9 ways businesses use AI in customer service in 2024

By using the same chatbot across all of your brand’s channels, you can provide a consistent user experience every time, anywhere. A front desk concierge is no longer needed when you have AI-powered customer support. You can use this technology to book in-store appointments for your customers, cutting down on your labor costs. Or you can program your chatbot to prompt a popular service offering to customers. With your chatbot analytics in hand, you have the potential to improve your customer experience strategy. The companies we’ve highlighted in this blog are leading the way in adopting these transformative technologies, enhancing their customer service strategies, and delivering exceptional value to their customers.

With the powerful potential of this new technology, service professionals and customers alike are curious how AI-powered customer service will impact their experience. The past 10 to 15 years have seen an incredible level of digital disruption, but those effects pale in comparison to the changes that will occur over the next decade. Now is the time to experiment with evolving technologies, embrace an experimental mindset, and create emotionally intelligent systems that intuitively and empathetically respond to users’ wants and needs. A convergence of advanced technologies will transform business innovation and human-centered design—and it’s coming much faster than you think. With GenAI, companies have the tools to interact with users in ways that convincingly simulate EQ. When combined with predictive AI, which offers deep insights into individual customers’ idiosyncratic traits, the potential impact is far-reaching.

How can AI automate customer support?

So whether you’re looking to reduce costs, increase efficiency, or simply provide a better customer experience, read on to find out how AI can help. In the world of customer service, the authenticity of conversation can make a lot of difference. Integrating generative AI into automated chat interactions enhances the natural feel of your chatbot’s responses. In today’s digital world, customers expect support at their convenience, day or night. You can meet this expectation by integrating AI-powered chatbots into your customer service strategy and providing uninterrupted, 24/7 support.

Use AI technology to understand the customer voice and turn it into usable, searchable text in real time. Enable seamless conversation, call transcription, and speedy live agent call resolution. Many AI chatbots and conversational tools have the capacity to generate content in different languages. As an example, AI can be paired with your CRM to recall customer data for your service agents. Your customer success team can use this feature to proactively serve customers based on AI-generated information.

How Generative AI Is Already Transforming Customer Service

AirHelp has assisted over 16 million passengers experiencing canceled, overbooked, or delayed flights. As a leader in the traveler claims category, it’s always received a high volume of queries. The system can suggest different menu items based on the person’s estimated age and mood. For example, a 20-year-old male could be offered a meal with a crispy chicken sandwich, roasted chicken wings, and coke. A 50-year-old female might be offered porridge and soybean milk for breakfast. AI copywriting tools can be your new best friend — if you know how to use them.

AI customer support tools simplify collecting big chunks of information to establish customer behavioral patterns, get a single customer view, and work towards hyper-personalization. E-commerce, telecommunications and finance excel with AI in customer service, enhancing efficiency, personalization and problem resolution, ultimately elevating overall customer satisfaction and experience. Arm agents with tailored responses and product recommendations to improve customer retention, drive incremental sales and accelerate revenue growth. But done well, an AI-enabled customer service transformation can unlock significant value for the business—creating a virtuous circle of better service, higher satisfaction, and increasing customer engagement. Bringing AI into customer service processes can be a big undertaking, but it can also pay dividends in issue resolution efficiency, customer satisfaction, and even customer retention.

With HubSpot’s free chatbot builder software, you can create messenger bots without having to code. You’re provided with a catalog of ready-made templates that give you a head start on creating any type of chatbot you need. It’s easy to install on a website or social media page, so you can be up and running in no time.

It’s not just another chatbot for its features involve state-of-the-art AI technology. AI proves to be a cost-saving powerhouse by automating tasks and identifying areas of inefficiency, optimizing operations and maximizing returns on investment. Clients receive 24/7 access to proven management and technology research, expert advice, benchmarks, diagnostics and more. To create trust in AI, organizations must move beyond defining Responsible AI principles and put those principles into practice. Accenture and Vodafone have used AI to get smarter about the way the communications company handles 15 million customer calls a year.

Reimagine service so every customer feels like the only customer

In today’s customer-centric market, personalization isn’t just a preference — it’s an expectation. To meet this growing demand, businesses are harnessing the power of AI to provide tailored support based on collected data. Traditionally, customers are required to leave a voicemail or send an email and wait for a response, which could take several hours, if not days.

Often, AI tools don’t require big initial investment to install the software on your website. They have freemium versions to play with, allow you to only get the customized features that you need, and come with pre-designed conversation flows and templates. This drastically reduces your support costs and allows you to do much more for much less. Learn the key customer engagement metrics in 2024, their business significance and how to calculate them with examples.

