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.