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The success of a business no longer depends mainly on the product or on the price. Providing an excellent customer experience has become the most important determinant. If you have been in business for a long time, you must have heard the popular mantra “the customer always comes first.” It is more relevant now than ever before.
These days, businesses are trying their best to leverage technology to understand their customers and meet their needs and lifestyles. Customer experience has become a competitive battle zone as brands are more focused on retaining old customers than acquiring new ones.
As the demand for personalized customer service experience increases, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become your most powerful tool when it comes to customer service. According to Dataconomy, in 2022, artificial intelligence will have progressed far enough to become the most revolutionary technology ever created by man.
In particular, with regard to customer support, AI can play a significant role in expanding and improving self-service support. With artificial intelligence, companies can provide excellent customer service and reduce costs related to human resources.
By using AI companies can automate some activities that agents should otherwise carry out, personalize their support services based on the specific customers’ needs and gather relevant data about customers. Businesses can focus on designing an incredible customer journey and fixing more complex problems while automating more repetitive tasks.
If you want to get rid of repetitive tasks Layerise has a solution for you. Educate and support your customers through Layerise Virtual Assistant and provide them with real-time support whenever they need it by using the Chat feature. If you want to learn more about Layerise, click here.
Today’s blog will explore ways AI can improve customer service.
What is artificial intelligence?
As per Gartner, the enterprise use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning has grown almost 270% in the last four years. But what do we mean by Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technological trend that allows machines to replicate the human mind’s abilities.
Mathematician Alan Turing asked the important question: “Can machines think?” His research paper published in 1950, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence", and the Turing Test established AI’s vision and fundamental goal. Therefore, we can say artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science that answers Turing’s question in the affirmative.
While there is no clear-cut definition of AI, it is best explained as a broad raging branch of computer science that concerns building smart machines capable of performing tasks that usually require human intelligence.
The advancements in AI have led to the development of self-driving cars, voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, smart houses, and so on.
Why is artificial intelligence beneficial for customer service?
When it comes to customer support, AI is a powerful tool. It gives brands the power to strengthen customer engagement, improve retention rates, and promote brand loyalty. While AI isn’t a replacement for human support, it can increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and reducing the burden on customer service teams.
Here are some of the benefits of artificial intelligence in customer service:
Offers personalized customer service
AI approaches such as predictive analysis, and machine learning can identify common customer complaints and offer insight into what causes problems. Using this data, businesses can fix these issues by implementing AI-based solutions at several customer touchpoints. It helps your brand personalize customer experiences and take proactive action.
Provide data-driven customer insights
By leveraging artificial intelligence for customer experience, brands can easily explore information and extract customer behavioral patterns. An AI algorithm can track diverse customer data points, including on-site interactions, purchasing behavior, referral sources, etc. This data can be used for predictive analysis to create customer personas, match customers to products, recommend products they are likely to buy, display relevant content, and so on.
Enhancing lead generation
Customers have thousands of choices at their disposal. Thus, making the buying process as seamless as possible is essential for your customers to increase satisfaction. AI can make this happen by using preprogrammed questions to validate leads. AI chatbots can also start conversations with customers, recommend products based on browsing history, and help sales move forward.
Reduce the burden on customer service teams
One of AI’s most significant features is that it automates processes, and it can reduce the substantial burden on customer service teams, increase their productivity, and guarantee consistent performance. Therefore, AI can ensure that your employees never feel burned out, allowing your support staff to focus on more meaningful tasks and streamline workflow.
5 Examples of how AI can help your business differentiate from competitors
Now that we have convinced you that AI improves your customer service, let us explore some examples of how it can help your company differentiate from competitors:
Learning customer behavior patterns and building personalized experiences
As we discussed, by leveraging AI, businesses can collect data about customer behavior patterns (for instance, retail spending, purchasing cycles on a credit card, previously browsed items, etc.) and predict behavior accordingly. When the customer interacts with the business, this system can be used to offer personalized services.
AI-powered chatbots
AI-powered chatbots are a game changer for customer service. Most brands use chatbots to handle routine customer complaints and redirect customers to user guides where they can find solutions to their problems.
Chatbots can also be used to solve frequently asked questions. For instance, Bizbike, a leading e-bike provider in Belgium faced one obstacle in providing exceptional and flawless customer service. Bizbike's customer service team spent too much time answering the same basic questions and didn't have time to deal with more complex customer issues.
Through effective automation and by implementing conversational AI chatbots, Bizbike was able to save more than 40 hours per month while also having engaging conversations with their customers. Bizbike's NPS score increased from 54 to 56, indicating that 62% of their customers actively promote conversational chatbot solutions and the Bizbike service!
Layerise is the perfect solution for you to reduce frequently asked questions. Thanks to the Virtual Assistant you can educate your customers and prevent issues from happening. In case of more complex problems, Layerise allows you to communicate in real-time with your customers through the Chat feature. To make it even easier for you to help your customers, Layerise collects data about customers and displays them while you are chatting with the users.
Self-service
Self-service has become a crucial part of providing an excellent customer service experience. Today’s customers are more empowered than before and would rather solve their own problems than live through the hassle of getting in touch with the company’s agents.
With AI-enabled self-service options, customers can identify the problem they are experiencing and find the support they need straight away instead of relying on a customer support agent. Intelligent agents can detect specific keywords in a customer query and use this information to provide valuable sources for the customer to find effective solutions.
As AI becomes more advanced, these self-service approaches will become more pervasive and allow customers to help themselves.
Improving human interaction
The vision of artificial intelligence in customer service is not to replace human interaction but to accompany and enhance it with the goal of decreasing friction in the customer experience. For instance, several customer queries like resetting passwords or creating a new account can be wisely directed through AI responses and don’t need human intervention.
However, brands should be careful when leveraging this function. The goal should be to improve human interaction and not to disorient customers by removing the human touch.
Round-the-clock support with automation
Customers want support instantly and on their own terms. As a result, brands have to be available and responsive to customers round-the-clock, even on holidays. Artificial Intelligence can make this possible by smartly automating customer service.
AI allows businesses to provide always-on customer service and fix problems as soon as they arise. It can also help brands proactively resolve issues before they appear. Leveraging automation means customers will have their inquiries solved 24 hours a day without a long wait time to get a response.
In conclusion, AI goes a long way in increasing customer satisfaction and can improve the brand’s reputation and drive customer loyalty. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that brands gradually integrate AI into their processes to acquire customers, retain them, and make them loyal to the business. AI helps companies stay ahead of the game and makes the customer experience extremely smooth and more enjoyable for users.
How Layerise can help you improve your customer service?
To help replicate artificial intelligence in customer service, Layerise provides brands with a post-sales B2C enablement tool. Layerise solution allows brands to offer an incredible customer experience and combine all the newest trends that help you stay ahead of the curve.
With Layerise, you can provide your customers with engaging instructional content, and real-time 24/7 support through chatbots, self-service tools, personalized services, and more. You can also gather customer data and analyze customer behavior patterns to create the best marketing strategy.
If you want to learn more about how Layerise can help your business grow, book a free demo today!
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