AI The New Customer Support Executive: How it Helps

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

AI-enabled technologies have been widely adopted today. This is revitalizing customers’ experience – making it much more personal, empathetic, and effective. This is something that’s needed right now since customer experience is at a crossroads. While customers are spending more money and interacting with brands much more than they have in the past, they’re not as satisfied or trusting of these brands. This despite the fact that brands have more opportunities than ever before to communicate with their consumers. Unfortunately, they’re not delivering experiences that let them capitalize on these interactions.

As new innovations change the playing field, we can expect better interactions between brands and their customers. Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be used to help businesses overcome creative fatigue and create efficient, personalized experiences. For instance, chatbots draw on AI and machine learning to provide lifelike service 24/7. This is just one of the many ways AI will transform businesses in the future and why your business needs to pay attention to it.

The Main Advantage of AI: Creating Empathetic Experiences

Introducing voice AI in customer service helps your agents understand your customers’ questions better. It also enables them to copy important conversations without having to take notes about the important points. This will make your customers’ experience much better. Albert says this is because with AI you can collect more real-time information than ever before from various inputs so you have a much more comprehensive understanding of your customer. Using this to create personalized, empathic customer experiences will improve your customer satisfaction.

Other Advantages of AI

Although some businesses are concerned that automation will make the business world more impersonal, there’s evidence that the exact opposite is true: Technology will personalize your business since now all your employees can focus on providing a great customer experience. For instance, AI will enable all your customer-facing workers to provide personalized service so all your back-end employees need to do is focus on delivering client-centric outcomes. In turn, this will improve your consumer satisfaction and trust. There are many other great advantages to AI as well, including:

  • Responding to regulation surrounding customers’ rights: Now that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is in place European citizens can legally demand that you delete their personal information. This means that the stakes surrounding your customers’ experience have been raised, since negative interactions will impact your sales or you could lose valuable virtual assets.
  • Creating empathetic experiences will grow easier for you to do now that you have more real-time data from various sources. Now you can have a comprehensive understanding of your customer at any given point in time. You’ll want to use this power to create personalized, empathic customer experiences that make service delivery better and increase your customer satisfaction ratings too. Your employees must also become experts in harnessing this technology so you’re certain to really capture your customers’ wants and needs.
  • Providing everyone with a robotic assistant (e.g. chatbot, robotic software, automated tools) will become commonplace in fields like sales, marketing, and customer service. This will make an immediate impact since mundane tasks will be eliminated, efficiency increased, and employees will also have more time to focus on the more challenging aspects of customer experience.

How Your Business Can Take Advantage of AI

RT Insights says there are three things you need to do to get your money’s worth from AI and chatbots:

  • Strive for transparency – something consumers are demanding today. When surveyed, about 39% of people say they want a clearer understanding of how businesses use their information so they’re more comfortable using chatbots. However, you should never make your employees feel compelled to reveal everything all at once. Instead, you should offer them opportunities to seek information from your customers when they’re ready to provide it.
  • Personalized accuracy is important for your customers when they choose to partner you’re your chatbots. As such, you need to make sure that your chatbots offer learning capabilities and customization. Over time you’ll want to make sure your chatbot’s information accuracy improves on your end as well.
  • Keeping humans first is important. You want to make sure they view your chatbots as being both secure and beneficial. Today, this is somewhat of a challenge since only 17% of consumers believe that chatbots are a good addition in helping them have a better customer experience. Most people feel they still need human touches. Another 49% of consumers say they’d feel better using chatbots if they knew for sure that they could escalate their interactions to speak with a real person if necessary.

What This Means to Your Business

AI is becoming your best “weapon” in the “fight” to reach customers in real time. They also feel that it’ll help them increase their levels of engagement. Surveys have found that AI encourages people to shop more, spend more money, and tell their friends about their experiences. Out of 1,008 consumers, about 49% of them say they’re willing to shop more frequently, another 34% say they’ll spend more money, and 38% say they’ll share their experiences with friends and family. This is different from just a few years ago when people thought chatbots were best reserved for the movies. Today, 83% say they’re find using AI and chatbots though. In another survey it was discovered that most retailers are interested in using this technology to build stronger bridges to their customers. In fact, many of them expect to increase their spending by 7%.

Clearly, retailers have a deep involvement with technology today even though this is typically in back-end enterprise applications like merchandise management and in certain areas along the supply chain (e.g. warehousing, fulfillment). This is great because about 36% of customers don’t mind having this happen either while another 38% say they honestly have no preference. It’s also interesting to note that about 39% will even go so far as to admit that they find chatbots useful – especially when they’re tracking deliveries of purchases they’ve made online. With this in mind, retailers expect to start using additional technologies in the near future too.

About the Author

Being a senior business associate, Peter Davidson strives to help different brands and startups to make effective business decisions and plan effective business strategies. With years of rich domain expertise, he loves to share his views on the latest technologies and applications through his well-researched content pieces.

 

 

Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.

Speak Your Mind

*

Comments

  1. What caught my attention is what you said about AI customer service creating empathetic experiences that will make it a lot easier for you. My sister owns a small real estate firm and she’s been talking nonstop about AI for her customer service needs. I personally think it’s a great idea since it offers tons of benefits that will save her a lot of time and stress.