Uncover and optimize new industry-specific journeys and engagement opportunities to reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction. The transformation resulted in a doubling to tripling of self-service channel use, a 40 to 50 percent reduction in service interactions, and a more than 20 percent reduction in cost-to-serve. Incidence ratios on assisted channels fell by percent, improving both the customer and employee experience. A few leading institutions have reached level four on a five-level scale describing the maturity of a company’s AI-driven customer service. Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with 6,000+ apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization’s technology stack.

Rideshare and transportation company, Uber, is committed to enhancing user experience and elevate its customer service with AI. The company’s in-house team of data scientists have built conversational AI that empowers Uber’s customer support teams to resolve issues swiftly and efficiently. The tool also enables more seamless interaction between drivers, partners and customer care staff for better communication and road safety. In customer service, AI is used to improve the customer experience and create more delightful interactions with consumers. Technologies like chatbots and sentiment analysis can help your support team streamline their workflow, address customer requests more quickly, and proactively anticipate customer needs.

Ways an AI Customer Service Chatbot Can Help Your Business

By compiling this data en masse, businesses can see what’s driving real customers either toward or away from competitors based on customer service experiences. Through natural language processing, AI can be used to sift through what people are saying about a company to create reports that can be used to improve customer service. Using sentiment analysis to analyze and identify how a customer feels is becoming commonplace in today’s customer service teams. artificial intelligence customer support Some tools can even recognize when a customer is upset and notify a team leader or representative to interject and de-escalate the situation. In conjunction with a voice of the customer tool, sentiment analysis can create a more honest and full picture of customer satisfaction. Vendors such as Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Lexalytics, NetBase, Sprout Social, Sysomos and Zoho offer sentiment analysis platforms that proactively review customer feedback.

• As generative AI advances, it may also learn to use such information to reach deeper into other aspects of the business, such as production and resource planning and even working directly with suppliers.
• Keep reading to learn how you can leverage AI for customer service — and why you should.
• Discover how you can combine people and technology to enable conversations that deliver real business value.

The Next Frontier in Customer Experience Design

This could help you notice trends and make product changes that will eliminate the problems customers are facing. Customer service is a vital consideration for 96% of consumers across the globe when it comes to deciding whether or not to stay loyal to a business. ING implemented them on Meta’s Messenger, making it easy for customers to receive help without having to log into their banking accounts.

You’ll become more efficient and get smarter insights from what your customers are saying. Just like analyzing the sentiment of tickets, you can also analyze pieces of text—such as customer support queries and competitor reviews. You just need to set up the tags you want the AI model to use when analyzing and categorizing your text—as demonstrated below. For example, chatbots and assistants like Siri and Alexa use NLP to interpret what the user says and provide a response. When it comes to Artificial Intelligence in customer service, we’re typically talking about natural language processing (NLP)—a subset of Machine Learning. When using AI, be sure to set up an alert that notifies your service team if a customer is unhappy with your bot.

Personalized shopping support

The fact that the digital assistant could understand and respond to over 1000 unique customer intentions is a testament to the power of AI. To manage this unprecedented volume without compromising on their high customer service standards, Decathlon turned to Heyday, a conversational AI platform. By learning the unique preferences of each viewer, Netflix can recommend content that aligns with the user’s taste. This helps them create a tailor-made entertainment journey for each member. HubSpot’s AI content assistant, powered by OpenAI’s GPT model, is an invaluable tool for any team focused on creating and sharing content quickly.

Their mission is to make the life of a restaurant owner easier and elevate the working experience within the restaurant industry. Across healthcare, retail, education, and more, AI was infused into customer-facing applications and helped businesses unlock new experiences that deepen customer relationships. 2023 was a breakout year for generative AI that significantly advanced how companies build and deploy AI-powered products and experiences. There is a lot of hype right now around Open AI’s ChatGPT, and what interests me most about this technology is its possible applications in customer service improvement. But while AI may be touted as the exclusive path to progress, it’s important to understand how it works; caution and a keen awareness of the technology’s limitations are going to be necessary. Now companies must decide how and where to deploy it to derive the greatest value.

Provide customer support in multiple languages

When choosing AI software, make sure to look for a solution that can help solve these challenges for your team. 60% of consumers say they can recognize personalized recommendations and find them valuable. As generative AI advances, it may also learn to use such information to reach deeper into other aspects of the business, such as production and resource planning and even working directly with suppliers. 1-800-Flowers is an online flower and gift delivery service with 93 locations in the US alone, and provides service internationally. If you prefer a rules-based chatbot over an AI, you can create one within minutes using Sprout’s Bot Builder on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The tool stays within your FAQs and knowledge bases, which prevents hallucinations and makes Lyro stick to the information within the predetermined scope.

