Your company’s customer service department plays a major role in your overall success. That’s because happy customers tend to become repeat customers and will tell potential new customers great things about you. Keeping your existing customers happy usually leads to more profit than constantly having to find new customers. Especially when you consider that unhappy customers usually don’t hold back from leaving you a bad review online.
Nowadays, there are a number of tools and resources to seriously improve your customer service. AI, short for artificial intelligence, is one of them. It can help you respond to customer inquiries faster and increase the quality of your interactions. In turn, these improvements help you increase customer loyalty and improve your brand reputation.
The use of chatbots
An increasing number of companies use chatbots as customer service agents. These chatbots handle various tasks, like troubleshooting and interacting with potential clients. There are some major advantages of replacing human employees with AI powered bots. They can, for example:
- help a large volume of customers 24/7;
- help identify a customer’s needs and forward the customer to the right expert within your company;
- proactively start conversations with customers, helping them find their way throughout the customer journey.
A chatbot is on call 24/7 and answers within seconds. This means that customers don’t have to wait for human employees to become available on the phone or answer their questions on WhatsApp, social media, or email. This will definitely help you improve your customer service experience. Naturally,, it helps your customer service employees as well. They have more time to handle the more complex cases that a chatbot can’t solve. Leaving the easy-to-answer questions and the repetitive and time-consuming tasks to chatbots gives your human employees the time they need to keep your most difficult customers happy.
A customized user experience
Another thing you can use AI for is to customize your user experience. AI can help you analyze customer data and tailor products to your customers’ needs. In the past, once a customer had purchased a product from a certain category, you would likely promote other products from that same product category. After all, they had shown an interest in that product category, right? Well, not necessarily. There’s a good chance that they were just interested in this one product.
AI can analyze large chunks of data at once from different sources. Imagine being able to offer your customers products or content that you know they are actually interested in. Let AI help you generate more comprehensive customer profiles that actually tell you what your customers are looking for. Knowing your customers’ specific needs, their personal buying behavior, and preferred channels of interaction can significantly improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Anticipate customers needs
These days, more than half of customers expect companies to anticipate their needs. And the same number of customers complain that customer service departments don’t answer their questions fast enough or don’t provide the easy service they are looking for. How do you know what a customer might want before they even pick up the phone? And how can you answer them faster without having to hire a huge number of extra employees? That’s where AI comes in. It offers the right technologies to bridge the customer expectation gap.
At Textmetrics we use AI and Machine Learning to help you improve your customer service. With the tools we offer, you can:
- guide your customer service employees when they are talking to customers;
- make sure your employees represent the brand identity and follow your company guidelines;
- analyze chats, emails, and conversations to improve the performance of your customer service employees.
With the right tools at hand, AI can supercharge your customer service. It’s a promising technology that can significantly increase your overall customer satisfaction.