We humans never stick to the same thing forever. Be it video games, songs, movies, cellphones, we choose something latest and trending over the former. Likewise, businesses are also choosing new and trending ways to provide customer service. And the latest way they’re shifting towards is AI customer service.
But why? What is the reason they are advancing to this technology?
These stats will make this clear
- American Express found that customers are willing to spend 17% more to do business with a brand that has great customer service.
- HubSpot also researched where they found that 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases with a brand that offers outstanding customer service.
As you see, customer service is a vital factor. Users judge a brand on behalf of it. So it’s crucial to have an excellent service that’s contents customers thoroughly. And AI powered customer service is something that has the potential to do this.
But when it comes to money, we all are tightwad. We want to know every single benefit before investing in something. So I’m gonna list some benefits of AI customer service here to help you make a wise decision about using it for your business.
Benefits Of Using AI In Customer Service
1. Greater Benefits With Less Workforce
Don’t say “I’ve heard this countless times”.
I know you had, and you will because it is the most ultimate benefit of AI in customer service. Because AI is developed to help humans, using it to provide customer service will not only make your service fluent and errorless, but it will also reduce the manpower needed for this job.
Artificial Intelligence customer service will make you resolve customer complaints. Reach out and greet them, and engage them with content, suggest products as per their interests, ask for the feedback, etc.
These were just a few things, there are much more we do in customer service. All of this requires hard efforts. And all businesses don’t have enough resources to hire staff to get the efforts done.
So the best way is to go for Artificial Intelligence. It’s economical, easy to use and obviously helpful.
2. Personalization
We’re already witnessing personalization in our daily life. Ecommerce sites like Amazon, Walmart recommend products as per our interests. Streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube recommend personalized videos as per the genre or channel we like. This happens with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Accenture says, 91 percent of customers are more likely to purchase products with a brand that gives personalized product recommendations to customers.
With the power of AI in your customer service, you can personalize and deliver your content to the right audience for better targeting. Also, you can create perfect buyer personas to convey your message in a better manner and increase your conversion rates.
3. Rich Productivity
Artificial Intelligence is ultimately easing our life by automating daily jobs. When your business has an AI powered customer service, you can simplify many tasks. Your customers and purchases are handled automatically, the content is delivered to the right segment of customers, human errors are diminished, etc.
When all of this happens without human assistance, you and your employees get much more time. You can utilize this time and focus on being more productive in your business to get better results.
4. Better Customer Experience
Salesforce said in a report that 67 percent of customers can pay more for a better experience.
Customer Experience is the war businesses are fighting and AI powered customer service is the weapon they can use to win this battle. Let’s talk about how…
Chatbots can work round the clock without leave. This boosts your brand’s presence and allows customers to contact you anytime, thus improving reliability and enhancing the customer experience. Moreover, they aren’t exorbitant and don’t require coding knowledge to build one for a business. You can create your own chatbot for free in just 5 mins with a chatbot builder.
Apart from all this, businesses can use AI chatbots to simplify things like customer retention, automation, lead generation, etc.
5. Speedy And Perpetual Response
A HubSpot Research says, 90% of consumers consider a quick response as very important when they have a customer service query. 60% of customers say a speedy response is 10 minutes or less.
AI customer service bots eliminate the wait time and reduce it to less than 5 minutes. Customers also prefer these kinds of brands who give an immediate response. So if you’re reducing their waiting time with your AI powered service, you’re more likely to have a great customer retention rate.
Not just fast, chatbots are perpetual too. They are 24×7 available and ready to help any time the customer needs them. So using chatbots for customer service will boost your brand availability.
With a smart chatbot, you can create a series of questions a bot will respond to. You can set answers that are more personalized and thriving. This way your audience will get a personal experience without a human touch.
6. Cost Cutting
Using AI customer service in your business will free up your employees, automate your marketing campaigns, handle more users at a time efficiently. Moreover, as I said, smart chatbots get smarter which means you don’t have to spend anything on training your agents or hiring new ones.
This will help you save your time and money you spend on all these operations. Simply saying, using AI customer service in your business will make you spend less and earn more.
7. Direct And Multichannel Support
Users on messaging apps are growing significantly. The graph below shows the number of unique monthly users in the United States on messaging apps.
