In the 21st century, technologies are undoubtedly ruling our personal and professional lives. Being one of them, artificial intelligence is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building intelligent machines proficient at performing tasks just like, if not better than, humans. The perks of this ground-breaking technology are just starting to become more evident.

Lately, many businesses have successfully integrated artificial intelligence into their scope of work in different ways, with one of the fields that have benefited the most from the extensive implementation of AI being customer service.

Younger customers and especially the millennial generation are heavily addicted to utilizing technology to get what they want, wherever they want, and whenever they want. This has made companies rethink their customer service strategies and welcome artificial intelligence to reach the ultimate goal of automating customer service efforts. The new era of customer service offers a better, superiorly streamlined service to every person using the company’s products or services, and integrating AI in customer service on a fundamental level is one of the most efficient moves a forward-thinking company could make.

For instance, the advanced AI-ruled chatbots have taken the customer service game to a whole new level. Nowadays, the interaction between a customer and a chatbot is no longer limited to a simple question and answer scenario. With the help of natural language processing and machine learning enhanced software like Y Meadows’ solution, regular chatbots now provide service far better as these newly-created chatbots process more information and can detect consumer behavior like never before.

Progressive companies are already adopting this trend. Just look around you, and you’ll recognize numerous examples where AI in customer service assists customers in buying products, ordering meals, booking tickets, making reservations, scheduling appointments, and even asking for recommendations via innovative systems like Siri, Alexa, etc.

Clearly, automating customer service through the utilization of AI is reshaping the customer service landscape and drives customer-centric innovation for good. To that end, for those who are yet to get started with AI-assisted customer service solutions, we will look at the top business benefits of integrating AI in customer service to prompt you to dig into the world of intelligent customer services and deliver better customer experiences.

Superior Results With Less Workforce

Since AI is developed to help human operators, utilizing it to provide better customer service will not only make your service more fluent, error-free, and superior when compared to your previous efforts, but it will also reduce the human workforce needed to cater to your customers. Therefore, providing superior customer service results with less crew is perhaps the most significant business benefit of AI in customer service.

Artificial intelligence-powered solutions like Y Meadows’ software can help your customer service department resolve customer requests and complaints, reach out and greet them, engage them with content, suggest products or services according to their interests, ask for feedback, etc.

These are just a few things as there’s much more that customer service task forces need to do for the company’s customers to be content with how the company is treating them and encounter a pleasant customer experience.

The problem is, all of this requires strenuous efforts and a lot of human resources. So if you don’t have the resources to hire human staff and get this done, or even if you do but you want to take your customer service efforts to a whole new superior dimension, the best way to go is with artificial intelligence as it’s easy to use, economical, and obviously helpful.

Providing Proactive Support To Your Customers

If you want to push things even further, AI in customer service can allow you to provide proactive support to your respected customers. This means that you'll sometimes be able to recognize customer concerns and issues before the customers themselves, and you'll be able to address things from behind the scenes without impacting the customer's experience in any way.

Consequently, particular problems will be resolved even before a customer has even had a chance to approach your customer support service about them. Although this might sound a bit like magic, it's already happening in numerous industries, and it's possible to continue as a trend moving ahead. The more computers and machines learn, the better they'll be able to service your customers' needs.

AI-powered chatbots have proven particularly useful in bringing these features to the forefront, as a well-designed solution can not only present instant answers but can be absolutely indistinguishable from an actual human agent.

You Can Provide Your Customers With Hyper-Personalization

As everyday consumers ourselves, we’re already witnessing a high level of hyper-personalization in our daily lives. Thanks to corporate brands like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc., we’re already spoiled with personalized choices everywhere around us and suggestions about products or services we might like because of our previous product selections. This all happens thanks to artificial intelligence.

As a matter of fact, according to research by Accenture, more than 90% of customers say that they’re more likely to buy products with a brand that offers personalized product recommendations to them. Customers nowadays expect brands to know and be sure of their wants and needs from the get-go.

By harnessing artificial intelligence in your customer service efforts, you can also personalize your offerings and deliver your content to the appropriate audience for better targeting. Artificial intelligence technology truly shines in collecting, storing, and analyzing user data in real-time so that businesses can offer hyper-personalization to their customers and enhance the overall customer experience with their brand. With the help of AI, you can even create and differentiate customer buyer personas to convey your messages in a better manner and increase your conversion rates.

Effective Omnichannel Presence

The presence of forward-thinking companies on multiple channels at the same time allows these companies to interact with their customers on their preferred channel and has brought many positive changes.

First of all, with an omnichannel presence, companies always seem reachable to customers in one way or another. Furthermore, most channels are friendly networks that encourage customers to keep in closer touch with the companies regarding their customer service needs. However, multiple channels also bring many new challenges as they represent more data and channels to cover.

In this regard, artificial intelligence is the ideal way to handle them all. To begin with, artificial intelligence models can quickly collect and process data from multiple sources. Additionally, AI permits centralizing files about each client and their interactions throughout different channels. With this information, it’s possible to provide greater customer service that considers all the communications from the customer.

Accurate Business Insights

Artificial intelligence-powered customer service can help your business collect precise insights from your customers. AI solutions contain and analyze the data on different factors like demographics, interests, psychographics, last interactions, sentiment, and more.

Once you have all the customers’ data at your fingertips, you’re more likely to provide customer service solutions that will delight your clients. Besides, when you decide to give your supporting team a helping hand of AI, your customer service agents won’t have to perform manual research anymore to extract the insights to establish your subsequent marketing campaigns, and business moves on.

Optimizing Resources

When companies decide to utilize AI in customer service areas, their resources mechanically reach an optimal balance. For example, if a company opts to implement AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants, customer service representatives can handle more complex requests, inquiries, and complaints.

Another good example comes from the data that some retail businesses collect through their customer service interactions to fulfill their physical stores. With the help of AI software, they can predict their future decisions based on the data they collect from customers along the way.

Non-Stop Availability

Offering non-stop availability is especially important for global companies as they have clients from all over the world in different time zones. Furthermore, customers nowadays have new behavior patterns, so they need other ways to interact and communicate with customer service teams.

Artificial intelligence is the best solution to this problem because this technology can be connected and interacting 24/7 throughout the year. By permitting artificial intelligence solutions to respond either through chatbots or self-directed knowledge bases, customers can continue receiving service while human representatives are offline.

Final Thoughts

The significant role of AI in customer service can no longer be ignored as more and more companies are investing in this futuristic technology to provide an excellent customer experience to their customers—one that’s characterized by reliability, speed, and quality support. To wrap up, here are the most significant business benefits of utilizing AI in customer service:

• It offers better results with far less workforce;
• It accounts for proactive support to your customers;
• It allows for hyper-personalization;
• It’s pretty helpful in creating an effective omnichannel presence;
• AI provides precise business insights;
• It optimizes the resources throughout the company;
• It makes you 24/7 available to your customers.
  

As long as humans and AI technology are working together and leveraging each other’s benefits, companies will gain from this collaborative partnership and augment the actual value and potential of a customer-centric culture.