Evolving customer expectations have led to a phenomenal increase in the number of companies leveraging innovative technology to optimize buyer journeys. Artificial Intelligence has emerged as one of the most valuable tools business leaders can access to boost satisfaction rates, streamline contact center processes, and access valuable insights.
AI technology gives organizations the power to deliver personalized 24/7 service to consumers on a range of channels, through bots and virtual agents. It can reduce operational costs, allowing agents to automate various tasks, and even provide insights into customer preferences and sentiment.
However, AI also comes with risks to consider, particularly in regard to ethics and security. Here’s your guide to the best ways you can leverage AI to enhance customer support, without falling victim to common implementation issues.
The 3 Main Use Cases for AI Customer Support
As AI solutions grow more advanced, with new algorithms and frameworks to explore, the use cases for AI in customer support are evolving. Today’s companies can leverage AI for everything from increasing conversions with proactive outreach, to generating responses for customer queries.
Most of the top use cases for AI customer support, however, fall into three main categories:
1. Improving Agent Efficiency and Productivity
Today’s customer service agents face increasing pressure to deliver expert support across multiple channels, at speed. AI can boost agent efficiency and productivity in a range of ways. For instance, chatbots can handle simple requests, and automate processes for employees, like scripting or call transcription, allowing employees to focus on more valuable tasks. In fact, 30% of customer service reps are expected to use AI to automate processes by 2026.
AI solutions can also support and guide employees throughout customer support tasks. They can use sentiment analysis to detect positive and negative feelings, and provide real-time insights to employees on how to de-escalate or improve a situation. They can even help with ensuring conversations are routed to the right employee, based on sentiment and intent analysis.
2. Delivering 24/7 Service on Multiple Channels
Perhaps one of the biggest use cases for AI in customer support, is that it allows companies to offer 24/7 assistance to customers on a range of channels. AI chatbots, for instance, are available to answer questions and deliver self-service resources to customers around the clock.
They can handle an unlimited number of conversations simultaneously, and can even leverage advanced analytical tools and data to personalize interactions. Chatbots can also hand crucial information about a customer over to an agent when a conversation is escalated, reducing the need for a customer to repeat themselves.
In the evolving world of customer experience, companies can also leverage AI to build voice bots, capable of interacting with users over the phone through speech recognition. They can understand natural language, interpret intentions, and minimize call queues. These 24/7 solutions enhance customer experiences, reduce strain on employees, and minimize operating costs.
3. Enhancing Business Insights
AI is a powerful tool for companies who want to gather more insights into their target audience, and the opportunities they have to grow. AI solutions can process huge volumes of data from thousands of conversations across different channels, offering insights into topic trends and customer preferences.
AI sentiment analysis solutions can help businesses understand which factors influence the thoughts and feelings of their customers. This helps businesses to better understand customer needs and wants, paving the way for the creation of better products and services. It can also ensure companies have the insights they need to improve retention rates and reduce churn.
AI solutions can even leverage machine learning to make accurate predictions about call volumes and customer requirements. This helps businesses make more intelligent decisions about resource allocation and optimization over time.
Ethical Considerations and Best Practices
While the benefits of AI customer support solutions are far-reaching, there are still issues that companies need to overcome. The fact that AI solutions rely on large amounts of data means that businesses need to take a proactive approach to using that data, and their tools ethically, and securely.
Here are the best practices businesses should follow when leveraging AI for customer support.
1. Develop Ethical AI Policies
Developing a code of ethics for regulating AI use is an important way to ensure that you’re adhering to ethical and compliance standards. The guideline you implement will depend on how you use AI, but they should always ensure you’re adhering to data privacy regulations, prioritizing transparency, and eliminating bias from interactions.
Make sure you also have a plan in place for how you’re going to consistently monitor and optimize your AI solutions. A well-developed AI customer support plan should include a process for consistently fine-tuning chatbots, voicebots, and other AI solutions, based on feedback and insights.
2. Leverage the Right AI Technology
AI for customer support can come in many different forms, from voicebots and chatbots, to AI-enhanced analytical tools. The right technology for your business will depend on the specific use cases you’ve identified for artificial intelligence, and your requirements.
Make sure your AI solution is:
- Equipped with cutting-edge technology: Such as natural language processing capabilities and sentiment analysis solutions, to help you optimize the customer experience.
- Customizable: Ensure you can train your chatbots with your own data, implement your own usage policies, and link your technology to existing tools (such as CRM software).
- Secure and compliant: The AI bots and systems you leverage should feature comprehensive solutions for data encryption and protection, to ensure ongoing compliance.
3. Make Sure Your Solutions are User-Friendly
Any AI solution you implement into your customer support strategy should be intuitive and user-friendly. Bots used to address customer service requests should use straightforward language that’s easy for your customers to understand, as well as straight-forward menus.
The AI solutions you use for data analysis should make it easy to surface valuable insights from a range of conversations. Look for a solution that allows you to tap into real-time monitoring options, and create custom reports based on the metrics that are most important to your business.
4. Keep the Human Being in the Loop
Finally, while AI can enhance customer support processes, it shouldn’t replace your human support team. Instead of replacing staff members with automated bots, use the AI tools you implement to augment your workforce. Ensure your customers always have a way to opt-out of interacting with a chatbot, or escalate their conversation to a human agent.
Make sure the AI tools you use for self-service can also transfer important information from customer interactions to agents too. This will help to retain context throughout the customer’s journey, and prevent consumers from having to repeat themselves.
Unlock the Benefits of AI in Customer Support
AI solutions give companies a powerful opportunity to enhance and optimize their customer support strategy. From bots that deliver 24/7 service, to solutions that enhance employee productivity, reduce operational costs, and deliver valuable insights, AI can play a role in every aspect of your CX strategy. However, it’s important to implement this technology correctly.
Leading vendors like XCally give companies access to flexible AI systems that can power everything from chat and voice self-service strategies, to sentiment analysis and predictive insights. With these tools, you can improve efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction, without having to compromise on ethical standards, or compliance.
Diego Gosmar – Chief AI Officer @XCALLY says “XCALLY empowers businesses to revolutionize their customer support strategies by harnessing the power of AI. With cutting-edge technology like chatbots, voicebots, sentiment analysis, and predictive insights, companies can deliver personalized, 24/7 assistance while optimizing agent efficiency. XCALLY’s secure and customizable AI solutions ensure compliance and data protection, while its user-friendly interface makes it easy to surface valuable insights and create custom reports. By keeping humans in the loop and allowing customers to opt-out or escalate to a human agent, XCALLY ensures a seamless customer journey. Fairness, transparency, security, privacy, and governance represent the key milestones for the XCALLY ethical approach in the artificial intelligence space, where humans and AI are combined to build CX applications for the common good.”