How can AI automate customer support?
In the era of digital transformation, there are plenty of innovative opportunities to improve customer support and provide a positive digital experience. From training agents and publishing self-service resources online to leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), companies can take many measures to ensure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Amongst the various options, AI is a game-changer because it enables automation of many resource-intensive tasks. But how can AI automate customer support?
This guide discusses several ways AI can automate and enhance customer support operations.
1. FAQ Chatbots
Chatbots are the most common form of customer service AI. As AI-powered virtual assistants, chatbots can engage with customers in real time at any hour of the day. Chatbots excel at handling routine inquiries. They can answer common questions with standardized responses and crawl manuals, web pages, and past interactions to generate relevant and helpful responses. When queries are unresolved, chatbots can connect customers with agents. This way, customers can get immediate support from the chatbot for most inquiries and turn to agents for only the most complex or higher-value inquiries.
2. Support Ticket Organization
Behind the scenes, support tickets must be categorized and sorted to the appropriate agent and support phase. Through AI and subsets of AI called natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, support tickets can be automatically tagged, labeled, and sorted according to pre-established rules. Integrating AI into this essential process helps agents stay on top of issues and reduces the time agents spend on repetitive, low-impact tasks. The streamlining of ticket organization helps companies scale customer support, improve customer experience, and drive growth.
3. Opinion Mining
Using NLP and sentiment analysis, AI can be used to gather and review comments about a company. AI can scan user surveys, public reviews, social media posts, and other available commentary to create reports that can be used to improve customer support. While opinion mining does not directly address users or resolve active issues, it does help identify common problems so that companies can address them as a whole.
4. Competitor Review
Another way NLP and sentiment analysis can be applied is to conduct opinion mining on the competition. Companies can leverage AI to review public data about competitors, scanning for common complaint themes, tone, and values. In doing so, companies can learn more about the values and concerns of consumers. They can also learn what experiences send customers to the competition and make improvements to win them back.
5. Predictive Analytics
One of the most valuable aspects of AI is its ability to predict needs and occurrences. AI algorithms can analyze historical customer and product data to identify patterns and anticipate potential future issues. Instead of working in response to issues that develop, companies can use AI to stay ahead and even prevent issues from occurring in the first place.
6. Multilingual Support
In this day and age, many companies have a worldwide customer base. While it may not always be practical or feasible to staff support agents who converse in every major language in the world, AI translation tools can help customer support agents meet the needs of their customers, regardless of the language they speak. Using neutral machine translation (NLT) services, AI can automatically detect incoming speech and translate the messages to and from the agent. Additionally, AI can detect the customer’s location and adjust the phrasing to account for localized linguistic and cultural nuances. This allows companies to expand their customer base and provide consistent support across all languages.
7. Personalized Experiences
Another subset of AI, machine learning (ML) helps eCommerce businesses give customers more personalized shopping experiences. Companies can gain insights from visitor demographics, purchasing history, browsing behavior, search queries, and more. Together, these insights provide a rich and holistic view of the customer that the company can then, with the help of AI, generate experiences tailored to each customer. This degree of personalization enhances the customer experience and streamlines the purchasing journey.
8. Agent Action Recommendations
Ai is an excellent tool to help agents resolve customer support tickets efficiently and accurately. In addition to conversing directly with customers through chatbots, AI can provide action recommendations to human agents based on factors such as the type of support ticket, history of past solutions, and customer interaction records. While the agent may have a solution in mind, the AI recommendations can be an inspiration and resource for other possible actions.
9. Enhancing Agent Responses
In many instances of customer support, AI copy can supplement human-written communications. Leveraging AI for written support can help agents avoid burnout, overcome language barriers, and keep things fresh. Instead of repeating the same customer support responses repeatedly, agents can use AI content generators to create new responses that still communicate the same message.
Learn More
The benefits of AI automation for customer support are endless. Companies must explore how AI can be tailored to their unique needs, industry, and target audience, and Encora can help.
Fast-growing tech companies partner with Encora to outsource product development and drive growth. We are deeply expert in the various disciplines, tools, and technologies that power the emerging economy, and this is one of the primary reasons that clients choose Encora over the many strategic alternatives that they have.
To learn more about leveraging AI for customer support, contact Encora.