Why connecting with your customers via AI is the future of customer service?
If you work for a company that is serious about providing good customer service to your users and consumers, chances are you’ve done some serious thinking about how best to provide a high standard of quality with that customer service. While there are many good options for how to provide customer service, here’s a few reasons why we, at AtomX believe connecting with your customers via AI is the future of customer service.
Some obvious ones……
Customers can get answers faster
For most companies, it’s not possible to have 24/7 support staff, and more feasible to have that support staff available only during normal business hours. That means that when customers have concerns or questions outside of business hours—which may be often, because many customers work day jobs and don’t have time to call or otherwise contact you during business hours—they will have to wait until the next day to get an answer if you are not using an AI chatbot. This is even more relevant for certain eCommerce and Professional Services businesses. Sometimes even during business hours, if there are staffing constraints, a customer might wait hours to reach a person who can answer their questions. An AI chatbot, on the other hand, is always available and never has to take hours off, infact, it performs even better at scale due to a wider training regime. That means that at least for simple questions, customers can get answers whenever they want them.
Less human effort means more targeted assistance
Because chatbots can triage simple questions without human assistance, employing a chatbot means that your customer service agents are only spending time helping with more complicated, high value requests. This is a way better use of their time and your money than responding to simple questions that an AI can handle for you.
Lower cost per customer means more scalability
Having an AI chatbot handle simpler questions means there are fewer questions that have to be handled by a human rather than a machine. Due to that, there is generally less of a need to have a large customer service staff. Because it is often difficult to quickly and affordably scale a customer service staff as a business grows, employing an AI chatbot for customer service means that your business can expand its customer base without worrying nearly as much about how to keep up a high standard of customer service.
Now, some not so obvious ones……
Increased tone consistency
Brands and companies tend to have brand “tones” they try to strike in official communications; for example, a cellphone company might be official and businesslike whereas a clothing brand might try to be more personal and friendlier. Human customer service agents can sometimes dilute that messaging with their own personality and tone; AI chatbots will always strike the exact tone you want them to. If you are concerned about that tone consistency, an AI chatbot can always help you get better at it.
Filling the sales gap
As a corporate with steep growth targets, the chance is that you are always under the hood to hit quarter on quarter sales targets, whilst reducing cost of customer acquisition and retention. An AI chatbot can be “tasked” to work as a 24X7 lead generation engine, fully integrated with your CRM systems like Salesforce.
The technology is such that you can tune the intent also – which means that it can align with the brand ethos of “upfront” vs “subtle”, and everything in between. This then gets designed into the user journeys and information work flows to make a perfect balance between customer experience & sales lead generation. For instance, for a high weighted sales lead, an exit path could be “talk to an active advisor”.
Enhancing your brand
AI chatbots can sometime provide better, faster and much more relevant information as compared to humans. They have an omni-channel presence and can derive instant intelligence from all previous customer interactions, across different digital, social and messaging channels.
Having a recognizable AI chatbot (“AskEddy”), can become a key part of your brand, its messaging and overall experience. As it learns and improves, it continuously becomes a better brand representative and can significantly enhance your overall brand value.
Expert answers
Not every human customer service agent will be an expert that can get accurate answers quickly. This becomes even more pronounced at scale, when you are running a large operation and customers can ask millions of different versions of their queries.
This is where AI can be a perfect fit because the scale actually helps it answer better. An AI chatbot might not be able to answer every question, but when it does answer the answer will be fast and exactly right.
No pressure of speaking to a human
Some customers have gotten used to not speaking to customer services, find it a chore or intimidating. Infact, the research suggests that people like to text chat more than calling, filling up forms or sending long winded emails.
Having an AI chatbot relieves that pressure, provides a sense of privacy and comfort, whilst addressing customers’ queries.
Overall, there are many reasons why AI chatbots are the future of customer service, and these are only a few of them. Other reasons include better data gathering on your customers, the need to support multiple languages, and need for easy support across multiple channels such as app and website.
AI is the way of the future in a large number of industries, and customer connect is certainly no different. Its almost obvious now to have some kind of an automated chatbot capability on your digital channels.
