A comprehensive guide to AI in customer service
The AI buzzword has taken over the internet and there's no escaping it. If you are unsure of the impact of AI in customer service but are constantly under the pressure to include it in your operations, this page will help you find the answers to your questions and make a more confident decision for your business and customers.
- What is AI in customer service?
- Benefits
- AI impact on jobs
- AI in today's business landscape
- Industry leaders' opinion
- Traditional vs generative AI
- AI for agents and customers
- Implementation factors
- Solution
What is artificial intelligence in customer service?
AI in customer service acts as an assistant for both your agents and customers. It's a sidekick that does the heavy lifting for your agents so that they can focus on personalizing responses and acts as a guiding light that helps your customers find the right answer quickly. For instance, AI can retrieve articles related to a customer's question from your orgnaization's knowledge base, cutting down response times and delivering instant help to your customers.
Unique value of AI in customer service
- Deliver personalized service
- Improve resolution times
- Identify gaps in self-service
- Reduce agent workload
- Offer 24/7 support
Will AI replace human jobs?
"Most experts agree that customer service jobs will be augmented and automated but not replaced."
Why is there a shift towards AI-powered customer service?
While advancements in technology are certainly playing a role in the shift towards AI-powered customer service, other factors are also driving this significant shift. Firstly, businesses are facing a growing challenge in finding and keeping talented customer service agents, which strains existing agents. Secondly, today's empowered consumers expect options for self-service, but limited resources and time often prevent businesses from offering a smooth self-service experience. Finally, economic pressures in a competitive landscape push businesses to find effective solutions. Here are some stats that state the same:
- 45% of agents leave every year
- Cost cutting is on the rise
- Agent burnout and inefficiency have been increasing
- Customer service is considered one of the top 10 stressful jobs
- Productivity growth has been declining
- Around 88% of customer journeys begin with self-service
- 40% of live support volume could be resolved on self-service channels
- 74% of customers are likely to return to self-service (if there's a smooth hand-off process between AI and live agents when needed)
*Sources: Mckinsey, Forbes, and Gartner
What are the industry
leaders saying?
Generative AI and self-service capabilities have been considered by customer service leaders as top two key areas of focus in 2024.
Traditional AI vs generative AI
Earlier, it was simple if and then statements that did the job of automating tasks and increasing productivity. As more data came into picture, artificial intelligence could be trained to make decisions, predict outcomes, and simplify business operations with less human intervention. This came to be known as traditional AI, also referred to as narrow or weak AI.
As the AI space evolved over the years, there were constant efforts to make it more sophisticated. One step towards this was the introduction of generative AI.
Generative AI can create new content within a few seconds from the massive data it is learning from. To simplify, imagine having a library that stores countless books on a wide variety of topics in different languages—and you can not only retrieve information on any topic but also generate completely new materials based on that data in the blink of an eye. That's generative AI.
AI for service agents and your customers
Increase agent productivity and deliver personalised service
There are several processes involved from the moment a ticket is raised until the point it's resolved: assigning the ticket to the right agent, understanding the problem, getting input from other teams, and drafting a suitable, personalized response. Unfortunately, this often involves long wait times, and poor customer experience. It can also take a heavy hit on repeat customer purchase as 55% customers have reported that they are likely to stop buying from a brand after several bad experiences, while 8% said they'd leave after one bad experience.
Here's how AI can help reduce the amount of time spent at every stage and empower your agents to provide quick responses to customers.
Intelligent ticket routing
Your agents can focus on issue resolution as AI automates the ticket routing process by accurately predicting the issue type, product involved, and various other details—triggering the workflow to automate processes.
Response summaries
To ensure your agents provide the best possible experience, it's essential for them to understand the issue effectively but also quickly. Generative AI summarizes the content for your agents so they can avoid spending time reading lengthy paragraphs without missing any important details.
Response enhancement
Spending hours crafting the ideal response to every customer inquiry hinders agent efficiency. Generative AI assists agents by offering reply suggestions and enabling them to customize the message's structure, length, and tone for quick and effective service.
Customer sentiment analyses
Sometimes the emotions build up caused could outweigh the intensity of the issue. Which is why it's essential to first understand your customer's emotional state, and communicate with them empathetically. AI helps in the first stage, by identifying the emotional state even before your agents read the ticket, so your agents can understand the situation from customer's perspective.
Improve self-service quality for your customers
According to a report by Gartner, around 70% of customers use self-service channels at some point, but only 9% could resolve their issues. A few reasons for this are outdated content, unmonitored self-service channels, and a lack of customer control over their self-service journey. AI can help you improve the self-service experience in several ways.
Chatbots
To meet your customers' need for instant and accurate service, you can deploy an AI bot on your website. The chatbot generates appropriate answers based on customer's request by utilising the information available in your organization's knowledge base. In case the customer requires agent assistance, the AI bot can either initiate a live agent request, or open a ticket form, collect details, and share them with the agents. This helps your agents focus directly on the issue instead of spending time collecting information.
Knowledge base insights
It's important that your knowledge base stores articles that your customers want. AI can help you improve by highlighting commonly raised queries through ticket tags. This helps reduce agent workload and meet customer demand.
Things to consider before AI
implementation
Purpose
While traditional AI can help customer service decision makers identify gaps in their knowledge base, automate tasks, refine service operations, and meet customers' self-service needs. Generative AI, on the other hand, helps agents quickly create effective responses. It's essential to understand what your organization is looking to improve, and choose customer service software that meets your needs.
Data availability
AI works on data, and as more data becomes available, the AI will be able to offer more accurate predictions and suggestions for your agents and customers. It's essential to determine the amount of data your organization deals with and the minimum requirement for your AI software to work efficiently.
Cost
Before you plan on including AI in your customer service software, it's essential to examine whether it is available as a part of the software or at an additional price. Along with this, check, whether there is any third-party integration involved and if there are any additional charges.
Security
Since your customers trust you with their information, ensure the AI-powered service software you choose helps you retain that trust by keeping their data safe and secure. Review your vendor's privacy guidelines and those of any third parties involved to ensure compliance with your country's data privacy laws.
Time
AI implementation can involve a significant work like planning, training, and testing AI to ensure accuracy in interactions. However, the time involved in implementation also depends on the software you choose. Ensure the software is intuitive, and requires less human intervention so that your service teams can focus on delivering service effectively.
Relevancy
Generative AI heavily relies on the external data available to create responses. It's important to be aware of what data is being used whether organizational or external and ensure your agents exercise appropriate discretion in their use of the available information.
Adoption
It's important to be aware of the perception among employees about the new technology. This can greatly affect the adoption rate and influence the performance of AI. To avoid this, it's essential to choose a customer service AI solution that is easy to use and understand.
Leverage the powerful capabilities of
Zoho Desk's AI Zia
Be available 24/7
Zia assists customers on their self-service journey by delivering precise and instant answers by retrieving query relevant articles from your knowledge base.
Send faster responses
Save your agents time searching or typing lengthy replies with ready-to-use responses generated by Zia.
Streamline service operations
Zia notifies you of ticket anomalies, predicts ticket fields that trigger automation workflows, and consolidates key metrics in the form of dashboard for faster and efficient operations.
Build a powerful knowledge base
Zia analyzes common questions and shares this data with you so you can build an informative knowledge base for your agents and customers.
Deliver personalized service
Zia's integration with ChatGPT helps your agents get a quick summary of each customer request, and understand customer sentiment through mood analysis so that they can focus on personalising experiences.
Better customer service awaits.
Try Zoho Desk.
- No credit card required.
- No software to download.
- Definition
- Benefits
- Trends
- Types
- Features
- Implementation
- Solution