17 May 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

It’s not surprising to see a new version of AI coming out every year. We’ve seen ChatGPT AI, Gemini AI, and Meta AI built throughout these years, which served as a powerful tool for everyone.

Although we appreciate having AI in our lives, we should be extra thankful for having AI for customer service.

What is the Impact of AI on Customer Service?

When we hear the term customer service, we imagine a huge office full of employees sitting and answering calls, with headphones on their heads. We often associate telecalling as the front end of customer service. AI in sales pitching also helps businesses nowadays a lot.

But the old customer service is bygone days. The landscape of customer service is undergoing a major transformation, thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

AI is no longer ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, or the robots that we see in the media. It is shaping even the most mundane tasks such as interacting with customers.

With AI, we’re now having chatbots for customers for instant query resolution.

For example, if you think from a customer’s perspective, you end up on a landing page of a leading educational website. You need to enroll in a course. Here, you can chat with the chatbot to gather information about the details of your course rather quickly.

Especially through Meta AI, you can enhance your customer service experience on apps like Facebook and Instagram. These apps allow you to get advice from AI chatbots and create reels for Instagram. This advanced AI can also help create images on text commands.

Advantages of having an AI in hand for Customer Service:

Almost everyone is aware of the fact that with growing technology, your business needs to grow as well. With AI being used all around the corner, you can gain numerous benefits from leveraging AI in customer service:

AI can be efficient: AI chatbots and virtual assistants are made for people to be answered the moment they send a query. You can ask as many queries as you want without waiting in line. This frees up some time for human agents for more complex issues.

They’re available whenever you want: Do you have an urgent query related to your business that can answer your query at any time of the day, not caring about any time zone or anything?

Your personalized chatbot: Did you know that AI can detect what sentiments humans go through, to appropriately answer them?

For example, if you have ordered an item, and decide to cancel it, but the money has not been refunded to you yet. You ask the chatbot about your refund, and AI can analyze your anger in this and recommend solutions for your problems.

Decisions are taken through past Data: AI can analyze your past data to answer your questions properly. Gather information on your past purchasing history, or search history to accurately resolve a query. These decisions taken by data can also be used to train human agents to optimize your business's sales force.

Cost can be cut down: The operational costs can be cut down by using AI. The labor force can be reduced if you’re a business owner. Automation of repetitive tasks with AI, chatbots will cut down your costs and save more money.

Best AI Tools to Improve Your Customer Experience:

When it comes to your business and website, you can use several AI tools to improve your customer service experience:

AI Chatbots: Open up any website and you’ll see on the bottom right a chat box saying, “How may I help you?”. These AI chatbots can answer your questions with ease. It gathers data from people who have frequently asked questions and answers you with the best possible solution.

Virtual Assistants: When you don’t have time to do some tasks, and as an entrepreneur, it’s understandable. For the completion of your tasks such as design, marketing, or managing your social media. These virtual assistants will understand natural language and complete your task.

Sentiment Analysis: As mentioned above, AI has now the ability to analyze your own emotions through text, but not to the extent of a human, and manage to answer your queries with some understanding.

Knowledge Management Systems: To manage all the above-mentioned AI, these knowledge management systems can suggest content creation, search, guide customer queries, etc.

Voice Biometrics: This AI can identify customer voices to verify their identity. This type of advanced technology helps with improving security and provides satisfaction to the customers.

Things to Know Before Using AI in Your Customer Service:

While AI has its benefits and also saves a lot of time, it is important to note a few things before adding AI to your customer service:

Protect your Data: You would want your business data to be protected at all costs. So make sure your AI is built with insane security measures.

Be transparent: The customers need to know you’re taking data for customers to get better customer service. You need to be upfront with them about you using their data.

Add a little human touch: Even though AI is convenient to use, customers will not be satisfied only with AI service. Sometimes, you need to provide some human assistance.

Provide an option for Customization: With different customers having different AI experiences, you can choose an AI platform that will be convenient for the customers to enjoy their service.

Challenges You Face While Using AI in Customer Service:

Every task has its own set of challenges. But the risk of AI rapidly growing in this era should not be ignored at all cost. While AI offers many benefits for us, being in control of it is crucial. Let’s see what challenges we might face through AI.

Execution costs are higher: AI does reduce operational costs. However, developing and starting the execution of AI is far more complicated and can be very expensive. Small businesses can have a hard time implementing AI in their business.

Limited Emotional Intelligence: Although AI is trying to analyze human sentiment through their texts, they cannot fully comprehend the complex emotions of a human being. For that, a human agent is needed to resolve their query.

Data can be biased by AI: AI algorithms take some information that they want to produce instead of diversifying their research. For example, if we search about a particular topic, an AI can take only the top search results to give us the information, rather than searching for more.

Security leak may happen: Your valuable data can be stolen if you’re not careful with your data protection and installing your AI properly.

Key takeaways of Using AI you should notice:

As AI is creating a revolution in every industry, by using it strategically, you can benefit a lot from it. Businesses can improve their customer service by letting AI do all the initial chatting, and let human agents handle the complex issues.

With time being limited, human agents can concentrate on other issues instead of meddling with small issues. By using AI you can improve efficiency, personalize customer experiences, and improve overall customer satisfaction.

However, it's important to note that using AI should be a careful approach. You need to be thoughtful and use customer data wisely.

If you need any assistance in implementing AI for your business, kindly reach out to us at info@ontogendigital.com. We have made videos on how AI is helping in businesses and their online marketing. You can check out our YouTube channel. Subscribe to us for more such blogs.