Artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service provides businesses with workflow automation and intelligent tools to streamline and expedite customer outreach. AI tools like chatbots, data enrichment, and intelligent routing enable customer service teams to speed up case resolutions and personalize service supported by data insights. This article explains ways customer service teams can use AI to effectively drive customer connections, tailor buyer experience, provide proactive solutions, and improve business operations, along with usage examples.
1. Answer Common Questions With AI Chatbots
Chatbots, or “chat robots,” automate and simulate human conversations through an embedded chat box on a user’s website. Chatbots are programmed to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) to save representatives from answering simple questions. They also capture customer queries and email addresses around the clock, so an actual agent can reach out to them once available.
Pro tip: You can use an AI-powered messaging system for sales and customer engagement teams using tools like Freshchat. Through its no-code builder, you can design a chatbot that can answer FAQs and execute actions based on triggers. You can also set up workflows to guide your customers when troubleshooting issues.
Freshchat’s no-code chatbot builder (Source: Freshchat)
2. Provide Quick Replies With Conversational AI
Conversational AI is a term used to describe support technologies like virtual assistants or chatbots that can “talk” or interact with people. It streamlines answering frequently asked questions (FAQs) and routing customer inquiries to the right agent or department, promoting customer intelligence. You can often find this on websites, ecommerce stores, and social media channels.
Pro tip: HappyFox Chatbot has enhanced messaging functionalities that mimic human conversations. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to understand and learn from customer interactions and to improve with continuous feedback and training. It communicates with customers and provides them with answers using a combination of quick replies and knowledge-based articles.
HappyFox’s AI-powered enterprise chatbot solution (Source: HappyFox)
3. Provide Voice Commands With Intelligent Assistants
AI chatbot customer service assistants save customer service agents’ time by enabling them to request any information or provide instructions using voice commands. This lessens the need for them to manually scour their customer relationship management (CRM) system for information they need or do simple tasks, such as finding a contact, pulling up customer service data, or checking the status of a case.
Pro tip: Zoho CRM’s predictive AI assistant, Zia, offers users conversational AI that allows them to perform and complete their tasks faster and more efficiently. Zia is capable of helping customer service reps with tasks like creating new contacts, adding call notes, or finding customer information.
Zoho CRM’s conversational intelligent assistant Zia (Source: Zoho CRM)
To learn how this CRM meets the needs of many small businesses, read our comprehensive Zoho CRM review.
4. Answer Questions Anytime With 24/7 Self-service
Artificial intelligence in customer service helps free up support agents by allowing customers to consult chatbots, which automatically answer their questions or concerns anytime. Embed this tool into your help desk software so it can learn from your historical data to serve your customers 24/7. It gets answers from data from past tickets, your internal company knowledge base, customer-facing knowledge base, and agent notes.
Pro tip: Zoho Desk features an AI assistant called Zia that enables agents to improve their productivity by providing pertinent data and smart suggestions. It searches through activity histories to identify patterns and suggest workflows. It also analyzes sales patterns to recommend products for cross-selling and parse email signatures to fill in information about your leads. Moreover, reps can chat with Zia to dictate notes or update records.
Zoho Desk’s AI assistant Zia answers a customer’s question (Source: Zoho)
Head over to our Zoho Desk review to learn if it is the right customer service platform for your support team. Zoho Desk is one of our highly recommended free help desk software programs with comprehensive ticket management and robust AI functionalities.
5. Analyze Customer Sentiments With Feedback Tools
AI for customer service tools are capable of analyzing customer sentiments based on the reviews or feedback customers leave after purchasing a product or service or experiencing after-sales support from a business. Through AI, businesses can gauge the average satisfaction rate of their customers in different areas, such as response times, agents’ level of helpfulness, and overall satisfaction level.
Pro tip: HubSpot Service Hub has a customer feedback tool that can analyze qualitative survey responses and evaluate them for positive or negative intent. It uses net promoter score (NPS) surveys to determine whether a customer’s review was good or bad and segments them based on sentiment. Customer service managers can view the results through a dashboard that provides a general overview of customer satisfaction.
HubSpot’s customer feedback tool (Source: HubSpot Service Hub)
Read our HubSpot Service Hub review to find out what it does best and how it helps customer support teams and small businesses achieve their goals. This customer service software provides in-app telephony, live chat, and shared inboxes, with ticketing workflows and routing.
Net promoter score (NPS) is a customer satisfaction benchmark determining the likelihood of your customers recommending your business to a friend. Learn more about how to calculate and measure your NPS scores in our comprehensive article about how to measure customer service satisfaction.
6. Automate Ticket Creation With Answer Bots
AI support tools automate your ticket creation process by allowing customers to send questions using a chatbot widget embedded into your website. The AI-powered chatbot then creates tickets for questions that cannot be answered automatically or require a live agent. This system allows customers to get in touch with support while reducing your agents’ workload.
Pro tip: Zendesk features an Answer Bot that automatically collects customer information, such as their name, email address, and type of issue. Customer service analytics data are then mapped into ticket fields for automatic ticket creation. This helps your agent reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks, like the manual creation of tickets.
