Augmenting yourself with AI: Customer Service Redefined

Over the past few years, expectations of customer service have risen, along with an increased emphasis on anytime, anywhere, any channel responses. Empathy, personalisation, speed and convenience are now defining the modern customer service experience, and businesses have no choice but to adapt or fall behind. According to Gartner, when businesses go beyond mediocre customer service and give value-driven customer service interactions, customers are 86% more likely to repurchase, 82% more likely to be retained, and 97% more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth about your business.

Fortunately, developments in AI have made it easy for businesses to adapt and improve their customer service approaches to meet new expectations. Using conversational AI for example, many businesses are adopting AI-powered chatbots to deliver a hyper-personalised and seamless approach to automate customer support. This article will explore the transformative impact AI can have when paired with customer service agents, the importance of preparing the workforce for the implementation of AI, and the key factors to consider when choosing an AI customer service solution.

The benefits of AI

Whether you’re for the AI revolution or a critic, it can’t be denied that AI has demonstrated its potential to enhance productivity for professionals. In fact, a recent study by Freshworks found that 95% of IT pros see the benefits to employees using generative AI to help complete work. The productivity potential present translates into real business success: think higher customer experience, satisfaction, retention rates, and boosts in revenue.

Within customer service, there is a clear space for the application of AI technologies. Chatbots have already laid the foundation, providing customers with instantaneous assistance. Over time, the limitations for what chatbots have been capable of have reduced further and further, with generative AI creating the possibility of a more human-like interaction than could be achieved before. This has opened an opportunity for businesses to maximise efficiency for their customer service agents, by retaining them for requests that require a more direct human touch. Through leveraging natural language processing, chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine customer inquiries, streamlining repetitive processes while also reducing response times.

Sometimes, however, customers aren’t fulfilled by the solutions provided by AI assistance, and this is where the potential for generative AI to shine really comes into play. The human element in customer service is irreplaceable at a certain point, so AI solutions should be equipped to best support agents in a variety of contexts. Developments in AI agent experience solutions have been shown to provide instant summaries of customer inquiries, connect teams across ticket generation, and augment responses with language suggestions. These vital tools highlight how human agents can be augmented with AI to turn them into super-agents, capable of answering customer inquiries faster and better than non-AI-supported teams.

Getting left in the dust

It’s looking increasingly likely that businesses must embrace AI to remain competitive and avoid getting left behind with inefficient work practices. AI-powered customer service solutions enable organisations to meet evolving customer expectations, delivering personalised experiences that customers will come to demand more as time goes on. There’s a reason remembering a customer’s name encourages loyalty – personalised experiences tailored to you are far more desirable than those that aren’t.

Businesses embracing AI find themselves able to anticipate customer needs, offer proactive support, and identify opportunities for excellent customer service that human agents might not always recognise. Organisations that fail to utilise an AI solution risk a competitive edge in a market that is constantly changing.

Preparing the workforce

As organisations increasingly recognise the benefits of using AI, they must ensure they are taking the necessary steps to prepare their workforce for AI implementation before deploying it. IT leaders play a crucial role in training their teams to adapt by fostering a culture of continuous, enthusiastic learning and reskilling, equipping employees with the necessary AI literacy and proficiency. Without this necessary reskilling, businesses risk losing the efficiency gains via speed bumps in implementation.

Through active training, agents will see the value in utilising AI as their response times go down, and day to day workflow clears up menial, repetitive tasks. In the same way that business leaders are responsible for providing the opportunity for customer service agents to reskill, agents must also keep an open mind as to the possibilities of support that AI can provide to themselves and the customer. By maintaining open communication on the role of AI within an organisation, employees and business leaders can ensure a collective movement to refine customer service processes with a true commitment to efficiency and productivity.

Practically, this means training workshops, demos across organisations, and actively encouraging opportunities for employees of all levels to experiment with AI technologies made available to them. Appropriate training on the use of AI can be as critical to implementation as the technology itself, and only through investing in the process of meaningful integration can businesses expect to see the benefits shine through.

Taking the first step

Selecting the right AI solution for your business is critical to achieving the benefits available through implementation. Ensuring your solution has been trained on relevant data sets that facilitate a customer experience suited to you can make the implementation process a lot smoother, and should always be a factor considered when shopping for the perfect AI.

Scalability and flexibility are also crucial to your business’ success in the long run. Solutions that aren’t capable of both of these won’t accommodate changing business needs and can end up hampering future growth further down the line.

Additionally, robust security measures to protect customer data and compliance with privacy regulations are paramount. Generative AI solutions shouldn’t make it past the

initial stage if they aren’t able to guarantee your data is handled with the appropriate level of protection and compliance according to your regulations. A business that risks its data, risks its livelihood, and this is arguably the most important factor to consider.

The future of customer service

All in all, AI presents an opportunity for businesses to stimulate growth and produce efficiency across their customer service model. Implementation of AI can’t be rushed along, organisations must ensure they’ve done their due diligence when it comes to choosing the correct solution and have adequately prepared their teams for AI augmentation. By doing so, businesses can unlock the potential to transform their customer service into a productive and efficient workforce that deliver exceptional service, every time.