now take minutes or seconds.
24/7 support
AI can provide customers with help at any time of the day, even outside of business hours. Chatbots can give customers answers instantly instead of making them wait, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
Better customer experiences
AI can help you rephrase and expand text in a help desk for better customer experiences. You don’t need lots of time to improve the customer experience when the AI can reduce the time and effort it takes for a customer to get a resolution.
The challenges of AI in customer service
There are some things you need to be aware of when deploying AI in your organization.
Data protection
AI customer service tools may be prone to malware attacks and you’ll have to take steps to ensure your customers’ data is protected. If you don’t, this will erode trust in your business and customers will look to your competitors as an alternative.
Lack of human emotion
AI is not yet emotional like a human and so customers may feel uncared about if you rely excessively on AI. Upset or angry customers will need the human touch and won’t be happy with AI if they have a problem.
Loss of touch with customers
Deflecting tickets with AI might result in the loss of contact with customers who no longer need to speak to a member of your support team. It’s easy to forget to collect feedback from customers who you don’t interact with on a regular basis.
Examples of AI customer service software
Intercom
Fin 2 is a frontline agent that comes with Intercom to handle your support. Fin is an AI agent that is essentially a chatbot and will interact with your customers. It can easily answer customer questions by learning everything about your company and product.
Fin personalizes its service for every customer that approaches your chatbot. It adjusts quickly to serve their unique needs. Fin can adopt your tone of voice, following your policies and procedures.
AI-generated insights give an overview into your whole organization so you can see how Fin is performing. Fin has complete up-to-date knowledge of your company’s products and processes.
HubSpot – ChatSpot
ChatSpot is best for sales, marketing and service professionals. It uses AI to work out when to send customers emails depending on if they would be open to it. It’s based on when they have opened emails in the past.
It has generative AI capabilities, so you can craft content based on what will resonate with your audience. Write a prompt and have Gen AI expand on your text so that you can send emails to customers.
ChatSpot will generate custom reports based on natural language. You don’t have to spend a lot of time configuring the platform when ChatSpot will do it for you.
Document360
Document360 is an AI-powered knowledge base that you can use as a self-service platform for your customers. On the one hand, AI-powered search can interpret natural language to help customers find the right information in the knowledge base. This search is powerful and customer-focused.
On the other hand, in the authoring side Eddy AI is used to help generate content based on inputs like summarizing your content, creating metadata and titles, related article recommendation, and more. Eddy AI is helping to generate a business glossary and an FAQs after every article.
As a knowledge base, you can use Document360 to create content for your customers. AI works in the background to make this a much better experience by providing extra features. Document360 is a standard knowledge base with AI-first capabilities so you can create a knowledge base that thrills your customers.
Conclusion
Use of AI in customer service is vitally important. It can handle customer queries and help agents create knowledge articles that feed generative AI. Being able to help customers 24/7 and handle a higher volume of tickets is just one of the ways that AI is aiding customer service teams.
Although there are some challenges, AI in customer service is still a growing phenomenon. More and more businesses are using AI in customer service to improve their offering and offer higher tier support to customers.
There are many examples of AI customer service tools out there and we’ve included just a few here. You can integrate them into your toolstack and use AI as a routine part of your customer service.
