The competition is so high today that people expect no less than excellence from customer service. According to Hubspot, 93% of customers will likely purchase again from companies offering good customer service. Luckily, various modern technologies, like chatbots, artificial intelligence, and automation tools, make the process of tracking and solving inquiries quick and easy. Yet, to gain desirable results, it’s necessary to know how to use these technologies correctly. This article will introduce you to modern customer service solutions and capabilities and explain how to utilize them best.

AI for Customer Service

The big breakthrough AI brought to the customer service sphere is the opportunity to provide real-time assistance, saving time for tasks requiring human presence, like speeding up Magento 2 website, for example. With AI, you can build and train a model. It means you can take structured or unstructured data and teach artificial intelligence to understand it by importing and tagging.

Using machine learning, computers may accomplish tasks without having to be explicitly trained to do so. Identifying trends in past data and making predictions can determine which algorithms should be employed to carry out particular tasks.

Apart from that, machine learning can swiftly extract insights from massive volumes of data. The customer service expert first establishes the rules, and the Machine Learning model completes the rest. Let’s see how it is utilized:

Support Tickets Categorization

Customer support tickets may be simply categorized with the help of automated tagging technologies. This implies that you organize your data by adding labels to make it easier to process.

You may, for instance, categorize your tickets by the feature to which they are related. AI can evaluate texts, such as customer service requests and competitor reviews. Automation technology can identify the underlying tone, intent, and urgency of text bodies regardless of the data type or name. After reviewing the text, the AI model adds one of the tags you’ve taught it to identify. For example, you can categorize it into complaints, positive reviews, negative reviews, refund requests, technical support, guarantee questions, etc.

Incoming Emails Sorting

Regarding AI’s ability to categorize data, AI-powered tools can automatically categorize emails into useful datasets. The system often classifies them as “interested,” “not interested,” “no answer,” or “not delivered.” Based on the tag, you may choose to automatically react, manually answer or be informed of urgent requests. By gathering the classified responses in one location, you may also gain particular information on the effectiveness of a campaign. For instance, the EmailTree tool uses AI to divide emails into categories and suggest answers.

Screenshot taken on the official Emailtree website

Gathering Opinions

Natural language processing may be used to comb through online reviews about a company, which can be utilized to enhance customer service. AI can carry out effective opinion mining on all types of user data, including private polls, public reviews, and social media postings.

Businesses can use these studies to uncover patterns in service operations and address issues by changing processes, offering new self-service resources, or giving agents the resources they need to manage them.

Voice Analysis

AI can analyze and comprehend spoken words, tone, and emotions during customer interactions. With the help of voice analysis, businesses may get useful insights from customer interactions, efficiently deal with frustrated clients, and improve comprehension of client demands, attitudes, and preferences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can identify clients’ positive, negative, or neutral attitudes by examining speech signals, tone, and word choice. With this information, organizations may evaluate customer satisfaction levels, spot possible problems, and take necessary steps to enhance the customer experience.

Based on their distinctive vocal features, voice analysis systems may even recognize and authenticate consumers. AI algorithms can validate a customer’s identification by listening to voice patterns, including pitch, tone, and speech rhythm. This enables safe and easy access to tailored services. Gong, Salesken, and Observe.AI are among the best voice analysis tools.

Screenshot taken on the official Observe.AI website

Predictive Analysis

Large amounts of client data, including previous interactions, purchase history, demographics, and browsing habits, may be analyzed by machine learning algorithms to learn insights about client preferences and behavior. This knowledge makes it possible to personalize customer service strategies, design engaging experiences, and anticipate client requirements.

Chatbots for Customer Service

A chatbot is a computer software simulating verbal or written human conversation. Often, they just urge the user to press a certain button to offer various engagement options. Sometimes, they perform a keyword search, which exposes them to grammatical mistakes and imprecise phrasing. However, many businesses now opt to utilize AI-powered chatbots since they have a far wider range of skills. In this block, we’ll focus on this kind of bot.

The most prominent thing about conversational AI is that it has the ability to communicate with customers in a manner comparable to human speech. See what other advantages AI chatbots provide for customer service.

