Artificial Intelligence has completely disrupted businesses across all levels. Find out how you can leverage it to improve your customer service and take your CX to a whole new level.
Although important, affordable prices and high-quality products are no longer the keys to outperforming your competitors. To attract audiences and inspire loyalty, you need to deliver outstanding customer experiences, and that starts with exceptional customer service.
Over 50% of customers would switch brands after a single negative experience; however, 78% of them would still do business with a company that provides excellent customer service.
So, the question is, how do you improve customer service without breaking the bank? – With Artificial Intelligence.
AI on eCommerce platforms can streamline communications, improve the CX, assist in creating strategies to increase sales, and transform your customer relationships.
Take a look at just a few of the ways that AI improves your customer service and see how it can elevate your business.
1. Artificial Intelligence offers 24/7/365 support!
How available is your call center for eCommerce? Do you have customer service representatives working around the clock, during weekends, on holidays?
Regardless of the time of day (or time of year, for that matter), customers engaging in remote communication expect fast response rates from the brands they support.
For live chat, they expect a response within 48 seconds. On social media, it varies between six hours on Facebook and one hour on Twitter.
Most of your customers want to hear from you via email within 24 hours, but 21% expect that you’ll answer within the hour.
Most customer service representatives can quickly handle low numbers of support tickets during their regular nine to five.
However, if there’s a spike in customer queries or someone contacts support during off-hours, your company cannot guarantee fast response rates. Not unless you build a robust in-house team or create remote work opportunities and outsource customer support offshore.
The best alternative is relying on Artificial Intelligence.
AI gives you an omnichannel presence and allows your business to stay available to customers 24/7/365. It takes no breaks, needs no time off, and can handle multiple conversations simultaneously.
You can easily integrate it with your existing IVR system, launch AI-driven chatbots on your website and even on your social media channels.
2. Artificial Intelligence streamlines communication!
AI-powered chatbots can streamline customer interactions by quickly and accurately solving common issues and responding to frequently asked questions.
Many customers shy away from reaching out to live support agents if they need simple assistance like finding the right product page, tracking their order, or clarifying the returns policy.
They’d rather dig through your website trying to find the information they need – a process that can be time-consuming and result in degrading customer sentiment.
However, with AI chatbots, they don’t need to waste their time. They can receive all the answers they need in an instant without feeling like they’ve unnecessarily bothered your support teams.
Communication is clear, straightforward, and instantaneous. Even when AI doesn’t have the necessary resources to answer a question, it can easily transfer the conversation to a live representative and further improve the customer experience.
3. AI gathers detailed insights!
Artificial Intelligence is more than a set of pre-recorded messages that you would include in your call center software pricing plan.
It’s a powerful program that can learn and improve over time to deliver ever-more accurate insights to consumers, but to you, as well.
AI chatbots don’t serve to respond to yes/no questions and keep the customer busy while a live agent enters the conversation. They gather data that allows you to keep improving your customer service.
They can keep track of, gather, and analyze relevant customer data– previous messages across platforms and channels, purchase history, buying triggers, on-site behavior, interactions, likes and dislikes, even marketing preferences.
Such detailed insights allow you to manage customer relationships better, improve your marketing, and enhance your loyalty strategies.
4. Artificial Intelligence offers more personalization!
By gathering and analyzing customer data on- and off-site, AI can offer better personalization than any human customer service representative.
It can use the information gathered about the customers’ tastes and preferences to offer personalized recommendations, present well-timed ads, and successfully cross-sell and up-sell. It can even make simple interactions feel more personalized by referring back to previous conversations and purchases.
Over 91% of customers prefer shopping with brands that offer personalized experiences – that’s why companies like Netflix and Amazon are so well-regarded.
If you want to improve your customer service and enhance the overall customer experience, investing in AI is the way to go.
5. It delivers proactive support!
Perhaps the most significant benefit of using AI to improve your customer service is that it enables you to provide proactive support.
You won’t have to wait until a customer is already angry to try and solve a problem. AI can predict potential issues, reach out to customers in time, and ensure their satisfaction.
If your delivery is running late due to unexpected weather, your AI chat software can reach out to the customer to notify them.
If a product comes with complicated instructions, your AI can preemptively send informational content that could help your consumer.
It can send reminders, keep your customers updated, reach out to consumers who’ve been losing their interest in your brand, and more.
6. It improves marketing!
AI gathers valuable customer insights to help you develop ever-more effective marketing campaigns that boost lead generation, improve conversions, and ultimately enhance your CX.
After all, ads are usually the first point of contact between your consumers and your brand, and they will shape how your new and existing customers perceive your company.
Email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, even traditional marketing can be improved with AI.
You can better target your ads to customers, present more relevant offers, anticipate issues, and identify customer needs with the help of AI.
You can use AI to predict customer demand, analyze trends, identify purchasing patterns, and improve your customer service.
7. AI allows employees to focus on more important matters
Although it may seem like AI is designed to replace human customer service representatives, that’s not the point of the software.
AI is designed to streamline workflows and simplify communication, taking the burden off of your employees while allowing them to focus on more important matters at hand.
It handles simpler interactions, allowing your support teams to better deal with more demanding customers with more complicated queries.
It gathers and analyzes data to give your employees better insights and arm them with information that will help them ensure the utmost customer satisfaction.
Final thoughts
AI is a disruptive technology that can completely transform how you communicate with your customers. It improves your customer service and enables you to deliver an outstanding experience to every new lead, helping you outperform the competitors and inspire loyalty.
