Irrespective of the business type, the importance of a robust customer support strategy cannot be undermined. This is what keeps contact centers at the core of such a strategy. With rising customer expectations, most contact centers handle tremendous pressure to do more with fewer resources.
On one side, cost-cutting narrows down the quality of customer support to be delivered. On the other, there are higher contact volumes via inbound and outbound customer communication channels paired with complex consumer problems. This is where technology, in the form of conversational AI, comes to the rescue.
“This advanced technology is expected to disrupt the contact center industry for the better, with its global market growing towards the mark of US$ 18.4 billion by 2026“
– MarketsandMarkets
Conversational AI for customer service is considered a core contact center automation technology that promotes the shift to a digital-first approach for customer support solutions. If you are wondering whether this technology is meant for your business, let us help you understand its impact in relation to the challenges it solves.
Check out these top customer service statistics to watch out for in 2022
Why Do Businesses Need Conversational AI for Customer Service?
The growth of a business lies in how efficiently it handles customer support needs post sales. Bad customer service can lead to an unsatisfactory customer experience, which can pave the way for the significant loss of potential customers.
As per recent research, 91% of customers are willing to leave a brand without warning because of poor customer service. Another statistics reveals that 46% of customers prefer live chat over email or social media. This highlights higher expectations for real-time support. This behavioral shift away from in-person interactions to effective, omnichannel customer service makes them feel the worth of conversational AI.
This technology can address these shortcomings, thereby making businesses improve their overall customer experience and operational efficiency. It will also allow your business to interact with your customers via their preferred channels for quick response delivery.
At times, staffing an in-house customer service division can be quite expensive to deal with customer queries round the clock. Delayed responses to support tickets can have an adverse effect on the growth of little-to-medium-sized organizations. The use of AI-based conversation interfaces to address customer queries not only reduce business cost but also ensure timely response delivery.
Operational Challenges Solved by Conversational AI
Conversational AI is largely used in three different ways to fulfill the required customer support needs, including:
1. Assistance to Customers
It covers the self-service assistance delivered via mobile, web, and voice channels to the customers. Here, the AI system backing voice bots or chatbots tends to interpret customer queries and respond in a manner similar to human interaction. As a result, it solves a plethora of operational challenges for contact centers and helps them meet their Return on Investment (ROI) targets.
Firstly, conversational AI for customer service provides 24×7 assistance which is far cheaper than handling rotating shifts of live agents. It also enables seamless management of high volumes of customer queries, answering each of them almost immediately.
Even if the deployed AI system is programmed to handle less complex queries, it will help manage the most common customer interactions. As a result, only the complex support queries will make it through to the team of live agents.
2. Assistance to Customer Support Agents
At various stages, customer support agents need to deal with information related to the consumers, be it their personal details, past purchases, prior shopping experience, etc. They need to look at multiple sheets and prompts to address the query or transfer it to the senior support staff for further resolution. This increases the hold time and reduces the overall contact resolution rate.
The implementation of conversational AI in the contact centers also supports live agents by providing easy access to the required information, tools, and systems to conduct customer interactions. With context-sensitive technology by their side, they can reduce the call hold time and forgo the need to transfer calls to other agents because of the knowledge gap. This can also increase the first contact resolution rate.
3. Data Analysis
Most businesses deal with and store huge chunks of data that include transactional information, previous customer interactions, chat sessions, or call transcripts. A major proportion of this data is in unstructured form and can only be mined to extract valuable insights with the help of AI technology.
AI interrogates the data to find patterns and links between pieces of information and transform them into insights. More particularly, conversational AI can monitor conversations with the customers to analyze how they respond in different circumstances and predict what they want.
A thorough analysis of how a customer responds now, how he/she had once responded, and how other customers respond to similar situations can give you the power to anticipate ways to deliver maximum customer satisfaction and guide live agents towards a certain course of action.