Zendesk’s Answer Bot collects customer information (Source: Zendesk)
7. Automate Ticket Routing With AI & ML
Artificial intelligence customer service for small business can manage ticket routing, automating this process to eliminate the bottleneck. Use AI technology and machine learning (ML) to automatically tag or sort incoming tickets by topic, language, sentiment, and urgency and then assign them to team members most qualified to handle them.
There are customer service platforms like HubSpot Service Hub that support automated ticket routing features. This allows you to automatically assign incoming tickets to agents or move them between pipelines based on category. Again, this saves time because agents no longer have to manually send tickets to the right agent or department, as the system does it for them.
HubSpot automated ticket routing feature (Source: HubSpot)
8. Automate Email Responses With Smart Assistant
AI tools support agents in automating email responses through NLP and ML. When agents receive customer inquiries, they can access a widget embedded into their help desk software. AI tools help agents surface the correct answer to the customer’s question based on stored data and previous examples, and the information is displayed on the widget.
Pro tip: Freshdesk features a smart assistant called Freddy AI that offers suggested email responses based on the ticket text. Agents can either use the recommendation or select another predefined email template to respond faster to customers’ queries. With this, agents no longer have to repeatedly type the same set of responses to multiple customers.
Freshdesk’s canned email responses to customer inquiries (Source: Freshdesk)
9. Analyze Profiles With AI in Customer Service CRM
AI helps customer service teams analyze customer profiles and qualify leads based on their past actions. It uses collected customer relationship management (CRM) data to provide users with AI-backed insights and recommendations, allowing them to give a more personalized approach when offering solutions to their clients.
Pro tip: Salesforce’s AI tool, Einstein, provides comprehensive and up-to-date customer profiles based on information and data saved in the CRM. It analyzes historical data, including past issues and previous purchases, to generate the next-best actions or suggested resolutions based on their queries.
Read our in-depth Salesforce review to learn more about how this platform supports small businesses’ growth. Salesforce is one of our top recommendations for small businesses needing highly customizable CRM systems with advanced sales tools.
10. Expedite Case Resolutions via AI Tech Support
Artificial intelligence customer service tools, specifically chatbots, hasten case resolutions. AI tech support and customer support software systems can dramatically reduce customers’ waiting time for simple and routine queries that can be answered without human assistance. Response suggestions also provide agents with ready-made answers they can easily feed into chat boxes, eliminating the need for agents to find answers on their own.
The best customer service AI bots can understand the flow of chat conversations and suggest common or predetermined responses to agents when chatting with customers. Bots can present answers based on FAQs or an existing knowledge base without requiring agents to dig up the information themselves.
Pro tip: LiveChat’s chatbot function integrates with business websites or social media messengers, such as Facebook, and provides canned or suggested responses for agents. Suggested responses minimize the need for agents to manually type responses or look for answers they may not have readily available responses for.
LiveChat’s canned responses (Source: LiveChat)
11. Extract Info With Generative AI-powered Search
Customer support teams can use AI tools with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) like AiseraGPT. This AI feature searches through business apps and different data sources in real time. Generative AI-powered search tools can also extract information from conversations, knowledge bases, tickets, and social media for fast data retrieval with neural search capabilities.
With the generative power search of an AI support bot, customer service representatives can save time finding the information they need. Hence, they feel more confident answering queries and providing proactive solutions to impress customers.
Pro tip: Aisera’s AI customer service solution is powered by ChatGPT generative AI, enabling teams to provide personalized customer support. Customers can interact in a human-like, conversational way with AiseraGPT to track orders or get answers and help with an issue.
Generative AI-powered search across the enterprise (Source: Aisera)
12. Learn From Interactions With Unsupervised AI
AI-powered customer service tools like AiseraGPT use unsupervised AI to boost customer service experiences. These platforms implement enterprise language learning models (LLMs) in various business industries for relevant responses.
Customer support agents can handle more complex issues requiring human interaction and intervention. Unsupervised AI for customer support learns from interactions to help call center reps to determine the reason for a call before even talking to the customer and categorize and resolve tickets quickly.
Unsupervised AI and human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (Source: Aisera)
Frequently Asked Questions
AI in customer service includes chatbots and customer relationship management (CRM) systems for call centers with AI functionalities, like predictive analytics and workflow automation. These AI capabilities help answer customer queries, handle requests, and resolve tickets quickly, enhancing the overall experience.
AI can help customer service reps answer questions and resolve complaints accurately and efficiently using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and data analytics. AI improves first-call resolution, customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter score (NPS), and other call center metrics.
AI can automate customer service through workflow automation. Customer service departments can set predetermined steps on how AI can categorize and resolve customers’ requests, complaints, and tickets, lowering call queues and resolving issues quickly.
Bottom Line
AI in customer service saves on costs and alleviates the workload of customer service teams by enriching customer data and providing smart suggestions and answers to queries. AI for customer experience can benefit both business owners with a limited workforce and established businesses that handle large volumes of customer queries. An AI support chatbot like Freshchat helps you provide more efficient and personalized service to your customers.
