Artificial Intelligence is one of the hot topics in the industry right now. There is no doubt that it will be used by most of the industries in the coming years. One such sector is the customer service. Most of the website is now having a chatbot on their home screen. Through this article, we will see how AI and customer service can improve the service you provide to the customers.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence commonly known as AI is a branch of computer science that makes machines think like humans. It is now an essential part of the technology industry. Research related to AI is highly technical and specialized. A system using artificial intelligence can be more and more improved as it learns over time. The extreme goal of Artificial Intelligence is that to create computer programs that can learn, think and solve problems by itself. Nowadays AI is used in strategic games (like chess and go), self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data. Searching in large databases and doing calculations are what computers can do better than humans. But in many areas computers are still not capable to think as good as humans.
AI is used in many industries such as healthcare, education, finance, market analysis, human resource recruiting, telecommunication etc. New cognitive systems like IBM Watson has taken Artificial Intelligence to next level. These cognitive technologies can help in the early detection of cancer, finding loopholes to solve legal cases etc. The improvement in Natural Language Processing has made the technology to communicate with real-world people. AI is now used for customer service also. In the coming parts of the article, we will see how AI and customer service are connected.
AI and Customer Service- How is it related?
By 2020, more than 85% of the customer interaction jobs will be handled without human beings. Automation is everywhere- from ordering food, booking hotels, checking luggage at the airport, and booking a doctor’s appointment everything is being automated nowadays. Customer service industry is no exception.
Let us see how AI is gonna take over the customer service in the coming future.
The rise of messaging applications
Nowadays the number of people using messaging apps overtook those who use social media. Beyond communicating with friends, relatives, and colleagues people are using messaging apps to communicate with brands. Messaging services are making it possible for companies to communicate with existing and future customers. Companies now have the opportunity to create revenue by using customized service bots within messaging applications.
One of the clear examples of this opportunity is that there are more than 34000 chatbots on Facebook messenger alone. Many industries such as airlines, tourism, clothing are already making use of these opportunities. Consumers are using messaging apps to communicate with their brands to purchase flight tickets, book hotel accommodation, purchase their favorite clothes. There is no doubt that, soon the other industries will also catch up to this.
Reducing the cost
Hiring and training a support staff requires a lot of money and time. You have to conduct recruitment drives, select the best-suited candidates, training them to mold them for your company, all of these requires a lot of time, money and efforts. These are the common problems faced by the call centers.
Implementing automation in these industries can offer a huge time and cost saving in this industry. Many artificial intelligence platforms come with pre-programmed domain knowledge. You just need to train them once. This is very useful when it comes to those industries. You have to keep on retraining the entire workforce frequently but using automation can help you in reducing the cost, time and efforts.
Innovative solutions in automated customer services like machine learning and natural language processing can help you in reducing 60-80% of the cost than conventional call centers handled by humans.
Works 24*7
Automated customer service doesn’t have anything like work timings or public holidays. They are always-on for 24*7. This gives the companies to deliver a better service to their customers as the AI system solves the issues as soon as they arise. This means that the customers don’t have to wait for hours or even days to get a response.
This can greatly influence your customer satisfaction and thus reduce the churn. It also shows the companies commitment towards their customers which is valuable to the company’s reputation and trust.
Performance and reliability
AI-powered customer services can deliver you an unmatched reliability that cannot be matched by its human counterparts. These AI-powered customer services are free from factors that can impact customer interactions. They do not work late with a hangover, they can be designed to not get angry or argue with a customer, they can be programmed to inform managers if it can’t solve particular customer queries. All these can improve your overall customer service interactions which can help in your business.
Chatbots can ensure you the speed of resolution also. Online FAQ contents have the power to immediately answer common questions and chatbots are not poor in typing and research speeds. These factors largely influence customer satisfaction.
Reduce churn
Recent studies show that more than 65% of customers leave their brand since they don’t get the customer service they expect. This number may be quite dangerous in the near future. There are many limitations for human beings to resolve the issues faster and with high precision. This is done more better by AI systems.
If the customers get instant replies and resolution for their issue within hours instead of days, they will have a faith and confidence in their brand. This can help in improving building a long-term relationship with your brand. It is the human nature that they move to brands who provide them a better service. They are even ready to pay more
Pre-emptive action
Automation delivers a level of response that is not possible by humans. AI-powered systems can monitor various websites, in-app activities, identify customer experience issues, the cause of churns etc. The AI-powered systems can respond in real-time support through FAQs or virtual service agents.
These systems have the ability to solve customer issues before they arise. This can help in lowering customer abandonment rates in the purchase cycle and also helps in reducing customer complaints and improving customer experience.
Will AI replace human in customer service industry?
From all our previous articles, one thing that we mention repeatedly is that how you treat your customers can make or break your companies reputation. With the advancement of technologies like cognitive computing, machine learning, and Virtual Reality, AI is seeming to be more and more likely the solution for managing customer needs. Using AI to manage customer service will be a trend in the coming years. Does it mean that it is going to replace the humans? Not exactly.
The AI-powered support systems can address high urgency situations better than humans. No doubt in that. But when it comes to human emotions. No AI systems can replicate human empathy. You might have read our article on ‘Top customer service skills‘. No matter how smart the AI systems are, human intelligence is not replaceable.
Nowadays the conversations around AI is focussing on questions of how AI can replace agent interactions, but the aim of AI shouldn’t be to replace human interactions but to improve the overall performance with human assistance. Instead of cutting out human, AI and human should work together to give the customers an improved experience.
The decision depends on the companies. If they want to provide the customers with an urgent solution better they can implement an AI-powered system. If they want to provide their customers with a solution that stick on to their mind forever, only human interactions can provide these emotional conversations.
Scenario
Even though chatbots provide you with solutions, in some situations you will feel it would be better if a human (who could understand your emotions) is sitting opposite to you. Let us see an example, suppose you completed a ride in a cab and you lost something very precious to you. When you are filing a complaint with the company’s chatbot. You are really sad and you are not able to convey your message properly. When the chatbots reply with their previously stored replies or if they couldn’t understand your problem in the right sense, you will be frustrated and that will let you down. In these cases, if it was a human he could easily understand your situations and emotions and he might have replied accordingly with a proper solution for this.
Conclusion
As we mentioned throughout the article, artificial intelligence is an important technology and it will surely change the way work is done in the future. Along with the boom in the technology, there is much misinformation spread around about AI. The main focus should be on how to improve the customer experience with the assistance of AI and not on cutting out the human from customer service.
Hope the article was useful. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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