• And this is the main purpose of request prioritization and intent analysis.
• With the powerful potential of this new technology, service professionals and customers alike are curious how AI-powered customer service will impact their experience.
• I’ve spent twenty years working in and alongside customer service at every level, going from Help Desk Assistant to the Director of Investor Services Technology.
• In practical terms, this capability means that companies will no longer have to design a string of user interfaces.
• AI helps you streamline your internal workflows and, in return, maximize your customer service interactions.

Use it to optimize your customer journey and provide excellent service to each of your customers. AI will continue to be a hot topic in business as companies start adopting these tools and reaping their benefits. Earlier users will be better positioned to adapt over time and will have a firmer understanding of which tools they should use and how they can grow their business. KFC is a great example of a brand that uses AI to offer a personalized shopping experience. It collaborated with the Chinese search engine company, Baidu, to develop facial-recognition technology that can predict what a customer will order.

Apply a data-driven approach to identify and prioritize customer intents for automation. Our IP-led, expert-managed solution accelerates enterprise value by delivering both top- and bottom-line benefits, along with enhanced B2C and B2B experiences. Our AI-powered solution accelerates artificial intelligence customer support the design, deployment and ongoing optimization of dynamic customer journeys, making it rewarding for customers and service reps alike. Zapier can make automating customer service apps about as simple as ordering your favorite breakfast meal from your favorite local fast food chain.

If there’s a tenth circle of hell, it probably involves waiting for a customer service representative for all eternity. Netflix’s use of machine learning to curate personalized recommendations for its viewers is pretty well known. It’s the process of analyzing large quantities of data and pulling out actionable insights that forecast trends, anticipate customer sentiment, and solve future problems. This AI tool identifies opportunities where human agents should step in and help the customer for added personalization. Chatbots are programmed to interpret a customer’s problem then provide troubleshooting steps to resolve the issue. This saves time for your reps and your customers because responses are instant, automatic, and available 24/7.

The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is setting the stage for increased efficiency across companies, especially when it comes to customer service. Before you automate everything, remember there are certain situations that should be dealt with by humans. For instance, when there is an upset customer who is threatening to churn. There are a lot of emotions involved, and while AI can efficiently tackle simple queries, it’s unable to show empathy.

Explore technologies like chatbots or live chat features to facilitate prompt and effective responses to customer queries. Integrate decision-making automation into customer service workflows, enhancing efficiency and responsiveness based on AI-generated insights. Thanks to modern technology, chatbots are no longer the only way customer service teams can leverage AI to improve the customer experience. Next Order uses AI in conjunction with Twilio’s Programmable Messaging, Email API, Voice, IVR, and SIP Trunking to automate customer interactions and provide helpful insights for restaurants. For diners, this AI can give a more consistent customer service experience. For restaurants, this technology reduces costs, improves customer experience during busy hours, and helps them make more informed business decisions.

47% of Gen Z will walk away from a brand after a single bad customer service experience, so every interaction matters. AI helps brands provide reliable experiences for every type of interaction. By automating mundane tasks, AI could provide a better experience for customers with more self-service options and help fix some of the industry’s biggest problems, especially employee burnout and inefficiency.

Service and support leaders should understand these three benefits in order to thoroughly develop and track the right metrics for evaluating their solutions’ effectiveness and prove business cases for further investment. AI augments customer service conversations by not only making communication more efficient but by enhancing the quality of responses between brand and customer. AI can help propose proactive messages to sales representatives to resolve a problem before it occurs and tailor recommendations for new products and services that may benefit the customer. It analyzes data from a variety of interactions and communicates seamlessly with customers across various engagement channels. Staying current with the pace of global developments and addressing the problems brought about by them requires flexibility. Companies built with a long-term strategy understand the importance of maintaining high-level customer service solutions, and they are always striving towards keeping a high service standard with their clients.

Provide a consistent user experience

Reach out to us, and let’s collaborate to transform your customer service approach, establishing new industry standards together. Thanks to ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence, companies can better prepare for the future of client care. Interestingly, 82% of executives are reevaluating their consumer experience (CX) strategies in light of recent technological progress. In light of generative AI’s benefits, companies are moving to incorporate the technology into customer care at unprecedented speed, despite its risks and challenges. Open AI launched ChatGPT less than a year ago, and already companies in every industry are exploring how generative AI can augment the capabilities of their customer care centers.

More recently, the streaming service has also been using machine learning to refine their offerings based on the characteristics that make content successful. These tools can be trained in predictive call routing and interactive voice response to serve as the first line of defense for customer inquiries. These types of tools use AI to synthesize existing information and output copy based on a desired topic. You can then use this copy to create knowledge base articles or generate answers to common questions about your product. Using chatbots as an example, you can automatically respond to a customer’s live chat message within seconds.

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