15 Ways To Leverage AI In Customer Service

Many businesses currently employ chatbots to answer basic queries using information gathered from internal systems. This includes things like delivery dates, owed balances, order status, and more. We’re looking forward to being your companion on this journey — that’s why we’re building thoughtful AI-powered features that only improve your customer conversations. Customer service leaders have known for ages that chat support is usually a cheaper and more efficient way to provide support.

For businesses with global customer bases, the ability to offer multilingual support is, like my beloved Christmas breakfast burrito, massive. It may not be feasible for every seller to have support agents covering every major language in the world, but it is feasible to employ AI translation tools to support them. Many AI chatbots and conversational tools have the capacity to generate content in different languages. Using chatbots as an example, you can automatically respond to a customer’s live chat message within seconds. Use AI technology to understand the customer voice and turn it into usable, searchable text in real time.

Bots and automation

Increased efficiency and quality of your customer support processes lead to happier customers. They become brand advocates and boost the reputation of your business—good testimonials attract more customers and lead to higher revenues. Using AI for customer support automates many processes and saves you a lot of time and money.

This helps them create a tailor-made entertainment journey for each member. Moreover, the AI content assistant integrates seamlessly with all HubSpot features, enabling you to generate and share high-quality content without the need to switch between different tools. It instantly recognizes the language used by your customers and provides immediate translation. This ensures your customers receive efficient support, regardless of their language. Consequently, it automatically assigns the ticket to the right agent capable of handling the situation. This ensures a smoother resolution process and helps your business avoid further escalations.

Netflix’s use of machine learning to curate personalized recommendations for its viewers is pretty well known. The popular language learning app, Duolingo, recently released a new learning experience powered by GPT-4. This approach leverages AI and machine learning to forecast ingredient and cooking quantities based on demand. In fact, some of the most useful tools are the ones that are integrated with your internal software.

Examples of AI in Customer Service (From Companies That Do It Right)

Many customer service teams use natural language processing today in their customer experience or voice of the customer programs. By having the system transcribe interactions across phone, email, chat and SMS channels and then analyze the data for certain trends and themes, an agent can meet the customer’s needs more quickly. Previously, analyzing customer interactions was a lengthy process that often involved multiple teams and resources. Now, natural language processing eliminates these redundancies to create deeper and more efficient customer satisfaction.

At the same time, leaders are wondering how to avoid common pitfalls in their AI usage so they don’t spend unnecessary money on flashy tools that won’t deliver. The streaming giant uses AI and machine learning to personalize its vast library of movies and TV shows. It can also keep customers updated about new products or services that align with their purchase history. Equipped with this information, your agents gain valuable insights into the best approach for each interaction. And, crucially, it’s all done in service of turning great agents into incredible ones. Forbes Business Council members share how AI can be leveraged to enhance customer service within an organization.

AI can be used in customer service to help streamline workflows for agents while improving experiences for the customers themselves through automation. Leaders in AI-enabled customer engagement have committed to an ongoing journey of investment, learning, and improvement, through five levels of maturity. At level one, servicing is predominantly manual, paper-based, and high-touch. While Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have been automating simple routing and transactions for decades, new, conversational IVR systems use AI to handle tasks. Everything from verifying users with voice biometrics to directly telling the IVR system what needs to happen with the help of natural language processing is simplifying the customer experience. Some companies turn to visual IVR systems via mobile applications to streamline organized menus and routine transactions.

These measures don’t solve anything for customers, but they go a long way in setting expectations and keeping them satisfied. Empower your customer service agents to easily build and maintain AI-powered experiences without a degree in computer science. OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models are industry-leading large language models that have incredible potential if used properly in the customer experience space.

Change tone, automatically write support articles, and deploy bots that sound like people, all with a few clicks. Levity is a tool that allows you to train AI models on images, documents, and text data. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can rebuild manual workflows and connect everything to your existing systems without writing a single line of code.‍If you liked this blog post, you’ll love Levity. You want to include at least two labels and a minimum of 20 data points to your model to effectively train it to produce more accurate results. The machine will improve in precision and accuracy over time—the more data you provide, the more precise the predictions will be. If you have a large number of customer messages and you’re processing them all manually, you might not be able to get to them all.

Nevertheless, an estimated 75 percent of customers use multiple channels in their ongoing experience.2“The state of customer care in 2022,” McKinsey, July 8, 2022. Robotic process automation (RPA) can automate many simple tasks that an agent used to perform. Automating bots to focus on updating records, managing incidents or providing proactive outreach to customers, for example, can drastically reduce costs and improve efficiency and processing time. One of the best ways to determine where RPA can assist in customer service is by asking the customer service agents. They can likely identify the processes that take the longest or have the most clicks between systems.

