Artificial Intelligence has captured the attention of the customer service industry for some time now. Sure, in the earlier days, the industry was pretty much skeptical about the ramifications that AI could cause in case of wide-scale adoption. However, in course of time, things are proving to be pretty fine with pioneering AI technologies such as Alexa and Siri leading the way and persuading businesses to set up their own personalized versions of AI, sooner than later.
These digital assistants, programmed to carry out several tasks with minimal effort, has suddenly made the industry sit up and take notice of the fact that how customer processes could be easily streamlined and how the customer service agents could boost their productivity through the intervention of AI.
Today, AI is at the centre of customer service departments, handling rote queries, and offloading the complex ones to live agents seamlessly, which in turn is saving a good amount of time of customer service agents.
Further, AI aids in centralizing the data from myriad databases. This, as well, is leaving enormous time in the hands of human agents, when it comes to answering customer queries, and not wasting valuable time looking for answers in the heat of the moment.
To cut to the chase, AI plays a big-time role in transforming customer service. These days’ customers need instant answers and AI-powered customer service systems help you do just that.
AI changes customer service – how?
Here are some ways AI is revolutionizing the customer service systems:
1. AI – A Perfect Co-pilot to the Agents
Providing customers with the right information is not always easy. Whenever a customer calls you up, you are expected to provide answers within 10 minutes. Because this is an age of instant gratification and customers don’t like to wait for anything, let alone for answers to their questions.
Enter conversational Artificial Intelligence Software.
Conversational AI solutions are trained to support human agents. At times, they can easily handle oft-repeated queries by understanding the user intent, and even factor in the context, thereby providing customers with all the required info on an immediate basis.
Further, unlike chatbots, a conversation AI sees more than what meets the eye, and goes into the depth of the problem before answering queries and not just opens the conversation without putting any thought to it.
Furthermore, even siloed data could be easily sorted out via AI, empowering agents to tackle complex queries, asap.
What’s more? These conversational AI also have quite an understanding of complex queries that are beyond their scope of understanding and problem-solving skill-set. In such circumstances, the AIs might pass on the queries to the human agent or might as well direct the customer to a resource or FAQ pages.
2. Personalizing Customer Service Experience
AI uses the organization’s data to understand your customers better and, in turn, offer personalized experiences to them. Audio files, call history and more are scanned by the AI algorithms to figure the type of products customers wants, the issues they are facing, thereby building deeper engagement with them.
The sort of groundwork undertaken by the AIs to source personal data could be used by the agents to offer discounts, cross-sell and up sell items. Or, for that matter, help agents find a connection. So, if you are planning to integrate AI tools to offer personalized customer service experience, you could seek help of top artificial intelligence companies.
3. Connecting with Customers at their Convenience Level
Customers tend to connect with businesses via emails, phones, online chats and so on. AI can easily scale these channels so that you could reach the customers where they are and that too without compromising on customer experience quality.
The Marriage of Man and Machines Is the Forever Reality
Sure, there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI development is happening at the cost of human jobs, and whether AI will replace humans completely. The fact is technological revolutions have always created more job opportunities, improved processes and more than anything, enhanced employee happiness in the longer run.
And, of course, unarguably, AI will change the way we interact. Nonetheless, the need for human interactions is not going to fade away that easily. Some people will still prefer interacting with humans over AI robots. So, in the future, we might see brands adopting a two-pronged approach that would benefit both the customers and the agents. The brands that are able to blend the two will be ones benefiting from this incredible evolution.