5 ways AI boosts the customer experience
Customer experience (CX) is one of company’s highest priorities today. Businesses are putting a lot of effort into making sure that their customers have an enjoyable experience with the company or in the service they provide.
One of the easiest and best ways to make customers happy is to answer questions and queries, and resolve problems as quickly as possible. This can indeed be tricky to do, especially with larger companies. We can all relate to stories where we have sat for hours on hold to ask one simple question. What we don’t know is that those agents have more than likely answered the same question several times already that day.
The good news is that this process doesn’t need to continue. More and more companies are implementing AI to help with customer support, improve response times and enhance relationships. More advanced AI is able to assist customer support teams in ways that were previously, not thought possible.
Inside Telecom have evaluated 5 ways that your company can use AI customer support to assist your team.
Faster Responses
Both Agents and customers do not like waiting. It is very frustrating for everyone involved, especially when the answers should be simple to find. AI can deal with the most frequently asked questions through live chat experiences. It is also able to refer customers to helpful self-service articles. Furthermore, AI is available 24 hours a day and ensures customers receive a response from the company at any time of day.
Reduced Research
When customer support teams have to go away and research answers or contact a different department, this can be time consuming. It also increases the time a customer has to wait for a response and makes an agent less available to other customers. With new technologies, AI is able to store answers and through machine learning, is able to recognize trends through FAQ’s (frequently asked questions). Agents can be provided with a choice of the most common responses to automatically insert answers after a question has been asked.
Better Customer Engagement
In the past times of call center customer support, an agent’s KPIs were measured on how fast they could resolve a customer’s issue and consequently, end the conversation. With today’s customer support engagement done on an online platform, businesses are now looking to have more lengthy and engaging conversations with their customers. AI can be extremely helpful in this way. AI is able to leverage information procured from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. It can highlight the main aspects of customer information and make it immediately accessible to agents. This enables them to approach customer interactions with more knowledge and intelligence than ever before.
Predictive Insights
It is the intention of companies to improve the customer relationship and to update company records and systems with more relevant information as a means of increasing both transparency and communication. To ensure that customers stay connected, companies are now using AI with predictive insights to elevate and raise their standard of work. A customer support agent is not able to quickly scan previous products and inventory to recommend similar items a customer may like, but AI is able to do that instantly.
Next Steps
One of the hardest things for a support team to assess immediately, is the true importance of a customer issue, especially when they need to analyze something such as an email or chat message. As a result of machine learning and the ‘big data’ revolution, online communication is able to be interpreted in multiple ways. When there are thousands of messages coming in on a daily basis, it can be problematic to know what next steps to take. AI technology that uses sentiment analysis,can help determine when to escalate issues and furthermore, who should be the one to handle them. Using sentiment analysis, tickets are automatically categorized as “excited”, “frustrated”, or other classifications, which can help agents to understand how they should prioritise their work. To summarize, keep in mind that AI is not here to replace customer support teams, but to make them more effective. AI is able to compile information quickly but does struggle with the human element. The use of AI in supporting support teams helps them to be more strategic and efficient in their work.