Artificial Intelligence in Customer Service: The Ultimate Guide

Chatbots, or “chat robots,” automate and simulate human conversations through an embedded chatbox on a user’s website. Chatbots are programmed to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) to save customer service representatives from answering simple questions. Chatbots also capture customer queries and email addresses around-the-clock, so an actual agent can reach out to them once available.

Freshchat offers an AI-powered messaging system for sales and customer engagement teams. Through its no-code builder, you can design a chatbot that can answer FAQs and execute actions based on triggers. You can set up workflows to guide your customers through a step-by-step troubleshooting process to resolve their issues. This saves customer service reps from answering simple questions chatbots can easily manage and resolve.

Freshchat’s no-code chatbot builder (Source: Freshchat)

Conversational AI is a term used to describe support technologies like virtual assistants or chatbots that can “talk” or interact with people. It is an effective way to streamline the process of answering FAQs and routing customer inquiries to the right agent or department. You can often find this on websites, ecommerce stores, and social media channels.

HappyFox Chatbot has enhanced messaging functionalities that mimic human conversations. It uses NLP and 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 content that include quick replies and knowledge base articles.

HappyFox’s AI-powered enterprise chatbot solution (Source: HappyFox)

Want to see why HappyFox is one of the most popular customer service software solutions for small businesses? Check out our in-depth HappyFox review for more information on features, pricing, and overall usability.

AI assistants help 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.

Zoho CRM’s predictive AI assistant, Zia, offers users conversational AI that helps them 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 information about customers.

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.

AI helps free up support agents by allowing customers to consult chatbots, automatically answering their questions or concerns anytime. You can 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.

Zoho Desk features an AI assistant called Zia that helps agents 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.

AI is 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.

HubSpot Service Hub has a customer feedback tool that can analyze qualitative survey responses and evaluate them for positive or negative intent. It uses NPS (net promoter score) 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 allows users to determine their customers’ level of satisfaction in various areas of customer service outreach. (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.

AI can help you automate your ticket creation process by allowing your 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 helps customers get in touch with support while reducing the workload of your agents.

Zendesk features an Answer Bot that automatically collects customer information, such as their name, email address, and type of issue. These 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 to map into ticket fields. (Source: Zendesk)

To learn more about this customer service software, read our Zendesk review to explore its rich feature set.

While many support teams still route their tickets manually, you can automate this process to eliminate the bottleneck of tickets. Use AI technology and ML to automatically route tickets based on previous examples. This way, the program automatically tags or sorts incoming tickets by topic, language, sentiment, and urgency and then assigns 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 Service Hub’s automated ticket routing feature (Source: HubSpot Community)

AI tools help support agents automate email responses with the help of both 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.

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)

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—helping them give a more personalized approach when offering solutions to their clients.

Salesforce’s AI tool, Einstein, provides comprehensive and up-to-date profiles of customers based on information and data saved in the CRM. It analyzes historical data, including past issues and previous purchases, to provide the next best actions or suggested resolutions based on their queries.

Salesforce’s AI assistant, Einstein, suggests the next best action to help agents provide the best resolutions to their customers.
(Source: Salesforce)

Read our in-depth Salesforce review to learn more about how this platform helps small businesses grow.

AI bots can understand the flow of chat conversations and suggest common or predetermined responses to agents when chatting with customers. This helps speed up resolutions and standardize customer experience. Bots can present answers based on FAQs or an existing knowledge base without requiring agents to dig up the information themselves.

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 in a chat conversation (Source: LiveChat)