You’ll become more efficient and get smarter insights from what your customers are saying. Let’s see how the customer experience improves when you implement an AI tool in your customer support process. Just like analyzing the sentiment of tickets, you can also analyze pieces of text—such as customer support queries Chat PG and competitor reviews. You just need to set up the tags you want the AI model to use when analyzing and categorizing your text—as demonstrated below. When it comes to Artificial Intelligence in customer service, we’re typically talking about natural language processing (NLP)—a subset of Machine Learning.

According to our statistics, AI improves productivity of more than 80% of employees. And all this at a fraction of the costs of additional hiring and training human agents. Often, AI tools don’t require big initial investment to install the software on your website. They have freemium versions to play with, allow you to only get the customized features that you need, and come with pre-designed conversation flows and templates. This drastically reduces your support costs and allows you to do much more for much less. There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of customer service.

Sentiment analysis is a type of NLP (natural language processing) that uses AI to recognize the sentiment and emotional tone expressed in text. Each of them can improve your support processes and help you excel at your communication with visitors. AI customer support tools simplify collecting big chunks of information to establish customer behavioral patterns, get a single customer view, and work towards hyper-personalization. There’s a variety of AI software that can help businesses from any industry partially or fully automate the customer communication tasks. These include responding to customer inquiries, welcoming new customers, recovering abandoned carts, answering FAQs, and more.

For instance, some can automatically take step-by-step screenshots as you work in your product (like Scribe). Nearly 70% of consumers will try to solve a problem themselves first, and customers prefer help centers over all other self-service options. https://chat.openai.com/ Even the most powerful large language model currently available to the public (Open AI’s ChatGPT) isn’t actually artificial intelligence. It can only use the information it’s been given to predict the word that is most likely next in a sequence.

Customer service is a vital consideration for 96% of consumers across the globe when it comes to deciding whether or not to stay loyal to a business. Learn more about how our AI features can save you time and energy on every conversation. Your customer is facing a gnarly bug, and you need to escalate their issue to another team. It doesn’t actually understand the information it’s been given, which means it can sometimes put that information together in ways that aren’t true or don’t make sense. And while ChatGPT can sound very human, it’s not able to process and use information in the way that we humans do.

AI can make sense of this data and analyze it as it comes, generating actionable and timely insights. Implementing AI-gathered insights and personalizing experience is crucial. This way, customers get information that is relevant to them and feel that the brand’s communication is specifically tailored to them.

• No matter how efficient and productive your support team is, they are not superhumans.
• Increased efficiency and quality of your customer support processes lead to happier customers.
• For instance, a scenario where a customer asks, “Where is my order? It was supposed to reach me yesterday.” The AI can sense from the tone that the sentiment is negative and the customer is displeased.
• In customer service, machine learning can support agents with predictive analytics to identify common questions and responses.

It works side by side with your agent, helping them to quickly adjust the tone or length of a message. AI tools can also enhance and even automate the quality of your customer conversations. This is where generative AI tools like Help Scout’s AI summarize really shine. AI summarize can summarize a complex conversation in seconds, generating an easy-to-understand bullet point summary that allows a new agent or team to get up to speed effortlessly.

But if you’re scrambling to handle calls as it is, you won’t learn anything from all that valuable information. AI, then, as well as being a great way to streamline operations and help agents out, is also the method by which you turn customer data into insights that can transform your business. When people think of artificial intelligence in this space, they usually think first of chatbots that can participate in customer conversations in lieu of a human support agent. Unlike traditional customer service bots, it doesn’t rely on pre-designed conversational paths and templates. It uses AI and NLP technology to understand customers, interact with them, ask follow-up questions, and make sure users are satisfied. Apart from scraping customer requests and questions to support, AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can also help with social listening.

Support ticket organization

They have employed computer vision and machine learning to analyze a customer’s body measurements, skin tone, and clothing preferences. HubSpot’s AI content assistant, powered by OpenAI’s GPT model, is an invaluable tool for any team focused on creating and sharing content quickly. Whether it’s for blogs, landing pages, or anything else you need to write, this AI tool can help.

For example, when you call your favorite company and an automated voice leads you through a series of prompts, that’s voice AI in action. That means you can use AI to determine how your customers are likely to behave based on their purchase history, buying habits, and personal preferences. Your average handle time will go down because you’re taking less time to resolve incoming requests.

