5 Ways to Leverage Artificial Intelligence for Efficient Customer Service

How can AI be leveraged to improve customer service?

As a business owner, you might have employed customer service representatives that were maybe too moody, tired, or unapproachable to handle customers’ queries.

Not only does failure to respond to customers mean losing them, but it also hurts your brand.

Good customer service is important for many other reasons as well.

Brands that know their customers well enough and cater to their needs and specifications accordingly, gain a competitive advantage.

Companies that have applied the use of artificial intelligence for efficient customer service improve customer experience and automate the whole process.

Additionally, AI helps the end-users (customers) to interact with the various applications with great ease.

AI-powered digital solutions transform customer service interactions. They are efficient in offering customer service because;

• They improve online customer experience
• Increase loyalty and brand reputation
• Offer preventative assistance

In this article, I will discuss 5 ways to leverage artificial intelligence for efficient customer service.

Let’s get started!

1. Uninterrupted Flow of Customer Service

As brands and marketers, it is difficult to attend to your customers all the time.

At times you might be too tired to respond, maybe it is your time off, or you are on holiday. Finding a balance between your off-hours and the need to attend to your customers can be a challenge.

The repetitive nature of answering questions from customers can be cumbersome and tiring too.

This is where as a business, you need to implement AI-driven customer service.

One of the amazing benefits of using AI in customer service is to assist in automating the responses.

Whether at night (during your time off) or during holiday offs, AI will ensure fast responses and uninterrupted service. This way your customers will appreciate the instant feedback and they will be able to communicate with your AI-powered bot to resolve issues.

A report by Gartner Report, suggests that 57% of thriving companies have leveraged the use of AI for efficient customer service.

The use of Chatbot software helps to give real-time message responses. They provide reliable engagement that aligns with your customers’ busy schedules. It is one of the popular ways in which artificial intelligence is leveraged for efficient customer service.

2. Learning Customer Behavior Trends

As a brand, knowing what your customer needs or wants can be a difficult task to handle. You definitely cannot be sending out questionnaires to customers asking questions about them! Who has time for that?

It is even worse when the customers do not know what they want and rely heavily on you to figure it out.

You are then faced with a puzzle to solve: not failing to please the customer and not knowing what to offer!

Such a difficult scenario can be easily solved by leveraging artificial intelligence to predict your customers’ behavior patterns.

AI-powered tools help you build customized experiences that are intelligent.

Through the natural language processing capabilities, daily interactions can be interpreted to uncover trends. Patterns can be generated by using data from the customer’s behavior such as buying cycles, spending habits, and travel patterns.

A forecast is then presented to you to have an idea of what your client wants or would need in the future. When your customer contacts your business, these generated patterns can be used to cleverly offer them the most likely service/product based on the history of your customers’ browsing activities.

Impressive! Right?

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For example, Netflix’s success is credited to the application of artificial intelligence to accurately predict what the customer wants in terms of consumer’s views.

Netflix has leveraged artificial intelligence for efficient customer service by using real-time information to forecast customer behavior accurately.

3. Managing A High Volume of Queries

Many businesses are bombarded by the frequent calls and queries that come from customers.

For a large company or a service-based business, too many queries can bog down your team and you realize that your team is always left behind in responding to these queries.

For each query that delays being handled or is left unresolved, there is a possibility of losing that particular customer.

It is tiring and frustrating to keep on answering questions one after the other and your customers may feel unappreciated or undervalued.

How can you leverage artificial intelligence for efficient customer service and support?

Many businesses to client (B2C) companies have call centers. The call center is a very important part of your customer service day-to-day workflows. The use of AI can help ease the workload at your call center.

Most customers prefer to make calls over other forms of communication. To tap into this target audience, prompt and efficient communication is a vital aspect.

Businesses can leverage AI-driven interactive voice recognition software to attend to the general queries that are common in your day-to-day operations.

The software eases the burden on the already exhausted and overloaded call agents. They help reduce the calling queues by answering the basic questions that come from your clients.

4. Better Email Engagement

Does your business receive countless emails from clients in a day?

The emails received might be too many and you find out that as a business, you are struggling to keep up with every single one of them. As if that is not enough, your customers expect feedback from you.

It then proves tedious to go through each one of them to make sure you respond accordingly. Hard as it may be, in the back of your mind you know that customer feedback goes hand in hand with customer satisfaction.

Well, leveraging artificial intelligence for efficient customer service is the solution you need.

The use of AI-fueled software can help manage email marketing strategy with ease. With the help of its natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, an AI-powered tool can enable your company to extract keywords from a ton of emails.

But AI’s usefulness in marketing extends far beyond email management. To get the full scoop, check out this quick guide on how to learn artificial intelligence in 2021.

It, therefore, makes it easy for you to differentiate between urgent concerns from the not urgent ones. Faster resolution is then applied to solve customers’ concerns in accordance with urgency levels.

For example, the AI platform called Sherpa uses data from the customers’ emails to automatically determine the content of the email.

The email-parsing software is able to use an algorithm to highlight words like terrible and angry which are normally associated with negative experiences.

5. Speech Analytics

Many customers complain that their calls to businesses are unsatisfactory because the customer service representative or the call agent was unresponsive and dismissive to them.

Nothing hurts a customer more than making them feel that their issue is not as important to you as it is to them.

Customer service representatives who fail to acknowledge the emotions and sentiments of the customer kill the reputation of your brand. For each unsatisfied customer, you lose a lot.

How can artificial intelligence be leveraged to solve that?

AI-driven tools can be helpful in detecting the level of frustration in a customer’s voice through speech analysis. Speech analytics help to analyze the language. This helps to extract important information from the customer based on their communication.

Speech analytics helps to establish which calls are more effective and which customer service representatives need more training on handling customers’ complaints better.

Language and speech analysis improve your customer experience as you are able to detect the emotions exhibited.

A major cloud player like Google is investing in speech analytics to get insight on which calls sound urgent and ooze frustration.

It is therefore easy to tell if a customer is satisfied if their voice transitions from being frustrated to being happy.

Conclusion

Brands that are driven by forward-thinkers need to leverage artificial intelligence for efficient customer service. Artificial intelligence technology is a solution that will open many doors and avenues for prompt self-service for customer care platforms.

Due to artificial intelligence major capabilities, machine learning, and natural language processing the customer service experience will be more efficient.

AI cognitive computing power helps enterprises to offer efficient customer service by reducing the waiting line and offering instantaneous feedback/communication.

In the modern-day, customers are more demanding than ever. The use of artificial intelligence provides smooth and effortless experiences that prove to be the best experiences they ever had.

AI plays a vital role in improving the efficiency and modernization of customer service.