Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Customer Service and Support

Introduction

Every company has one crucial area that should be taken care of — Customer Relationship Management (CRM). To get the best results and automation out of CRM, business leaders use Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions including Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). AI-powered customer service provides 24/7 customer support to companies.

Artificial Intelligence is injected in customer service to augment human efforts, as well as getting rid of some employees. This leads to boosting the satisfaction of customer experience and cutting expenses on human customer service. Bureau of Labor Statistics states that there are nearly 3 million customer service workers employed in the USA, and they are getting paid $35 170 a year on average! AI technology is still too far from performing all human customer service activities perfectly and replace people altogether, but it could easily take over some tasks. Artificial Intelligence already can provide a higher level of efficiency, significantly cutting costs for businesses.

In this article, we will take a look at value, that AI brings to customer service, some of the use cases, and discuss the potential of the technology in this industry.

The Benefits and Real-World Use Cases of AI in Customer Service

It’s not necessary to eliminate human customer service workers with AI solutions – they can work in a collaboration getting the best of both worlds. Humans can dedicate themselves to goals they handle best, while Machine Learning improves the operations. Here are some examples of how AI already provides value for businesses.

Messaging powered by Artificial Intelligence Augmentation

LivePerson is among the companies that introduced messaging augmented by AI to the market. They had developed a partnership with IBM Watson and gained approximately $200 million last year. One of LivePerson’s solutions are chatbots to assist the agent. Some clients could get confused by talking to the chatbot, but using bots in combination with humans makes things better. This company doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of generalized chatbots, but giving bots specified and simple routing tasks is the idea of improvement.

The specialists at LivePerson consider that near 50% of all customer service interactions could be easily signed to chatbots. They use this system where simple questions are delivered straight to a bot, but when things become complicated humans take on the conversation. When difficult issues are solved, the conversation goes back to the chatbot. That’s how both parties perform what they do best and get the maximum efficiency in minimum time.

Thanks to this system, a human agent could handle a number of interactions. LivePerson states that agents at UPC, one of the biggest internet providers in Ireland, can now handle three clients at once, while agents at Sun could take up to impressive six chats at the same time.

Read more on AI in Retail

Artificial Intelligence for customer phone calls

There are two main reasons why it’s way harder for AI to perform well in a voice chat. First being accents, different noises, bad pronunciation, and unknown speech patterns. The second one is that in most cases customers call when they have difficult and complex issues, so the text chat won’t help to find the solution. Despite these challenges, some companies still offer solutions in this area.

Cogito used behavioral science and deep learning technology to build a tool that is able to analyze conversations in real time. Their Artificial Intelligence is aware not only of the content in the dialogue but also the tone. This tool provides insights into customers’ feelings based on changes in volume and pitch, along with mimicking detection. So, with all this information human representatives will get additional information and tips to improve the call quality and get feedback about their performance.

The juggernaut of the insurance industry Humana gave this system its first major test. The trial period lasted for half of the year giving 28% improvement of Net Promoter Scores, while issue resolutions rate became better by 6%, and much fewer customers still wanted to talk to a manager. According to Cogito, callbacks rate was lowered by 10%, and the customer satisfaction rate grew by 28%.

Artificial Intelligence for managing emails

When a person reads every email in the company’s mailbox, it can take a very long time. If you add the fact that worker must figure out what a client wants, and how he can help in this case – it could take even longer. No wonder that companies already implemented AI to cut on time in this area. DigitalGenius provides this kind of solution as the main customer service product in their arsenal. Technology scans and tags emails to send them to the correct person. This system also offers humans similar inquiries solved in the past, to come up with the response even quicker and more effective.

Magoosh, the student prep company, already improved their customer service team with DigitalGenius solution. The internal goal for Magoosh was to respond to every client within 24 hours and they met it – nearly 50% of the client’s inquiries waiting for the response were cut. DigitalGenius states that over 83% of emails could be sorted and tagged by their solution!

Could Artificial Intelligence replace human customer service?

For some routine interactions with the very basic information required AI will work perfectly fine without any human involvement. Starbucks, Domino and Subway, among many other companies in the food industry are already implementing AI for order placement. Chatbots in Facebook Messenger or Amazon Alexa are some of the ways you can order your coffee at the moment. There also some use cases in the banking industry for simple actions like checking balance or paying bills. Natural language assistance from Capital One or Bank of America are examples of how chatbots could take over banking routine.

The Future

Artificial Intelligence is becoming a vital part of modern CRM. According to Gartner by the year 2020, nearly 80% of customer service interactions could be handled by AI without a need for involvement by people. Undoubtedly AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing will get more sophisticated in the near future unlocking unlimited potential not only to improve in Customer Relationship Management but also introducing new opportunities to increase revenue along the way.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence development is here to help your business turn in the more client-oriented company making customer experience and interactions more convenient, frustration-free and personalized. Powering your CRM with AI technologies like chatbots and other AI-enabled communication will lift your business to the entirely new level among the competitors. Here, at SPD Technology we are ready to answer all of your questions on this topic, provide you with the consultation and help you build the solution that will reinforce your company in the competitive market.