Developing consistent, convenient, and personalized experiences at scale has never been more important. 47% of Gen Z will walk away from a brand after a single bad customer service experience, so every interaction matters. AI helps brands provide reliable experiences for every type of interaction.

ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard are all AI-powered tools that use large language models to train their understanding of how we use language to communicate. As the demand for an improved and personalized customer experience grows, organizations are turning to AI to help bridge the gap. It’s definitely the future of customer service and the true key to winning more customers who will stay with you as loyal clients for a long time. Intent Analytics will help you to prioritize tasks, assign them to relevant agents, and learn about the topics of conversations without even reading them. It allows you to quickly and efficiently take care of the most urgent chats without making clients wait.

AI customer service for sentiment analysis

Imagine your chatbots handling direct inquiries and automated processes, eliminating time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Customer service teams have a tough job, so any help they get can make a world of difference to the overall customer experience. Sure, you can use AI to run an effective chatbot, but that’s just one of its many abilities. There’s no replacement for truly effective customer service teams staffed by talented, empathetic human beings. That means it’s not AI’s job in the contact center to replace people; it should instead be there to help those people do their jobs to the best of their ability – and to feel empowered to do so. In the customer service industry specifically, AI is a powerful force for improving the overall customer experience – and driving up customer satisfaction in the process.

Today’s customers expect instant answers and generally choose to self-serve first if at all possible. Their data sets are effectively created by taking an enormous snapshot of swathes of the internet and processing everything into algorithmic understanding. The resulting software is referred to as ‘Generative AI’ tools since they’re able to generate new content on command. From gathering data to speech recognition and message response times, AI can enhance the customer experience in nearly every way when it’s applied correctly. Here, 15 members of Forbes Business Council share their expert insight on how organizations can leverage AI to enhance their customer service. “The customer always comes first”—it’s a business mantra as old as time, but it’s more relevant now than ever before.

While usual bots have pre-designed conversational paths and rely on templates, Lyro uses NLP to understand questions and have human-like conversations. It can ask follow-up questions and chat with customers until they are satisfied. In fact, it starts communicating with customers and learning from its interactions from the moment you click “activate”. On top of that, it responds to visitors within the information from your existing knowledge base, so you don’t need to train the bot or set up conversation flows. And AI tools can identify keywords and analyze the nature of the request to understand if they should redirect it to a human agent.

Modern-day customers are picky and demanding, with as many as 79% claiming they wouldn’t complete their order if customer service was unresponsive. The truth is, hiring dozens of support agents is a thousand times more expensive than implementing an AI customer service tool. So, not only do AI solutions bring a lot of money to your business, they also save plenty of expenses. AI customer service is the use of tools powered by artificial intelligence to automate support and provide more efficient assistance to buyers.

In fact, 78% of customer service professionals say AI and automation tools help them spend time on more important aspects of their role. AI is transforming customer service by bringing together the best of tech efficiency and human-like warmth. AI tools aren’t just about automation — they understand context, feelings, and even humor. With AI in particular, there are a few strands working together to help move businesses in that direction.

Wait time monitoring

With improved workflows, AI can give you better customer response metrics. Zendesk AI comes pre-trained for financial services, insurance, IT, HR, travel, hospitality, tourism, retail, and software. Semantic search understands the meaning of your search queries to surface the most relevant results, even if you don’t use the exact keywords.

For example, messages from customers on your CRM tool can be structured according to the process or feature they refer to, but the content of the message is still unstructured. The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is setting the stage for increased efficiency across companies, especially when it comes to customer service. For instance, Help Scout’s AI assist acts like a personal writing assistant in email conversations, helping agents match your company’s support voice and style.

The vast majority of consumers, both in the U.S. (82%) and abroad (74%), still prefer to speak to a human. Your customers will remember that connection when it’s time to purchase again, and so will the friends and family they recommended your product to. With the introduction of generative AI, these customer insight tools can now generate actionable summaries of trends, highlights, and concerns from your customer data. The companies we’ve highlighted in this blog are leading the way in adopting these transformative technologies, enhancing their customer service strategies, and delivering exceptional value to their customers. From providing round-the-clock assistance to predicting customer behavior and preferences, AI is increasingly becoming an integral part of delivering a seamless and personalized customer experience. To manage this unprecedented volume without compromising on their high customer service standards, Decathlon turned to Heyday, a conversational AI platform.

