Leveraging artificial intelligence in businesses has become extremely important to maintain a competitive edge in the market. Businesses are opting for various AI-powered services that enable less human intervention and timely completion of mundane tasks.
Also, the future of artificial intelligence in customer service is leading toward fulfilling the ultimate motto of every business i.e., customer satisfaction.
The customer is the hero of every product/service and customers are the major sources of building a stronger brand ecosystem. Businesses have realized that making a potential prospect wait is equal to encouraging customers to look out for other competitors.
AI-powered customer services are not only gifting the time to humans to carry out other complicated processes, and cutting costs for businesses but are also promising various crucial aspects of businesses like customer retention, improving engagement, bridging communication gaps with timely assistance, building brand reputation, etc.
The future of AI capabilities in Customer Services: Focusing on business needs and advancements.
1. Making various touchpoints accessible to customers for easy interactions
Customers are everywhere and they like to interact with a brand from various channels at their convenience. Making various touch points available for the customers can be done through omnichannel customer services.
Omnichannel Customer service refers to the integration of various communication channels to provide a seamless and consistent experience for its customers.
By leveraging AI capabilities to integrate multiple channels, businesses can deliver efficient, personalized, and satisfying customer experiences ultimately leading to improved customer loyalty towards the brand.
Ex: Deploying AI-powered NLP (Natural Language Processing) helps in the automated understanding and analysis of customer inquiries across different channels such as chat, voice, email, and social media.
2. Reducing Average Handle Time (AHT) through Intelligent Routing
AI capabilities are already in use to automate basic and mundane tasks so that customer service representatives can look after more complicated tasks that demand human intervention.
But the future of AI in customer service will become more effective by leveraging Intelligent Routing to the right extent.
Intelligent Routing refers to analyzing customers’ queries by data & history of the customer, agent expertise, language preferences, workload distribution & availability of the agents, etc., and directing the inquiry of the customer to the suitable human executive.
The routing system evaluates all the above data in real-time and makes intelligent decisions by seamlessly transferring the inquiry to the qualified agent and relevant department.
Intelligent Routing is one such solution for businesses that can reduce AHT to 50% through the right balance of AI-driven solutions and human interactions.
3. Sentiment Analysis and Humanizing Chatbot Conversations
Businesses are using virtual assistants and chatbots to enhance the experience of the customer but customers are expecting the responses to be more empathetic, connecting, and real.
Sentiment analysis with the help of conversational AI or Natural Language Processing is capable of understanding the mood, tone, and language of the customer and personalizes the responses accordingly.
The need for humanizing interactions isn’t a new expectation of the customer but businesses are yet half a way to fulfill this need for personalized and empathetic AI interactions. A customer is of course a human and this need for sentiment analysis and humanizing concepts is going to get intense and competitive in the future.
4. Meeting the challenge of Personalized Engagement to Fulfil High Customer Expectations
Personalization expectations can only grow from customers and cannot be reduced. Customer service is one such segment where the satisfaction quo of the customer changes from time to time and businesses need to understand this.
Personalization is no more a buzz word indeed a reality that businesses need to work on. Through quality self-serve tools like FAQs and Blogs, revamped applications, new interfaces, and well-researched IVR (Interactive Voice Responses) brands have to work on providing high—level personalized customer experiences.
5. Proactively anticipating customer needs using Intent Recognition and Predictive AI
Predictive Analytics along with AI will help businesses to anticipate customer issues and provides opportunities to proactively resolve them.
By analyzing previous Data, Preferences, Interactions, Customer Behavior, and Market trends, AI can predict potential issues and address them before they occur resulting in a seamless customer experience
The Intent Recognition model gathers a large amount of customers’ historical data, cleans and processes it to remove unnecessary information, segregates the data according to intent. The resultant data helps in providing tailored experiences and seamless interaction with the customers.
Bottom-line
As customer expectations continue to grow, businesses will have endless capabilities to leverage AI in Customer Service to match and even exceed those expectations. However, businesses would need to focus on the key aspect of “humanization and personalization” during the future course of the journey to move ahead in the right direction.
Additional Read: How is Artificial Intelligence Reshaping the Email Marketing World?