AI for customer service: Faster fixes, happier agents

AI for customer service is revolutionizing the way companies interact with their customers. It’s a tremendous opportunity to offer faster, more personal, and more efficient customer service to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention like never before.

Imagine automating repetitive and manual tasks, freeing your customer service agents to focus their core strengths – like empathy – on the most valuable interactions.

You could also streamline your service processes and empower your customer service teams with timely, relevant insights so customers are served more quickly and efficiently.

AI-powered customer service journey

Advances in AI make it possible to transform the agent experience by streamlining manual tasks and giving reps the resources to provide exceptional service.

In the age of AI, you can optimize and enhance every step of the customer service journey – from service request handling to resolution.

Let’s drill down into AI’s role in managing requests for service and resolution.

Case creation and agent assignment

Today, customers expect to be able to easily request customer service support anytime, anywhere, and through any device. As a result, your business may be flooded with incoming service requests from email, chatbot, social media, or other channels.

What if you could automatically categorize the incoming service requests so that your agents wouldn’t have to do it manually?

With AI, you can intelligently assign the ticket to the right agent, understand the customer’s mood with sentiment analysis, prioritize cases, and identify opportunities to upsell.

This has the potential to boost the productivity of your customer service teams, improve response times, and increase customer satisfaction – while also reducing service costs.

Potential solutions and case resolution

Once a case has been categorized and assigned to an agent, the clock continues to tick as customers expect speedy resolutions. With AI, you can empower your customer service agents to provide personalized interactions and faster resolutions.

With AI-powered, intelligent customer service, agents can quickly access and read a summary of the case, including past related interactions. They could also access a quick view of similar tickets that can serve as a reference to solve the current customer issue.

And responding to customers can become easier thanks to customer service AI: imagine email template recommendations automatically generated to help accelerate the resolution process. AI-driven confidence scores could let agents know the chances of the recommendation’s success so better business outcomes will follow.

By summarizing the case and providing similar case information with email template recommendations, your customer service teams could become more productive and consistently deliver service excellence while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Generative AI for customer service

Generative AI has been making headlines as one of the most promising fields of AI for business. Research from McKinsey shows that its impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy.

For customer service, generative AI is an opportunity to supercharge productivity and customer satisfaction. Gen AI could elevate the scenarios described above, but also fuel new use cases. It can go beyond analyzing data and making predictions to producing new content in the form of text, images, or speech.

For example, it could support an intelligent Q&A, where AI would quickly identify questions from incoming service requests and provide agents with answers based on data from across your organization.

The reality is that when it comes to generative AI, it’s just the beginning – there are many gray areas that businesses must consider to move forward in an ethical way.

Customer service: 3 considerations when implementing AI

Along with its immense potential for customer service, AI comes with challenges and risks. In order to achieve real benefits from AI, business leaders should look for solutions with these characteristics:

1. Built-in: AI built into your customer service solution and other core business processes;
2. Relevant: AI that’s trained on industry insights and business process expertise and tailored to your data, in your customer service application or other applications you rely on daily;
3. Responsible: AI built on leading ethics and data privacy standards designed to protect your data and privacy. Also, one where you keep humans in the driver’s seat.

AI won’t replace humans in customer service delivery, but it’s absolutely reshaping and transforming service operations – companies should seize the opportunity to take service to the next level.