Benefits of Conversational AI in Customer Service
1. Easy to Win Over Potential Customers
Your customers look at the quality of your products/services and post-sales support experience you offer with the same lens. A good customer experience can make your business benefit from customer loyalty financially.
Conversational AI for customer service can help you answer queries almost instantly, which can make the customers come back for more. Keep in mind that amidst the rising competition in almost every sphere of business, some customers would not choose your brand again on not receiving support service as expected.
2. Faster Resolution of Queries Across Channels
These days, consumers love to communicate with each other using instant messaging apps or social media channels. On the other hand, businesses need to build their presence on these channels for brand building and marketing. This calls for having the capability to handle and answer queries from customers received via these popular channels.
You can automate customer service across different channels with the help of conversational AI and let it interact with the customers while staying true to the brand’s tone.
3. 24*7 Efficient Support Services
Step into your customers’ shoes to realize how frustrating it can be to wait for hours to get an urgent issue resolved or explain the same problem to different agents. Ensuring the benefit of constant, quick support becomes the critical factor that defines how they perceive your business.
All the communication channels can be made available to the users round-the-clock when backed by conversational AI. Whether it is about new orders, problems related to the shopping experience, or any other query, this technology can make it easier for you to handle customer queries whenever they come up.
4. Personalized Support Services
Another benefit of utilizing chatbots or voicebots backed by conversational AI is greater personalization of support offered. By knowing your customers’ clear profile, you can handle their queries related to a product or service according to their needs, which can set your brand apart from the competition. These bots will also deal with the end users in an empathetic way and recommend products/services accordingly.
The more personalized your customer support service is, the more prospects you can convert into paying customers.
5. Reduced Customer Service Costs
Automation in customer service backed by AI can enable you to optimize how the agents handle customer queries, among other things. For instance, a chatbot can handle queries related to sales and after-sales service, business processes, and FAQs, while the hired agents have time to deal with complex cases.
In case you opt for a no-code conversation AI solution, you can easily get started without creating a new IT team.
6. Multiple Language Support
For multinational contact centers, having a diverse support team to handle customer queries is quite challenging. Plus, you never know with certainty from where the support query will arise, making the language barrier persist for a longer time.
With conversational AI, it is possible to create chatbots to provide customer service to specific target regions or the whole world. Take the case of Ameyo Chatbot which supports more than 100 languages and responds to the customers in their native language.
How to Leverage Conversational AI for Best Results?
While delivering customer service, you can implement conversational AI for as many use cases as possible. From dealing with post-live support to handling customer queries about using your product, chatbots or voicebots can take care of end-to-end customer experiences.
Given below are a few use cases where conversational AI can be linked to customer support services:
1. Response Suggestions to the Agents
Generic customer queries are simple and easy to resolve by chatbots, whereas complex queries may need human intervention. The best part is – conversational AI can deal with them both and suggest appropriate responses to the live agents to make things easier for them.
For example, a chatbot can help a support executive by analyzing the intent behind the customer’s query and providing relevant information to resolve the same and close the ticket in less time. It can also handle automatic call routing to different departments of your business to deliver a world-class customer experience.
2. Social Media Monitoring to Recognize Customers’ Concerns
Finding the issues faced by your customers is the first step towards their timely resolution. With the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP), you can automate social media monitoring to track customer behavior across different channels.
You can also benefit from automated ticket classification based on which the chatbots will redirect the query to the concerned department timely. As a whole, it will make the customer service more efficient.
3. Customer Service Analytics
Conversational AI Platforms (CAIP) can also provide you with an analytics dashboard where you can analyze minute details about every chatbot interaction. You can clearly check how many users leave your website or other touchpoints with timely resolution of their queries.
Summing It Up
Every business aims to provide the best-in-class customer service and resorts to advanced technology to make this happen. Ameyo Chatbot and Voicebot, which are based on conversational AI, are powerful tools to help your business automate customer service delivery and convert your customers into loyalists.
Interested in understanding this technology further? We recommend you to read our complete guide to conversational AI.