The second strand is in enabling agents to provide better customer service. We’ve already mentioned that AI shouldn’t be seen as a system to replace human agents, and that’s an important trend. Zendesk suggests that 68% of agents report feeling overwhelmed at times, so it’s crucial that businesses provide them with tools that can help make their jobs more manageable. That means there are a lot of simpler queries that can be offloaded to free up human agents for more pressing calls and interactions. These transcriptions offer an objective record for effective dispute resolution and pave the way for personalized customer interactions, ensuring a more tailored and responsive service. By leveraging tools like CallRail’s conversation intelligence software, customer service teams can operate with heightened efficiency, ensuring improved customer experiences.

Artificial intelligence can be an incredibly powerful tool for customer service teams, but it’s a quickly evolving field. Ultimately, much of your success with AI will come down to vetting tools well and ensuring they’re a good fit for your team. Prior to 2023, most of these so-called chatbots weren’t actually artificial intelligence. They weren’t generating responses to customers, and they often required significant work to set up and maintain. As with customer conversations, these tools are great for giving your agents a place to start. They eliminate manual work, so all your team members need to do is fill in gaps and double check outputs to ensure they’re accurate and consistent with the rest of your knowledge base.

It streamlines the process and minimizes the chances of leaving the page before making a purchase. Instead of spending hours answering similar questions, they can focus on really complicated support tickets that allow them to apply their skills and professionalism artificial intelligence customer support in practice. This is important, since every day, around 1.145 trillion MB of data is generated on social media. Users write more than 500 thousand comments and status updates on Facebook and 6 thousand tweets on Twitter every minute.

And that means better customer satisfaction, reduced cost to serve, and greater efficiency. Artificial intelligence imbued with natural language processing can help agents close more tickets and solve more issues, while also boosting customer satisfaction with every interaction. There are still countless issues and regulations to address with its use, plus building systems that seamlessly move customers from AI to humans.

When companies redesign customer service jobs with these new tasks in mind, they can create a more engaging work environment and attract and retain great talent more easily. Although Goldman Sachs says AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, most experts agree that customer service jobs will be augmented and automated but not replaced. These tools can automatically detect an incoming language and then translate an equivalent message to an agent and vice versa. Paired with neural machine translation (NLT) services, they can even detect the customer’s location and tweak the phrasing according to localized linguistic and cultural nuances. Opinion mining can also be used to analyze public competitor reviews or scour social media channels for mentions or relevant hashtags.

Your customers will be able to solve a problem at any time of the day with AI-powered customer service bots. By creating an AI-powered chatbot to answer frequently asked questions with customer-specific information, your customers will be able to get answers to their questions more quickly and simply. In turn, this enables the customer support staff to focus on more complex issues and provide a better overall experience while lowering operating expenses. An AI-powered chatbot can be an ideal solution for delivering personalized and instant support. AI chatbots allow you to provide basic customer support 24/7, and when they’re plugged into your other support tools, they enable automation and personalization at scale.

They also monitor brand reputation, catch feedback comments on social media, and gather insights for product improvement. AI can understand what’s happening in any call or live chat, marry that with rich customer context, and provide real-time prompts to agents that can help them keep customers onside. The best AI tools even know when it’s the right time to offer a personalized discount based on a given customer’s history and preferences. In customer support, natural language processing is probably the most important trait for an AI tool to have.

Important information like call time, issue resolution, customer frustration and next steps can all be automated if your contact center management solution has natural language processing built in. As AI customer service software is becoming more advanced, businesses shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to implement AI-powered solutions that could take their growth to the next level. The great news is that there are tools available not only to large corporations that could afford a fat price tag, but also to small and medium businesses. Lyro learns new information automatically as you expand your knowledge base and as the tool interacts with your customers. It creates new automated workflows as opportunities arise, so you don’t have to spend hours on teaching it about new products and services.

When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Using these suggestions, agents can pick from potential next steps that have been carefully calculated for viability. They may not always be right, and in many cases, the agent may already have a plan for resolution, but another great thing about recommendations is they can always be ignored. At its best, serving customers also serves companies—one hand washes the other, as the saying goes. The last time I called to place an order before a road trip, I was greeted by first name by a disarmingly human computerized voice that recognized my number and suggested the exact order I planned to make. Or if a customer is typing a very long question on your email form, it can suggest that they call in for more personalized support.

AI-powered customer support enables you to develop deeper insights and build a better user experience. This leads to improving online customer experience, retention rates, brand image, preventive help, and even the generation of revenue. In fact, AI is expected to boost company productivity by up to 40% by 2035.