Today, you would hardly find any business that doesn’t provide customer support to its clients. What is more, with the shift towards customer centricity and the bigger number of digital channels that customers use to address their issues, customer support has become much more complex. Not only does customer service manage a higher number of requests, but it also cope with multifaceted nature of requests, related to supply chain, quality, troubleshooting, pricing, and many more.
At the same time, customer support is one of the main pillars of business operations. The department fosters loyalty, influences brand reputation, and customer experience. Since customers’ expectations increase, businesses compete for the best solutions that will make their customer support productive and efficient. Let’s see how artificial intelligence (AI), the leading solution in customer support space, transforms the ways of working and leverages productivity across businesses.
The Most Popular AI Implementation in Customer Support
The popularity of AI doesn’t lose ground, and customer support is one of the biggest areas where AI solutions transform the ways of working and interacting. If we look at the key AI technologies that gain popularity in customer support, we’ll see that chatbots lead the ranks. They’re followed by virtual assistants, predictive analytics, and NLP technology.
Virtual Assistants and Chatbots
As AI-based tools, chatbots can simulate human interaction and answer customers’ requests 24/7. Depending on the tasks they are programmed to perform, chatbots can understand customers’ intention, request, and demand, and provide immediate answers. They can guide customers through the troubleshooting process, provide estimated delivery time, register complaints, provide information on the availability of product, etc. As a result, a customer gets a quicker response whatever time they contact support.
Virtual assistants, in turn, assist customer support agents to handle customers’ requests, saving their time on each task and increasing the overall response time. For example, a virtual assistant at https://cosupport.ai/ can answer customers’ requests on its own, being trained on customers’ historic data. Integrated in your business’ CRM system, a virtual assistant prepopulates ready responses to the customers, which an agent should only choose, validate, and send.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics uses a number of machine learning algorithms to analyze the historical interaction with customers through different touchpoints. As a result, it offers you the precious information which you can use to better understand customers’ needs and leverage their satisfaction. For example, Zendesk uses and offers multiple metrics to analyze customer journey, retention, engagement, and customer support performance.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Apart from being also used in chatbots, natural language processing helps to detect the sentiment behind customer communication. NLP algorithms can also classify tickets created in the CRM system based on interaction with a customer. They can generate summaries of interactions and convert voice interactions into text transcripts. Besides, NLP helps with knowledge base management. It optimizes search options by analyzing huge volumes of existing data.
Benefits of AI Enhancements in Customer Support
When companies invest in AI solutions, they get gains both for businesses and customers. That’s why, from small smart-ups to big corporations, companies invest thousands and millions of dollars to stay competitive. According to the Washington Post, such giants as Microsoft, Google, or Meta, continue to increase their investments in AI. This means that the trend is not expected to slow down anytime soon.
Here are the main advantages you get with AI specifically in customer support:
- Continuous operations. With implementation of chatbots in chat and email channels, your support to the customers can be 24/7. This is especially useful if your business extends to more than one country and time zone.
- Faster resolution time. Customers get quick replies to their inquiries. Their requests are resolved much faster.
- Personalized approach. With sentiment analysis and intent recognition, customers get tailored responses that consider their historic data and interactions. They also get personalized suggestions based on historic data.
- Actionable insights. Predictive analytics provides numerous insights to improve customer support. They indicate customers’ pain points and suggest proactive actions.
- Scalability. With virtual assistants and chatbots, customer support can process a much bigger amount of requests in the same period of time, saving you costs in the long run.
- Improved support efficiency. Businesses get more efficient support that proceeds requests quickly and up to the point.
- Increased customer satisfaction. As a result of various AI solutions, customers get what they need quicker. They remain more satisfied and stay loyal to the company.
Successful Use Cases Across Businesses
Putting the customer in the center of their activities, businesses create amazing experiences that make customers return and choose their products. For example, Sephora launched Virtual Artist a couple of years ago. Thanks to AI algorithms, the app allows users to try different cosmetics and suggests various products based on their choice.
As in all businesses, the financial sector is also transforming its customer support. As one of the cases, American Express implemented AI models to streamline their customer interactions and leverage automation. Their solutions allow processing bookings, transcribing voice to text, automating customer support chat, among other functionalities.
Another example is H&M’s virtual assistant that gives answers to frequently asked questions and processes requests 24/7. As the company operates around the world in numerous languages, such chatbots reduce the processing time of a huge number of requests their customer support gets every day.
AI–Transformed Customer Support
AI technologies, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, natural language processing, and predictive analytics, provide unparalleled benefits by automating routine tasks, enhancing accuracy and consistency, and offering 24/7 support. AI empowers businesses to deliver exceptional service and build stronger customer relationships.
AI not only improves response times and reduces workload for human agents but also provides deeper insights into customer behavior, enabling more proactive and personalized support strategies. By leveraging AI, modern businesses can ensure they meet and exceed customer expectations. They remain competitive in the constantly changing environment that puts the customer in the center of business operations.