AI for customer service: The Ultimate Guide

AI for customer service: The Ultimate Guide

AI solutions can automate various customer service tasks. These solutions can handle everything from text-based customer conversations to personalizing recommendations and responses.

AI solutions are not just handy for automating repetitive tasks; they also empower human customer service agents. By handling routine tasks, AI frees up agents to provide better and more personalized service to those who will benefit most.

AI solutions, whether handling incoming calls to a call center or managing customer databases, are designed to improve almost every aspect of customer service. They do this by becoming more efficient, reducing response times, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

What are the benefits of AI in customer service?

So why should most companies look to AI solutions for their customer service?

Here are some key benefits of implementing AI into your customer service.

Agent Efficiency

One key benefit of AI is that it doesn't replace human customer service agents; instead, it makes them more efficient.

For example, AI integration for call centers can help manage activity spikes during peak periods. It can answer and redirect calls that agents are too busy to handle, allowing them to focus on helping customers.

AI can automate call transcription, incoming call distribution, and caller data collection.

Ultimately, this automation allows human agents to focus on the tasks they provide the most value to customers.

Customer Experience

AI should only be implemented if it improves the overall customer experience. It isn't simply automation.

While AI solutions allow for process updates, they can provide high-quality 24/7 customer support, meaning customers don't have to wait until human agents are available to find solutions.

Decision Making

AI can collect, manage, and analyze data. With intelligent data analysis, AI can help you make data-driven decisions about customer behavior, segmentation, and CRM.

The data and decisions from AI solutions can also be used in marketing and by human agents to better understand and improve decision making.

Preventing Fraud

AI systems can also improve security. AI-driven tools vastly reduce the time to detect scams and fraud, allowing customer support and security agents to focus on real customers.

24/7 Availability

Since AI doesn't need to eat or sleep, it can be made available to customers 24/7. While it's not recommended that you use it to replace human agents, it can be used to provide solutions to problems when human agents aren't available at any time of the day.

The solution for many customer service problems is likely to be found in FAQs and common issues, which AI can help with every hour of the day.

Reduced Waiting Times

Particularly in call centers, AI plays a significant role in reducing customer waiting times. It can provide customers with solutions without human intervention, better manage incoming calls, and even prepare specific customer support tickets before a human agent gets involved.

AI can provide customers with solutions without human intervention, better manage incoming calls, and even prepare specific customer support tickets before a human agent gets involved.

Live Automatic Customer Service Request Management

AI solutions like callbots can even reply to customer requests. The more requests an AI solution can handle, the happier customers are.

When an AI solution can handle an entire request, human agents can focus exclusively on the requests that require human intervention.

Reduced Company Operating Costs

For many companies, the main benefit of AI solutions is that they can reduce operating costs. Increased productivity means reduced costs and the savings can be reinvested to improve customer service and experience.

Customizable Solutions

Most AI solutions are customizable, allowing companies to tailor callbots, chatbots, and other AI solutions to the kind of problems that their customer service regularly encounters.

You can customize AI solutions to your brand identity and the specific requests that your customer service agents deal with regularly.

How to use AI in customer service

The term AI is often used without mentioning the type of AI solution used. When it comes to customer service, there are several types of AI-driven solutions that you can use.

Here are the types of AI-driven solutions that you could use to improve a company's customer service. These include callbots, chatbots, AI for automating workflows, data analytics, AI in CRM, content generation, sentiment analysis, and recommendation systems.

AI Callbots and Voicebots

One common solution for customer service departments and call centers is a callbot or a voicebot. The callbot is an AI solution that talks to humans over the phone.

A callbot will use voice recognition technology to understand what the customer says. From there, it will transform the speech into text and use natural language processing to understand it.

It will then process the query, provide an answer, and use text-to-speech technology to voice the response to the customer.

The critical difference between a voicebot and a callbot is that one is accessed and used through a phone call. You might have a voicebot integrated into your phone, but you don't dial a number to communicate with it.

With a callbot, the callbot is integrated into the company's telephony systems and can manage and redirect calls.

AI Chatbots

A chatbot is akin to the middle part of the callbot process without the voice recognition and voice synthesis parts.

The chatbot receives text instructions (often in a chatbox) and provides the answers within a chat window.

Automate your Workflows

There are AI solutions that can be used to automate and optimize workflows. This can be particularly useful for customer support teams looking to increase productivity.

There are AI solutions for handling incoming customer requests, routing them to the correct solution, and even agent according to the customer's intent, sentiment, or language.

Simple tasks like summarizing the customer's issue before a human agent takes a call can save time and improve customer satisfaction.

Data Analytics

Through predictive analytics, AI solutions can even proactively predict customer concerns, allocate resources appropriately, and personalize interactions with each customer.

AI in your CRM

Making AI an integral part of your CRM can be hugely beneficial. Generative AI can help create drafts based on customer conversations and behavioral data.

CRM isn't the only backend system that AI can be integrated into, but it's certainly one of the most powerful solutions.

AI can also be integrated across CRM and e-commerce tools to send powerful recommendations, upsell, and boost sales and conversion rates. For instance, AI can analyze customer data to suggest personalized products or services, or it can be used to automate the process of sending follow-up emails after a purchase.

