As your company grows in size and scope and more customers request help with products or services, it can be pretty challenging to maintain sufficient customer service staff to address people’s feedback, questions, and concerns.
Whether you’re contending with a sudden rise in interest due to a viral marketing campaign or are experiencing higher call volumes during seasonal demand, such as around the holidays, it’s crucial to support your staff with the latest in software and technology so you can please customers as effectively as possible.
Forward-looking entrepreneurs and career professionals are now looking to enhance customers’ experiences and work more efficiently by using artificial intelligence systems to help keep up with demand. To that end, AI has a revolutionary impact on the customer service industry.
Read on for insight into the practical applications of the latest AI technologies and what they mean for your business. You can leverage AI to enhance the customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving market.
AI Reducing Costs in the Contact Center
Contact centers are reducing labour costs by deploying artificial intelligence to address customer inquiries. Industry data forecasts that AI systems will reduce contact center labour costs by $80 billion by 2026. It also projects that AI will handle 10% of customer service interactions by 2026, compared to approximately 1.6% of interactions being automated in 2022.
Using AI in contact centers helps organizations address staff shortages. For context, up to 95% of their costs are devoted to labour. By adding generative AI agent technology to your call center, you can do more with fewer human employees.
Chatbots and Voice Assistants
Many ordinary people are familiar with using AI-fueled voice assistants at home, such as Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri. Voice assistants are also being found in call centers. Companies use voice recognition and text recognition to help them automatically analyze customer interactions and better understand their sentiments and emotions. Obtaining this insight from AI can help your human workers offer empathetic and more personalized assistance.
Sentiment analysis from AI systems will also boost your quality management efforts. Using artificial intelligence to examine customer sentiments, feedback, comments on social media, and reviews can help you discover emerging patterns of customer dissatisfaction with your goods or services.
Growing Your Business With AI-powered Customer Service
Companies can harness AI to integrate multiple channels, such as voice, email, and customer text messages, to offer omnichannel support.
Moreover, you can leverage AI to offer multiple language options to customers, obviating the need to hire and train staff in foreign countries as you expand your reach. Instead of needing to staff your contact centers 24/7, you can use AI technology to keep up with customer service tasks during off hours.
AI can help companies deliver more personalized messages and experiences by analyzing and understanding customers’ intentions and sentiments. As AI systems listen to people and read their text communications, they can predict behavior, such as when a customer might be ready to make a purchase (based on what they say and their recent shopping history).
About 65% of survey respondents think AI and automation are the best options for scaling customer service operations. Use cases include deploying AI to write responses to customer requests, analyze feedback, and create self-service tools designed to let customers discover answers to questions on their own.
Will AI Play a Customer Service Support Role in Your Organization?
Whether you run a small startup company or an established enterprise, you must keep customer service at the forefront of your mind and be able to address demand despite CS labour shortages. For many organizations, it’s clear that AI tools will help them analyze customer sentiment and intentions to respond directly to incoming calls or guide human workers to answer inquiries more efficiently and comprehensively.
Author bio: Teri Llach spearheads marketing strategies at LiveX AI and is an innovative leader in AI agents for customer experience. She is a seasoned growth marketer with more than 20 years of experience. As a co-founder and former CMO of Blackhawk Network, Llach was instrumental in leading the company through a successful IPO. She also served as the head of marketing at Tynker, an educational technology company. Llach specializes in product marketing, digital strategy, lead generation, and branding across all company stages, from startups to public enterprises. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley.