In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption has increased across many business sectors. One of the main areas experiencing rapid transformation is customer service. Apart from just delivering services, improving the customer experiences is important to attract and retain customers. According to Gartner, customer experience is the newest competitive battlefield.
With intense competition among brands and the availability of alternatives, companies are focusing on developing superior products and services and also enhancing customer experience to attract new customers and ensure brand loyalty. A good customer experience means the customer is likely to not only repeat business but also recommend the business to others. To offer tailored customer experiences, it is important to plot customer personas and match those persona's with relevant experiences. Companies are leveraging AI in customer service to enhance their customer experience.
With AI-enabled analytics, companies are able to examine large amounts of data, such as customer purchase history and interactions to develop a comprehensive customer persona. This helps businesses understand a customer's specific needs and offer highly personalized recommendations and experiences. Offering this type of personalization manually is nearly impossible. It is challenging for customer service agents to be fully aware of the history of a particular customer. On the other hand, AI can analyze thousands of records and provide accurate customer data points to meet customer needs and improve satisfaction.
Another advantage of AI in customer experience is the ability of the AI to make real-time decisions during a customer interaction. By analyzing real-time interaction data, AI can upsell during the interaction and provide better customer experiences.
Customers in the age of AI are beginning to expect far more personalized products, services, and content than ever before. Based on the customer’s history and interactions, AI can recommend products, services, and content that are tailor-made for that customer. AI algorithms provide Intelligent recommendations while shopping online, watching videos on streaming services like YouTube, or while searching on Google. Consumers are starting to rely on AI algorithms for assistance in decision-making. Efficiency of AI algorithms is evolving with more and more user data so customers will get a more hyper-personalized experience.
AI-enabled chatbots can converse with customers in a realistic way and provide accurate and relevant answers to customer queries. This keeps customers engaged throughout their journey. Unlike human customer service agents, chatbots are available around the clock, allowing customers to connect at their convenience. A customer service chatbot can handle many customers without delay. In the case of complex queries, chatbots can handover the task to a human representative.
Chatbots are not meant to replace human employees, but can improve the efficiency of the process. Chatbot interaction data can be used by customer support representatives to offer a more personalized interaction and relevant solutions.
AI has the power to overcome shortcomings in customer service and improve CSM processes immensely for a fulfilling customer experience. It is for this reason that business leaders are aggressively implementing AI in customer service. An MIT Technology Review survey shared that the most active department for AI deployment is customer service.