Importance of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Service
AI in customer service can be implemented for a variety of purposes. It is used to stimulate sales, redirect customers to products that are relevant to them, or identify negative factors that reduce customer retention.
According to IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, 35% of companies use AI in their business, while 42% reported they are still exploring AI.
The AI adoption rates will continue to grow in 2023 and beyond.
Therefore, companies from any industry whose services revolve around customer services should be thinking about integrating it into their services.
So how exactly can AI benefit your customer service?
Personalization of services
AI in customer service can benefit companies whose customers live in different regions, speak different languages, and have different cultures and traditions. In this respect, personalizing services or content to different regions without AI is a challenging task. Based on customers’ data, companies can identify customer preferences and provide them personalized services. This boosts customer engagement, drives sales, and gives company a competitive advantage.
Chatbots
Conversational AI has become popular in customer support software, and chatbots are its primary application. Conversational AI in chatbots uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to enable computers to understand human speech and respond in a way that mimics human conversation.
This is typically used to automate routine customer service tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, providing basic support, providing product or service information, and promoting products or services.
Their main advantages are 24/7 availability and consistent customer service. In addition, they cut costs since you don’t have to maintain a 24/7 customer service staff.
Apart from it, AI adds self-learning ability to chatbots, which also future-proofs companies.
Predicting product demand
Demand prediction with the help of AI in customer service is another avid benefit. Feeding AI with crucial data such as billions of transactions of different products, currency rates, social media news, customer portraits, and even seasons can give companies more clarity for products’ demand prediction. As an example, AI can determine which products would be in demand in the next month. This can yield measurable results: for example, German e-commerce Otto managed to reduce returns by 2 million units a year, and reduce inventory by 20%.
Smart Emails
According to Forrester, more than 54% of all customers use email to interact with companies, citing it as one of their preferred communication channels.
AI in customer service, you can do away with automated responses and offer “smart” email support instead.
Those companies that prioritize emails as the most essential marketing channel can improve their customer service. For example, employment platforms use AI development services to deliver personalized job listings and training opportunities. To automate marketing segmentation, predictive analytics of users’ preferences (based on interests, location, previous behavior, and stated skills) can be used to enrich the AI algorithm.
This will drive further customer engagement, double the number of page visits, and improve email open rate by at least 50%.
Manage your sales more effectively with AI in customer service
AI analyzes an avalanche of historical data collected from similar sale cases, thereby offering data-driven recommendations to sales agents for the next steps or actions. This can provide sales agents with more data-driven decisions: should you offer an extended warranty on an item with an expired warranty? Or perhaps offer discounts, cashback, and servicing?
AI enriches the agent-customer experience and improves their communication, equipping the agent with more reliable information and enabling them to deliver it to the customer.
Gathering Information through image analysis
Sometimes an image can describe a problem better than words. Consider, for example, a car insurance claim. It makes more sense to send the company a picture of the damaged car than to try to describe the problem in words in correspondence or on the phone.
Artificial Intelligence technology is getting better at analyzing sacramento web design every year, and computer vision is the next step in this evolution. This allows users to send images from their smartphones directly to virtual assistants.
If customers come across a defective or broken product, they can send a picture of the product to a chatbot, for example. The AI-powered software identifies the product model from the image. The system sends the user information about the warranty conditions or tells them what steps should be done to fix the problem or how to contact a service center.
This feature provides customers with a convenient self-service option. Employees do not have to be involved in customer interaction.
To conclude
AI technology is soaring and should not be treated with a grain of salt. It opens up more opportunities for companies in different sectors to improve customer data analysis, customer behavior prediction, and much more.
