As the contact centers as a service (CCaaS) model’s evolved, AI customer service tools have become a useful feature that allows call centers to improve various aspects of the customer and agent experience.
Customer service AI boosts customer satisfaction, worker efficiency, and your business’s ROI. And AI is filling more advanced roles in customer service as time goes on, improving service even more and making the customer journey more seamless and frictionless.
But many businesses and firms have no clue how artificial intelligence is transforming contact centers. And they’re stranded without AI-powered automation, missing out on all the benefits.
That’s why in this blog, we’re going to show you how AI is revolutionizing customer service.
What Is AI Customer Service?
AI customer service is automated technology that solves customer problems faster and more efficiently. And it’s catching on quick—over 90% of the world’s top brands use AI to boost customer satisfaction and improve worker efficiency.
Customer service AI improves CCaaS by assisting call centers in what they already do best, delivering great customer service. Whether it’s through sentiment analysis or 24/7 self-service, customer service AI is implemented to assist call center agents and remove limitations that agents might experience while interacting with customers.
Even though AI won’t replace agents, it makes their jobs easier and more productive. And thanks to AI’s broad applications, AI customer service is able to complement the agent experience and customer experience through personalization, fast service, and improved efficiency.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Contact Centers
AI is improving contact centers with its wide range of applications. Human agents can’t do things AI can, like provide 24/7 customer service and be at the phone around the clock.
But availability’s only the beginning of contact center AI solutions’ impact—its effects go far beyond that.
Speed
Customer service AI helps identify issues and resolve them faster. Since AI can process your entire knowledge database, it instantly provides customers with answers to frequently asked questions and can assist customers when agents aren’t available.
AI chatbots can also display existing answers to routine questions, creating rapid solutions.
Scalability
AI lacks many of the limits that a human agent may have. AI is always awake, and it can speak any language. AI can provide service 24/7 and communicate with the customer no matter what language they speak. AI’s powers let it grow with your business at any pace or direction.
AI Customer Service Examples
Customer service AI takes form in many ways.
Chatbots
Chatbots are dialogue-based systems solving basic problems without human help. And if a client needs human help, chatbots seamlessly shift the customer to a qualified agent. Chatbots can answer frequently asked questions, figure out what general issues or requests the customer has, and depending on the platform, lead the customer to another communication channel that they’d like to connect with the business on.
By giving personalized 24/7 help, chatbots boost conversions and sales.
The Importance of Including Bots With CCaaS
Your CCaaS needs bots to be available to customers. Humans can’t always be there for clients, so bots fill in.
Websites with AI customer service bots solve customer problems without any human help. The bots you design can respond to as many questions as needed. And when bots can’t help, they connect clients with humans.
Customer Self-Service
Customer self-service means customers can solve issues without relying on a human. And self-service isn’t less preferable to live agent assistance—73% of people would rather solve problems themselves. Customers want fast self-service options that can help lead them to the right resource quickly and efficiency, or even resolve their issues outright.
AI for contact centers will only get better at self-service. And as contact center AI improves, firms using it will see happier customers.
Automated and Conversational IVR
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems aren’t new, but AI’s making them more useful than ever.
AI contributes to the improvement of IVR systems through their use of speech and text analytics. AI can be utilized to allow customers to interact with the menu using their own personal voice through a conversational IVR.
Conversational IVRs allow callers to speak in a natural tone, completing self-service tasks with just their voice. Even better, these automated conversational systems are intuitive and understand the conversation’s context, which can spare customers their time and patience when resolving a problem. Conversational IVRs improve personalization of the customer experience and improve the customer service in general.
Customer service AI only continues to make IVR more efficient as it develops.
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is key for crunching big datasets and finding useful patterns. For instance, speech and text recognition lets AI tell when customers are upset and call human support. And another example, voice biometrics, helps AI verify a client’s identity faster and speeds up security checks.
In CCaaS, ML means systems making themselves better at support.
For example, ML-powered chatbots learn from each conversation they have. Those bots learn the most popular questions and scan your knowledge base to give clients the best answer.
And when it’s a real person behind the chatbox, ML helps with autocompletion. ML can pre-fill responses for agents based on customer input, meaning faster resolutions for customers.
Better Employee Training
Recently, AI’s made its way into agent training.
For example, chatbot AI creates messages based on real client interactions to train agents for support chats. Agents train against those ML-powered conversations while staff watch on, correcting mistakes. When AI-trained agents have their first real chat, they already have tons of experience.
AI Agent Assist
AI-powered agent assist suggests phrases used by high-performing agents for higher-quality customer service. Agent assist reduces support costs, improves customer satisfaction, and boosts response rates.
AI-powered agent assist utilizes technology like sentiment analysis and text analytics to monitor the text to gauge the sentiment of the customer, allowing agents to see in real-time if the customer is satisfied or dissatisfied. AI can also provide suggested responses based on the context of the conversation which the agent can then choose from.
Omnichannel Sentiment Analysis
While evaluating voice interactions is common, most companies fail to measure their other channels (text, live chat, email, etc.). And even when companies do measure interactions, they typically sample only a small percentage.
By using omnichannel sentiment analysis, AI solves these sampling issues. Impressively, AI can analyze every customer interaction across all channels for any problems in support quality. This means through sentiment analysis, AI can monitor sentiment and quality on channels like email, text, SMS, web chat, messenger apps, and more.
How AI Can Improve Customer Experience in the Contact Center
Customers also benefit from AI customer service—not only businesses and their agents. Here’s how contact center AI adds value to customers:
Personalized Customer Care
Customer service AI serves customers based on machine-learning algorithms and CRM integration. Those technologies make for ultra-personalized service based on real data. And research says people are 80% likelier to buy when given personalized service.
For example, AI might use your CRM to address customers by name and give shipment updates on demand. And with progress in data-driven AI customer service, future chatbots will use language suited to clients’ personalities.
Better Customer Retention
Machine learning features in AI make it a powerful tool for retention. ML now helps businesses identify and prevent pain points contributing to churn.
With AI, you can make improvements based on real data, not theories. For example, tone analysis lets you find frustrated users and develop effective strategies to win them back.
Add AI to Your CCaaS Now
As you can see, “AI customer service” isn’t a buzzphrase to boost CCaaS sales. AI is a tangible product that can boost the performance of your contact center.
AI for contact centers provides both companies and clients with tangible benefits. Speed, scalability, personalization, and retention only scratch the surface of what AI in contact centers can do.
To succeed in an era of higher client expectations, you need those benefits. See how AI can improve your customer service with a Bright Pattern demo today.