Screenshot taken on the official Farfetch website

Answering FAQs

Answering recurring client inquiries is the primary purpose of chatbots. Due to the predictability of these questions, you may program a bot’s response using rules. If the bot is unable to address the problem on its own, it might refer users to customer service specialists. See how Mailchimp manages FAQs.

Screenshot taken on the official Mailchimp website

Providing Multilingual Support

Multilingual chatbots function equally well in any language. They either ask users about their chosen language right away or look up input terms to determine the language being used.

Chatbots that speak many languages are crucial for global companies. Even if you don’t serve a global clientele, you should keep in mind that growing a business will happen eventually. When that happens, you’ll start considering multilingual support.

Dealing with Fluctuations

Chatbots mitigate the impacts of frequent staff turnover in customer support. Additionally, when the business is understaffed, they may step in for your team members. For instance, chatbots handle the Christmas season, Black Friday, and other busy times of the year. Hence, they save you money by avoiding the need to hire additional seasonal staff.

The ongoing advancement of AI in customer service opens the door for NLP-powered, human-like conversation. Customers won’t even understand that they interact with software.

Predicting Customer Churn

Customer turnover is the percentage of customers that stopped doing business with the company. AI in customer service enables you to anticipate client attrition and pinpoint the root cause to create a rescue strategy.

For instance, personalization can be used. Depending on customer information, personalization may include:

• Using names when addressing individuals;
• Displaying relevant content appropriate for a certain audience; 
• Presenting unique deals based on consumer activity.
  

A chatbot welcomes consumers, asks about their requirements, and then creates unique suggestions based on their preferences and past purchases.

Functioning Across Various Channels

Businesses should offer an equivalent quality of service across a variety of channels. Customers may learn about a product’s features on social media, email the company for more information, or give them a call to get in touch. 

A strong omnichannel customer support strategy is necessary to efficiently use various communication channels. Omnichannel chatbots are AI-powered assistants that greet users on all channels, identify them, and provide dependable and individualized assistance.

You may quickly tweak the solution on your website using a variety of low-code chatbot builder tools. A chatbot may be created once and used across several channels. It supports voice assistants, live chats, emails, webpages, mobile applications, and messengers.

Automation in Customer Service

While most points described above are connected to automation, there are some other opportunities and techniques that should be mentioned:

Self-Service Solutions

73% of consumers, according to Aspect, prefer to be able to handle problems with products or services on their own. Here is where having a Knowledge base containing articles, tutorials, product setup pages, and other resources, together with a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section, may assist your clients in finding the information they want. Additionally, it spares agents from having to respond to the same queries on a daily basis. Intimissimi’s chatbot initially suggests choosing a request or a contact option and redirects users to a page with the answers to the frequently asked question after clicking the FAQ button.

Screenshot taken on the official Intimissimi website

Email Automation

Set up brand newsletters or order confirmation emails to be delivered automatically, at a certain time, or upon a specific event. Alternatively, you may send frequent emails outlining everything new customers or users might need to know. Don’t forget to include an email signature to build credibility and brand recognition. To send emails automatically based on the results of conversations, you may simply combine your current email marketing with the call center software.

Interactive Voice Response

An automated system known as interactive voice response (IVR) welcomes consumers when they call a helpline and offers them service alternatives via a phone menu. The IVR will immediately send callers to the relevant department after their selection. Having an IVR can help your agents manage their workloads better because it can handle several calls at once and even complete certain simple tasks (like checking order status).

Final Word

There are several vital points about the usage of the latest technologies for customer service. First of all, they are in constant development, so it’s necessary to monitor the updates and trends to stay on top of the competition. Secondly, the modern audience is spoiled by personalization, as well as quick and efficient customer support with a variety of communication options. Hence using various technologies is often not a choice but rather a necessity.

Finally, the solutions provided above are tailored not only to please customers but also to save time and resources for the companies, freeing up time for other business matters.

Author’s Bio

Kate Parish is a chief marketing officer at Onilab. She has almost a decade of experience in the company and is still enthusiastic about every aspect of digital marketing. Kate sees the marketing mission in ensuring sustainable business growth. For this purpose, she helps companies and readers create efficient campaigns, solve common problems, and enhance crucial website metrics, such as conversions, bounce rates, and others.