These are the numbers only for the US. If we talk globally, only Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp users are 3 Billion and still growing. This shows how vast the user base of messaging apps is.
And every customer wants the brands to be available on their preferred platforms. So you must have a tool that allows you to provide smart AI customer support to your customers on different platforms.
The good news is there are many Chatbot builders that let you create smart AI customer service bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Hangouts, etc. to help you follow a multichannel approach.
All you need to do is to drag and drop a few things to get your chatbot ready in a few minutes.
8. Reduction In Churn Rate
Churn Rate is the number of customers who leave your brand and choose another one.
When you leverage AI powered customer service in your business, you’re more likely to witness a reduction in churn rate. Let’s talk how.
AI based solutions are more ideal. Businesses can use smart chatbots to give customers a nailing solution they are looking for. Even if the bot can’t resolve the problem, these AI chatbots can redirect them to a human agent.
The human agent then analyzes the issue the user has shared with the bot and responds to it with the answer. This elevates the customer satisfaction rate that eventually results in churn rate reduction(or increased retention rate), improved customer loyalty, fewer return rates.
Dashbot processed millions of messages and observed the retention rate of chatbots across different platforms. Here’s what they found:
If you count, the average retention rate of chatbots within the 30 days is 34.4 percent. That’s way too good!!!
9. Accurate Customer Insights
AI powered customer service can assist your business in collecting precise insights. It collects and analyzes the data on various factors such as interests, demographics, psychographics, last interaction, and more.
When you’ve all the customers’ data at your fingertips, you’re more likely to predict a solution that the customer might be interested in.
When your customer support team gets a helping hand of AI, they don’t have to perform manual research to give customers what they may like. Everything is done automatically.
10. Organized Business Workflow
AI can be a great help in streamlining your day-to-day tasks. Businesses can use Artificial Intelligence to collect, review and analyze functional data, segment customers, systemize sales tactics, target users with automated campaigns, etc. on the go.
All these things and even more can be done on a regular basis efficiently without a human touch. This eases a lot of things and makes your work easier to handle, so you can do more things in less time.
11. Automated And Secured Transactions
With AI powered customer service, businesses can facilitate their customers to make payments automatically. They can use payment gateway APIs like PayPal, Stripe, etc. and integrate it with their AI driven chatbot. Once they integrate it with their chatbot, the bot will be able to make and automate transactions.
Not only automation, money-oriented jobs need security too. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Payment gateways like PayPal use AI to detect frauds in transactions to improve the security of the payments. This way the AI can ease and secure the payment process and win customers’ faith.
Experts say, 60% of millennials already use chatbots to purchase basic products regularly. If businesses smoothen the security of payments and automate it, this number will rise much higher in the future.
12. Give Optimal Solutions
With AI, you can collect your customers’ data. This data is based on several aspects like customer behavior, products bought, value they spend, etc. This data can be efficiently utilized by your customer service reps to provide excellent AI based solutions to them.
Businesses do this by using smart AI chatbots and other methods. The chatbots they use are built to become better by learning on their own. They store the data they get from customers while interacting with them. And use it in future to provide a perfect solution to the customers’ problem.
Even if the chatbot cannot provide the solution, they can handover the conversation to a human right between the chat. Thanks to the human handover feature. This ensures that a customer always gets what he came for.
Future Of Artificial Intelligence In Customer Service
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a newborn baby now. It’s grown enough and being embraced by many industries. It’s said that the use of Artificial Intelligence by customer service teams will rise by 143% in the following year.
This determines the need for AI powered customer service in businesses. Customers are being impatient and asking more and more queries, but work hours are still limited. Businesses have no time to handle every customer personally so they’re shifting towards AI to automate this job for them.
If you haven’t thought to use them so far, think again because the future isn’t very far. Those who’ll start using AI from now will have an edge in the future.
Winding Up
Machines, especially AI, are more efficient than humans. But by saying this, I not at all mean that AI will replace humans in the future. In fact, it’ll create more opportunities for us to do or manage things in a better and proper way.
Everyone wants to do big things with fewer efforts, and we’re developing AI to make this happen. You should also embrace Artificial Intelligence to please your customers. The more you content your customer, the more they’ll do business with you.
After reading your post I searched for some service that can include AI and I found many. Great article about AI driven bots.
Thank you Albert. I’m glad that you appreciate my work.