How can you use AI to improve your customer service?

Technology has made the ability to communicate instantaneous, and with this comes high customer expectations for fast responses from your business. Meeting these demands can be challenging.

Whether that's a small team trying to juggle daily work with customer service or a large business with a team dedicated to customer service. You could try and lighten the load by providing a series of FAQs via your website. Or take that a step further and create a Knowledge Base to try and lighten the load coming into your inbox, however it’s not eradicating the problem entirely. 

AI tools can massively benefit your customer service by solving multiple issues at once, this will help your business continue come out on top and be a consumer favourite.  

Here are five ways AI can have a positive impact on your customer service;  

• 1) Ticket Deflection:  

We all know what it feels like to just not have enough time in the day, especially when dealing with customer service. No request is the same in complexity or importance so it’s hard to juggle the never-ending inbox and get everything done. AI can help solve this by taking over manual and routine tasks, freeing up some much-needed time for your team. Whilst a chatbot can’t replace your job (thankfully) it can answer a lot of questions from customers to make sure you aren’t spread as thin. Automisation tools can also help keep the process running smoothly, without manual input from your team – for example ordering from an ecommerce site; an AI chat bot can let you know your customer know their order status, update that status to ‘order received’ or ‘shipped’ as you scan and fulfil the order. Handing over these mundane tasks to an automated system frees up so much time allowing you to focus on what matters.  

• 2) Increased Personalisation: 

Many websites now offer personalisation to enhance their user experience, logging into a platform and seeing ‘Welcome back, John’, but that’s not where the personalisation stops. Intelligent AI engines now push personalised content to your consumers, based on their behaviour and engagement.   

It’s almost impossible to do this manually – for instance imagine having to analyse large amounts of data to make decisions about what will entice your customer to click your latest offer on the monthly email. Now imagine doing that for all your customers, 5 times a week. AI is the missing link that makes that happen, at–scale and therefore directly enables you to increase traffic on your platform and in turn optimise sales opportunities.  

• 3) Automatic Ticket Classification 

Sifting through a full inbox before you start your daily admin, to check for the most time sensitive issue takes time itself, and it’s easy for an important enquiry to slip through the net, leaving your response time much longer than it should be. Implementing AI into your customer request workflow allows you to analyse key words and organise issues by priority, sentiment and other metrics, making sure that you continually meet SLA’s (Service Level Agreements) which is important when offering customer support.  

• 4) Workplace Efficiency 

A large frustration reported in the ‘National Customer Rage’ study was long wait times. Technology is now so instant that as a consumer we expect that instant response to our issue. This is where chat bots and AI widgets are really useful as they run 24/7 and are programmed to answer questions instantly, again keeping lots of admin out of your inbox whilst satisfying the customer. Even in the case of out-of-hours support, your chatbot could organise a call back keeping the conversation flowing and helping to reassure the client that the issue will be resolved within a set time frame. 

• 5) Customer Feedback and Improvement 

The best way to improve your product is through feedback from those who directly use it. Collecting feedback can be tricky, especially when wanting it to be accurate. Asking questions through an anonymous survey means you’re more likely to get a genuine response from the consumer; by using AI to build your survey you can generate questions that will get you the most data. Based on tracking consumer trends and habits, it will know what to ask, helping you understand why parts of your platform get less traffic or less click throughs for example. Once the data has been collected, AI will also analyse these results, compile the data into key insights and calculate the important metrics – making it easy for you to see a holistic view of your consumers behaviour.  

Overall, AI cannot replace the much-needed human aspect of customer service, but it does have a lot of benefits that allow your company to free up time for other areas so it can perform to its best ability.

Keeping customers happy and well informed is essential to maintain that relationship between your business and a returning customer, it’s also vital for making the workplace enjoyable for staff, increase revenue and enjoy your admin days in the office!