How to Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Service without Losing the Human Touch?

Customers have high expectations in relation to the level of service they demand from companies. While the American Express Customer Service Barometer found that users are willing to spend up to 17% more on businesses with excellent customer service, the main reason most of them switch products or services is because they don’t feel valued by the brand. In fact, 33% of customers change companies after a bad experience.

Introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into operational processes is one way that organizations can control costs while improving their service capabilities and maintaining the human touch that makes customers feel appreciated and valued.

What Is AI-based Customer Service?

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning facilitate the work of customer service agents, saving them time and offering a more satisfactory CX.

Integrated AI can instantly retrieve the data an agent needs, while the agent or the support team deals directly with the human side of customer service. This eliminates the need for agents to run multiple systems simultaneously to service customer inquiries.

Instead of employing agents to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a call center, Artificial Intelligence can be used to receive and classify calls and messages, so that “human agents” can work in shifts more reasonable, with greater efficiency and less physical and mental stress.

Likewise, AI allows companies to be present throughout each step of the customer journey.

How Is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Used in Customer Service?

There are many reasons why AI and automation should be implemented in customer service. Here are some ways these technologies are already being used:

1) Chatbots

Chatbots help reduce costs, expand customer service, and enable agents to have more meaningful and productive conversations.

If chatbots have access to information about customer preferences, they can interact with customers to the point where an agent is needed. Once the conversation is transferred to an agent, you can pick up where the chatbot left off.

Eventually, a chatbot can be programmed to not only acquire customer information, but also to recommend actions for users and agents to take next. If a customer simply needs a common question answered about a product they already purchased, the chatbot can direct them to a frequently asked questions (FAQs) section instead of contacting an agent.

This allows agents to handle the most complex customer inquiries. All chatbot interactions can be automatically tagged so they are easy to track and refer to, and can be used to improve future recommendations.

2) Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be used to handle necessary but routine tasks that prevent support agents from interacting with customers in any meaningful way. By taking care of low-priority tasks, RPA helps contact center employees spend their time handling high-value customers or answering complex questions.

RPA works across multiple systems to track user actions within an application to complete and perform tasks ranging from automatically replying to emails to routing calls. In addition to reducing costs, Robotic Process Automation has the power to increase revenue by accelerating the rate at which customers can make purchases from a business.

3) Agent Specialization

Using AI to capture information about customers and transmit only the necessary parts of that information allows agents to have more meaningful conversations and better understand the areas of the business that matter.

For example, if a customer wants to speak with an agent even after discovering that a product is discontinued on the company’s website, the agent can immediately start the conversation by offering recommendations on other products they might like. Artificial Intelligence does not eliminate the need for human agents, as many people incorrectly assume when they hear about the use of AI in customer service. On the contrary, it increases the human team and allows them to be better at their jobs.

4) Supervision of Support Operations

When AI is used to monitor support operations, you can predict when conversations may start to turn from positive to negative. This information allows supervisors to intervene accordingly and call customer service to regulate quality.

Artificial Intelligence can also help monitor that responses result in reopened tickets. If response A, for example, tends to resolve queries quickly, but response B results in the ticket being repeatedly opened, the system may recommend that you remove response B for agents to be successful. In this way, managers and executives can use the data generated by the AI to monitor customer service operations in a clearer and more efficient way, improving day-to-day operations for the entire call center team.

What Are the Advantages of Automated Customer Service?

Customer satisfaction is directly related to the service experience, so it is important to ensure that the customer journey is as seamless as possible. Integrating AI into customer service is not about replacing humans. Rather, it’s about arming contact center agents with the information they need to have useful conversations with customers and using the data to personalize the CX with the brand.

Incorporating AI customer service not only improves customer relationships, it builds trust and increases brand loyalty. This means more repeat customers and more “word of mouth” referrals for a business.

In conclusion, the implementation of an AI strategy in an organization and optimizing it according to the data collected, will lead it to success. Using Artificial Intelligence to build a more complete view of the customer relationship with the brand helps companies meet high expectations for exemplary service and appear anything but artificial.