A comprehensive guide to AI in customer service
AI is having a significant impact on customer service, from assisting agents in resolving issues quickly and empowering customers to find answers easily to helping leaders gain quick insights. Find out how AI can be used in customer service and the best way to incorporate it into your customer service operations.
Use cases for AI in customer service
Increased productivity
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 purchases, 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 reading lengthy support articles while not missing on 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 built up around an issue can outweigh the issue itself. Which is why it's essential to 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 the customer's perspective.
Similar tickets classification
Having access to tickets with similar issues can help agents find effective ways to solve an issue quickly. AI analyzes the ticket content and adds relevant tags to allow agents to revisit issues with similar tags easily.
Ticket activity prediction
Efficiently managing tickets is essential to ensure every customer issue is resolved on time. With the help of AI predictions and real-time insights based on ticket activity, you can allocate tickets to your agents effectively without overburdening them.
Improved quality of self-service
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 the customer's request by utilizing the information available in your organization's knowledge base. If the customer requires agent assistance, the AI bot can either initiate a request to chat with a live agent or open a ticket form, collect details, and share them with the agents. This helps your agents focus directly on the customer's 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.
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.
Frequently asked questions
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.
Here are a few ways to keep your data secure while leveraging the power of AI in customer service:
Data compliance and regulation: Review whether the vendor meets the privacy and security guidelines required for your business operations.
Data specifications: Understand how and what data is being processed by the AI solution.
Access permissions: Check whether the software allows you to control access permission levels for specific fields.
Employee training: Train your employees to use AI with discretion so they can deal with your cutsomers' data safely.
Zoho Desk complies with data regulations like HIPAA and GDPR to ensure you deliver secure and reliable experiences to your customers. Even when you use the ChatGPT integration, rest assured that your customers' details are safe by masking specific fields before they're sent to ChatGPT for processing.
Building an AI bot is simple with Zoho Desk. All that you need is a knowledge base with a minimum of 30 articles in it. Select the department from which you want the bot to use articles, and in no time, you'll have your AI bot ready to go. It can answer the customer's and agent's questions instantly by fetching essential information from the knowledge base.
Here are a few ways in which AI is used in customer service:
Chatbot
Ticket automation
Sentiment analysis
Response creation
Ticket summarization
Ticket activity prediction
Ticket categorization
The accuracy of chatbot responses is increasing by the day with the ongoing advancements in AI. While its use by businesses is on the rise, there's still a need for human assistance to ensure customers are satisfied with their support experiences. Combining the power of AI and human intelligence will help businesses achieve the best outcome.