66% of customers make use of more than three channels to communicate with a business. This indicates their inclination towards an omnichannel experience, in addition to speedy and personalized interactions. With a view to providing better customer experience, businesses are focusing on digital transformation to improve turnaround time and accuracy of responses. AI transforms customer service, making it cost-effective, faster and efficient. While 45% of companies have invested in AI, 37% of them have already implemented chatbots to automate customer service along with providing 24/7 assistance.
Role of AI in Customer Care
The capability of AI to process enormous amount of data in seconds is taking customer service by storm. Handling repetitive tasks such as answering to customers’ common requests faster helps in improving response times, leading to better customer engagement and satisfaction and allowing agents to excel in performing more creative tasks. According to a survey, 79% of customer care agents think that they have improved their skillsets while solving more complex issues.
With AI and Machine Learning (ML), it is possible to segregate tickets based on language, topic, urgency and route them to the appropriate agent automatically. AI capabilities provide better accuracy, consistency and reliability while performing repetitive tasks, making error-free and unbiased decisions every time, unlike humans. Chatbots are capable of operating 24/7 to handle frequently asked questions, analyzing data to provide suitable replies.
64% of millennials prefer personalized services and this can be powered by AI/ML. This technology can also help deflect support tickets by offering specific solutions drawn from a knowledge base or based on previous solutions for specific issues. This enables reducing the number of support tickets, and also facilitates instant resolution.
AI enriches customer experience, saving time and costs, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This, in turn, increases customer life time value with outstanding impact on business ROI. AI helps in lowering costs by eliminating manual labor and costly errors, expediting process cycle time and accuracy. It is possible to handle varying volumes of customer queries with AI-automation, scaling up easily. 63% of company executives mentioned that AI adoption has led to elevated revenue.
What AI Technology Supports Customer Care?
Chatbots, AI-powered Helpdesks, Text analysis tools, etc. are some of the AI tools that have become mainstream in customer service.
Chatbots
Chatbots can be AI-agents, efficient in handling large quantity of tickets and solving 70% of routine customer queries. They work 24/7 to provide reliable, speedy and personalized responses. It is possible to train AI-based chatbots to analyze the intent of a customer query and provide an appropriate solution or route the issue to a human agent, if necessary. NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities of AI chatbots provide a more intuitive and user-friendly approach for customers to get solutions to their issues, using everyday language. This saves a lot of time on part of human agents to focus on higher-value activities.
AI-powered Helpdesks
AI can be used to classify collected data and rout tickets and answer simple, routine questions. This saves time and improve efficiency. For example, Zendesk’s “answer bot” suggests relevant content from a knowledge base. This is also used to categorize tickets on the basis of sentiment, urgency, prioritizing tickets requiring immediate attention. Triggers can be set for routing to the appropriate agent, in case the AI application fails to solve the issue.
Text Analysis Tools
AI can respond to emails as well as tickets in the system. Text analysis tools can efficiently classify thousands of incoming tickets and emails with respect to topic, sentiment, urgency, risk etc., and direct them to specific agents. They can take urgent action based on priority and solve customer problems, avoiding customer churn or a probable sale.
Text is analyzed based on topics such as delivery issues, refunds status, account login issues, etc. Through sentiment analysis, it is possible to detect specific emotions (positive, negative or neutral) of customers towards company’s products or services. Through keyword analysis, it is possible to detect immediacy of an issue with specific words such as ‘immediate’, ‘ASAP’, ‘urgent’, etc.
Organizations are putting their faith in AI to automate repetitive, mundane, low-value processes such as solving common customer issues, tagging support tickets, prioritizing high-risk issues, routing tickets to the specific agent or team. AI can efficiently solve customer queries coming through various channels of customer service such as chat, email, support system with tickets. It is not only improving the workflow of the customer care agents but also revolutionizing customer experiences through providing reliable, appropriate, faster and personalized solutions. This impacts customer satisfaction as well customer retention and loyalty. Al is an indispensable solution for customer care organizations to replace manual intervention with intelligent automation, saving costs, scaling-up processes and increasing accuracy and speed.
If you would like to explore how implementing AI can help your customer care business or department, the Rapid Acceleration Partners AI team would be glad to help you. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow in tandem with our RPA solution RAPBot , provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just week. Our platform also has specific applications and you can build your own use case that easily integrates with your existing systems. Book a demo to understand how our AI solutions can bring immediate results to streamline your business processes and boost ROI.
