Customer service has been an integral part of business enterprise for years.
This discipline helps build trust and confidence in the mind of customers, which is a requisite for sustained growth and continued success. As technology changes, so have your customer’s service needs.
If your company is still manually responding to customer service requests, you’re wasting lots of valuable time, energy, and other resources.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming a powerful tool for customer service, with major players across industries investing in this developing technology.
AI might sound intimidating, but automated tools are available for any size and scale company. Learn 9 ways that AI and hyperautomation can help your organization provide its best customer service.
1. AI Is Helping Improve Customer Service
AI tools help streamline your customer services processes. You can apply an AI framework to almost every part of the customer experience, particularly in situations where the customer isn’t face-to-face with one of your human team members.
Many industries have already adopted AI interfaces for their helplines. AI can handle many customer issues over the phone, through text-based online chat services, and by email.
In such scenarios, automated tools can perform many lower-level tasks that used to require a human touch.
AI can answer phone calls, provide common knowledge base answers, tackle operational questions, and even approve refunds or account exceptions.
AI services can improve the customer experience which leads to improvements across all fields: customer loyalty, repeat purchases, brand reputation, revenue, churn, and more.
Such increases also impact your internal operations.
Your company will save resources by assigning your human workers to more complex and interesting tasks. This leads to lower staff turnover, higher team satisfaction, and ultimately, more brand growth.
2. AI Learns From Human Input
Artificial intelligence isn’t as scary as science fiction makes it out to be.
AI is simply a simulated form of intelligence engineered into machines. An AI-based tool is capable of learning, making decisions, and correcting itself within certain circumstances.
A customer service AI product doesn’t come preloaded with everything it needs to know about your company, policies, and procedures.
Instead, an AI tool can adapt and adjust its behavior within a certain set of guidelines. These guides or parameters can be established when you first adopt the tool, but overall, your AI will be learning on the job.
AI tools learn from human interactions and behavior.
When your AI makes the best choice, its decision is reinforced. Awkward, negative, or unnecessary decisions receive a penalty. Over time, this process of machine learning encourages the AI to learn and grow.
3. Machine Learning Drives Customer Service
Machine learning is similar to the process of human learning.
After all, AI was designed to mimic human intelligence.
If your company installs an AI chatbot to provide customer service through your website, the bot will go through a learning process as it starts to work with customers. Whenever the AI tool makes a customer happy or solves a problem, that decision tree is reinforced.
If the bot can’t answer a question, gets caught in a conversational loop, or drives a customer away, those decisions receive a penalty.
This process mirrors the learning curve for a new human customer service representative. Your human team members must also learn how to satisfy customers and what strategies don’t succeed. A benefit of using customer service AI for basic questions is that these tools free up your human team for more complex concerns.
4. AI Has A Faster Response Time Than Humans
Computers and machines can respond faster than humans. A computer’s processing speed operates on a different scale than the human experience of time.
People stop to consider context, have emotional reactions, get bored, or otherwise find themselves distracted during conversations. AI, on the other hand, receives input and immediately provides output.
This means that AI can make decisions almost instantaneously compared to a human’s thought process.
Faster response times are a common goal of customer service departments. Slow response teams frustrate customers, especially users who are already dissatisfied with their experience.
A long hold time or delayed response can drive customers to give up on the interaction. This frustration is dangerous to customer loyalty, brand image, and repeat transactions.
5. AI Can Reply From End To End
Today’s AI solutions can handle a complete interaction, producing robust responses that manage the situation. Tools like Emailtree can maintain simple yet entire conversations. In these scenarios, the AI tool may complete a full interaction with a customer. For example, AI can answer questions from a knowledge base, access account information, take order details, and more. They also escalate more complex issues to human team members as necessary.
AI is also ideal for answering contact forms and emails. Products like EmailTree can perform a range of tasks upon receiving an email. Using hyperautomation, EmailTree provides a high-level response that’s available for human review before sending.
6. Hyperautomation Handles The Entire Interaction
Hyperautomation combines multiple aspects of customer service automation. Services like EmailTree use machine learning to handle incoming emails and customer requests. EmailTree’s AI foundation performs three basic steps for every email.
First, EmailTree reads the message to extract meaning. Using natural language capabilities, EmailTree can understand human messages in context. The service also cross-references your existing business information to find account information, client history, and more.
Second, EmailTree automates a variety of tasks. EmailTree uses the information it gathered from the message itself, as well as the customer information, to delegate a range of responses. Depending on the situation, EmailTree may generate a discount code, prepare a invoice, or answer inventory questions.
Third, EmailTree builds upon its previous tasks and generates a reply. These responses fit within your brand standards and voice while addressing the customer requests. The messages you send can either be sent automatically or sent to members of your team for review before being delivered to the client.
EmailTree learns from any changes your human representative makes and will address those concerns in the future.
The AI also assigns a confidence level to each response. The higher the confidence level, the more successful the message should be. Your team can decide to review every response by hand, or as EmailTree learns more, you can automatically approve messages above a certain confidence threshold.
7. AI Can Handle Different Languages
Artificial intelligence works with natural language, which describes the informal way most people actually speak and write. AI can learn to understand slang, common misspellings, partial queries, and other forms of speech that often confused older operating systems.
This skill is useful enough in one language, but AIs can learn to handle multiple languages.
Offering support in several languages is a great way to reach more of your community. Today’s global society speaks a variety of languages and your customer base is likely to be multilingual as well.
AI customer support allows you to serve more customers without relying on the language abilities of your human staff.
8. AI Understands Customer Concerns
Empathy is a commonly stated reason why people prefer human customer service representatives, but AI tools are increasingly able to understand client concerns as well.
The machine learning process enables AIs to absorb and contextualize customer comments.
When an AI has a conversation with a person, it sorts terms into categories or families. For example, a bot can tell the difference between a product name, service request, order details, and other common parts of a business conversation.
Once the AI has determined what a customer is asking, the bot can reference a group of standard responses to their question. The AI might ask a follow-up question, provide a link, send a list of available appointments, or do many other tasks.
Repeated interactions with customers will help the AI learn whether its choices were well-received or not. Over time, the AI will learn to repeat the positive responses.
9. AIs Make Decisions With Authority
It’s easy for AIs to remain calm, collected, and impartial while working with customers.
Even the best human representative can get frustrated, angry, or emotional when helping a difficult client. However, bots don’t have human emotions.
AIs can make decisions based on proper protocol instead of emotional responses.
This allows artificial intelligence tools to project authority when working with customers. An AI also can’t change its mind. Customers may be able to escalate their concerns to a human supervisor, but your customer service AI makes calm, reasonable decisions in every situation.
Hyperautomation And Customer Service
AI is finally here to make our lives a little easier and more efficient.
The customer service business environment is an important aspect of any company, but this work can be challenging for people to perform.
A robust customer service hyperautomation tool like EmailTree allows you to provide the best service to every client while allowing your valuable human staff to spend their time where it’s more useful.