Content Generation

Content generation is one of the most commonly known uses of AI. Not every AI is used for content generation, but generative AI can generate text responses to FAQs, answer customer queries, or even create art.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is an AI tool and system that can gauge customer sentiment through feedback, reviews, and even social media.

By analyzing the tone and content of customer interactions, AI can help companies identify areas for improvement and respond to specific customer concerns, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.

Companies can use AI-powered sentiment analysis to improve customer service and respond to specific customer concerns.

Recommendation Systems

AI can make intelligent customer recommendations and suggestions, drawing upon vast amounts of data from various knowledge bases.

Chatbots and callbots can provide product recommendations based on customer behavior and purchase history.

AI recommendation systems can also be integrated into CRM and CMS to provide content recommendations!

Case Studies of AI improving customer service

There have been many examples of AI being used in customer service. These are just a few of our favorite examples.

Best Western and YeldaAI

YeldaAI worked with Best Western, a cooperative hotel group with 300 hotels across France and North Africa, to help with customer service for their 3- to 5-star hotels.

In an industry where the customer is at the heart of what they do, customer service plays a huge role before, during, and after a customer stays in one of their hotels. Digital tools allow them to provide 24/7 customer service to customers on their preferred channels.

They chose Yelda because it offered a real voicebot that allowed customers to have a natural conversation with the AI without changing how they spoke or their vocabulary.

Once they'd established their FAQs, the implementation was quick and easy. They defined the answers, synonyms, and other parameters.

The YeldaAI voicebot solution developed for Best Western can handle booking inquiries and look up customer information on rewards programs.

Klarna

The Fintech company Klarna licensed OpenAI's models in 2022. It developed an AI Assistant to automate customer service tasks as well as an internal AI assistant known as Kiki that helps employees across several departments.

The customer service assistant handles around two-thirds of Klarna's customer service interactions and around 2.3 million conversations yearly.

HealthTap

HealthTap is an example of AI used for customer service in the healthcare industry. Their chatbot offers users medical information and symptom checking and can even connect them to healthcare professionals when necessary.

Amazon

Amazon is probably the largest company implementing AI chatbots for customer service.

Their chatbot solution has enhanced customer experience by tracking orders, providing estimated delivery times, and offering real-time updates to customers. This has massively reduced customer wait times.

Things to consider when implementing AI in customer service

You need to think about how to integrate AI into your customer service. Here's what to consider before deciding if and what AI customer service solutions would be suitable for you and your company.

Budget and Cost

Be sure to consider the cost of implementing AI into your customer service and the value added by integrating it.

Customer Experience

The ultimate goal of AI customer service should be to optimize and improve the customer experience. While AI can save money versus human customer service agents, the downsides of a worsened customer experience could cost you when not correctly implemented.

Always put customer experience and satisfaction at the center of customer service decision-making.

Implementation

The cost of AI in customer service is more than just financial. There's also the implementation to consider. This could include developing the AI, using customer service software that uses AI, and training staff members on deploying and using AI.

Reliability

The AI you implement needs to be reliable. You should know that it's actually solving problems with accurate information and that it works as intended.

Security

Ensure that the AI solutions you choose are secure and that you have implemented any other necessary security measures.

Value

Carefully consider the cost of AI solutions and the value they bring to your customer service, satisfaction, and experience.

Workforce

Think about your employees and how AI will help them deliver the best customer service possible. AI is a tool to help human customer service agents perform to the best of their abilities and focus on what they do best, offering real human interaction and solutions to customers who need it.

Make sure that any AI solution complements the current workforce.

AI for CS FAQ

Naturally, you may have some questions. Here are some of the questions most people ask about AI in customer service.

Is AI going to replace customer service agents?

No. AI is used to complement human customer service agents, not replace them.

AI solutions should be used to handle and automate repetitive tasks, freeing up human customer service agents to do their best work and improving customer experience and satisfaction.

While AI customer service can be cheaper than human customer service agents, this is a false economy since the cost of replacing human agents entirely with AI will be seen in lower overall levels of customer satisfaction.

AI can strike the perfect balance when used correctly alongside human customer service agents.

Is your data secure when using AI for customer service?

How secure your data is depends on the measures you take to keep it secure. Data can be made secure when using AI for customer service.

Some standard measures for securing customer service data when using AI include:

  • Choosing transparent AI algorithms
  • End-to-end encryption
  • Ensuring data is only readable by machines by tokenizing it
  • Regularly performing security measure audits
  • Using training datasets that exclude identifiers

What industries benefit the most from AI customer service?

Almost every industry will benefit from AI customer service in the future. Those that are likely to gain the most from leveraging AI in their customer service include:

  • Finance
  • Healthcare
  • Manufacturing
  • Real estate
  • Retail

What is the future of AI in customer service?

AI is expected to be responsible for about 80% of customer service interactions in the next three years.

Customer service powered by AI will deliver fast, personalized service that is indistinguishable from that offered by human customer service agents in many ways.

AI will improve customer experience and the everyday working lives of customer service agents. These agents will ultimately be able to provide better and more rewarding customer service solutions, leaving AI to deal with many of the repetitive and draining aspects of their jobs.