Four Ways AI Is Revolutionizing Customer Support

Call centers can use AI in truly collabortive ways

Published: Tuesday, April 26, 2022 - 12:03

By 2035, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase business productivity by up to 40 percent. It’s already a part of people’s daily lives and its use is only expected to increase to solve more critical problems that assail our world.

Businesses are looking at AI to achieve cost-effective customer success. Integrating AI into customer service is revolutionizing the ways customer problems are resolved. From managing never-ending support tickets to responding at the right time, AI is helping customer support representatives by giving them timely information at their fingertips. It’s helping business leaders customize experiences for users and create high-touch experiences for customers at every touchpoint.

Here are four ways that AI is benefiting customer support.

1. Simplified search

Although there are multiple aspects to achieving customer success, time is the most crucial. Handling several customers simultaneously, and supplying the right and effective solution at the right time is a tedious job. Call center agents juggle between multiple platforms to retrieve the information necessary to resolve customer problems. Therefore, search should be made simple and seamless for agents to navigate the troubleshooting process easily.

AI employs natural language processes (NLP) to provide agents with a seamless search experience. There are infinite communication challenges involved when machines and humans communicate. NLP gives a human touch to users’ experiences by translating between different languages and understanding the natural language in which they speak. It understands the context and intent of a user’s search, completes sentences for them, and retrieves the relevant information from the knowledge base.

Customer support representatives can easily search by title or type keywords to retrieve the needed information from long text documents. This bolsters agents’ efficiency in resolving more support tickets without compromising the quality of customer support.

AI also enables easy auto-tagging and classification of content, which enhances the findability of information and helps representatives and customers alike to access relevant information quickly and efficiently. With simplified and seamless information searchability, customer support teams can rely on a unified knowledge base to serve customers confidently; this results in increased customer satisfaction.

2. Real-time decision making

Customer support is a fast-paced department and needs strong decision-makers to meet rising customer expectations. Support agents need to make informed decisions in real time to help customers. However, given the enormous amounts of data, it’s practically impossible for agents to process all the information and recollect it in times of need. Multiple steps must be executed in the right order to troubleshoot customer problems. To this end, AI automates cognitive tasks, empowering agents to perform their jobs quicker and more efficiently.

Incorporating AI into guided workflows enhances support representatives’ ability to take the next best action to help customers resolve complex issues. Instead of confusing customers with complicated, interactive voice-response systems, AI-enabled cognitive decision tree software supports representatives with step-by-step instructions to ease the troubleshooting process for customers. With standardized guided workflows, agents feel more confident about the support they provide to customers, resulting in increased customer confidence.

AI empowers business leaders to make improved decisions by providing valuable insights about user engagement. It automates recording the most-searched queries, unmatched phrases, and total resolution time, which helps knowledge managers optimize content in the knowledge base. They can increase the visibility of top-performing content, add new knowledge, and delete unnecessary information.

AI-enabled data analytics makes users active participants in the decision-making process by providing a safe space for agents to share their feedback on the resourcefulness of content. By tracking user engagement, AI brings together different stakeholders and gives them actionable insights to make real-time decisions to help customers.

3. Personalized experience

Customers today have many options to choose from, which makes it crucial for business leaders to invest in providing personalized experiences to customers. Every customer is unique and comes with their own set of expectations. More than 75 percent of consumers believe brands should implement better strategies to encourage loyalty, so that the brand understands them and what they want to achieve. Clearly, personalization is the most effective way businesses can retain their customers and gain a competitive edge. However, it’s challenging to provide customized customer support on scale.

Besides automating manual tasks, AI is helping businesses supplement the efficiency of their human workforce in providing customized support. AI can process large amounts of data in real-time and share relevant suggestions and notifications with users. Machine learning tracks users’ journeys, constantly learns about their behaviors and activities, and improves experiences with its collective memory.

In customer support, AI integrates with several backend servers to enable seamless traversing of customer information in the guided workflows. Agents need not visit multiple platforms to collect customer information or request customers to repeat their information. AI makes sure that the information in a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) database is used efficiently to create elevated customer experiences.

With adequate data in place, customer support representatives can offer meaningful and personalized experiences with customers at scale. Data hold tremendous growth opportunities, and AI can help organizations monetize their data and use them to their full potential.

4. Around the clock customer support

One of the most crucial ways AI is revolutionizing customer support is via intelligent virtual assistants or chatbots. As customers increasingly turn to online support, chatbots are addressing customers’ needs by providing them with instant answers to their problems.

More than 60 percent of users believe 24/7 support is the best feature of chatbots. Bots don’t get tired or sick and can function continuously. Furthermore, it’s easier to train bots than human agents. Bots can carry out critical cognitive tasks and provide a human touch to customer conversations.

By configuring chatbots on the most frequently used customer service channels, business leaders can provide round-the-clock customer support, which is pragmatically impossible with customer support teams alone.

While AI chatbots can take up standard customer queries, they also enable easy and seamless handoffs to live agents in cases of complex issues. Chatbots transfer all the customer data to live agents for effective and speedy resolutions. Failed searches or unmatched phrases can act as valuable insights for knowledge managers to update the information in the bots to meet future users’ needs.

Conclusion

AI is improving people’s experiences in every sphere of life, leading to rising expectations for more on-demand, customized, and instant services. In customer support, AI revolutionizes how support teams interact with customers and deliver solutions. AI is altering call center dynamics by helping agents focus more on skill-based work as well as equipping them with the correct information at the right time to deliver meaningful and lasting customer support.

While AI is eliminating the redundancy of work by automating customer services, it should not be used to replace support teams. It can’t replace humans, but it can augment their ability to achieve more in a given time. This will enable businesses to grow in an evolving digital landscape.

About The Author

Sowmya Juttukonda

Sowmya Juttukonda is a digital media specialist at Knowmax. Knowmax is an AI-backed knowledge management software for support agents that helps enterprises reduce support costs and solve productivity challenges. Knowmax, which is powered by decision trees, picture guides and a robust content management system, supports quick answers to knowledge base queries, seamless customer experiences and business efficiency.