How AI is Redefining the Customer Support System

With constant improvements in technology, artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in every aspect of your business. It is especially important in customer support, where it’s completely redefining the system. In fact, there has been a growing use of AI-powered customer support technology.

A Salesforce study found that 24% of service organizations are already using AI and 34% plan to use it within the next year-and-a-half. We can expect to see a 143% increase in the use of AI-powered customer support over the next 18 months.

The question now is – how exactly is AI redefining the customer support system?

It is helping businesses serve their customers whenever they need it, wherever they ask for it, and however they feel comfortable interacting. 

AI is empowering businesses to follow a unified approach to cater to the needs and preferences of their consumers 24/7.

Let’s discuss in detail how AI is helping brands enhance experiences across all customer touchpoints.

1. It Helps You Maintain Uninterrupted Service Momentum

One of the most notable benefits of AI in customer support is that it isn’t limited by time constraints, sick days, or holidays. This allows you to provide your customers with uninterrupted service at all hours of the day throughout the year using AI chatbots.

Any time they have an issue, your customers can interact with an AI-powered bot to resolve it in an instant.

Plus, AI-powered customer support has the ability to process natural language and understand the nuances in human interactions. This allows it to quickly filter support inquiries to understand what each customer needs at that specific moment. 

So even in situations that need human intervention, an AI-powered bot directs the customer to the right department (sales, technical support or other). This makes room for prompt escalation.

AI also provides agents with all of the necessary information about the customer along with their past interactions. So with AI-powered customer support, your representatives can instantly get to the root of the issue without further delay. 

This level of responsiveness and uninterrupted service is essential to enhance the customer service experience. A good service experience further leads to enhanced customer satisfaction.

Related article: How AI and Chatbots Help to Improve Customer Experience

‍

The Aivo Suite offers the perfect solution for seamless customer service momentum.

AgentBot is an AI-powered customer service solution that can interpret and learn everyday language. It understands the customers even when they use formal or informal language. So it knows exactly when a customer needs to speak to a representative. 

2. It Empowers Agents to Provide Better Support

Perhaps the biggest impact of AI-powered customer support is on the quality of service that human agents are providing.

First of all, AI instantly gives agents access to customer data to add more context. This helps them understand the customer and their journey, so they can ensure a personalized experience every time.

Rather than getting the customer to repeat their issue over and over again, support agents can instantly provide them with relevant solutions. In other words, they can take more well-informed actions with the help of AI-powered customer support.

AI also helps agents find solutions and answers more quickly and therefore, enhance their response and resolution time. 

For instance, Aivo’s Live gives agents automatic suggestions for predefined answers to commonly-asked questions. So they can just select a relevant answer and provide faster responses and issue resolution.This is crucial because responsiveness doesn’t just impact the customer experience; it is also one of the main factors that influence people’s purchase decisions.

Sprout Social found that people feel more inclined to purchase from a brand that is responsive.

In addition, AI also has an indirect impact on support quality by deflecting some inquiries through intelligent chatbots. As bots can resolve most of the basic issues, they will significantly reduce the number of tickets that each human agent has to work on.

This gives them more time to focus their attention and energy on each customer and prevents them from getting overworked and overwhelmed. 

A happier, more focused agent means a better quality of support and a genuine desire to help your customers. This makes AI-powered customer support particularly favorable for a small business, which may not have the budget to hire more agents.

3. It Collects Valuable Insights to Enhance the Support Experience

The data-mining power of AI-powered customer support is another redefining factor. It collects the most valuable information from customer feedback and behavior to provide more personalized experiences.

AI-powered customer support uses every interaction to learn new things. This allows you to gradually improve the quality of support with each chatbot interaction. It also helps you derive actionable insights that you can use to optimize your support system. 

Related article: Technology at the service of customers or customers at the service of technology?

‍

Aivo’s Analytics dashboard shows comprehensive insights into support interactions so you can stay in control of your customer experience. It allows you to view and manage your performance data in one place and discover meaningful insights from it.

Using these insights, you can customize the flow and paths of conversations across every channel and device to create a consistent AI-powered customer support experience. 

The dashboard shows complete and detailed analytics to understand your virtual assistant’s behavior. So you can make adjustments and publish those changes from a single dashboard.

You will also be able to learn from your customers without any linguistic or technical skills. The Tag report further shows you the most popular products so you know what appeals to your audience. You can even use the Training section to improve your existing content or learn what new content to create.

4. It Makes It Easier to Find the Right Answers

AI enables you to create a centralized knowledge base where you can store and organize all of the important information related to your business. This includes details about your products and services, policies, pricing plans, and answers to other common customer inquiries.

With an intelligent knowledge base, you can easily and instantly provide the right answers to all of your customer requests. In fact, you can also allow your customers to help themselves through an automated self-service section.

This will help you easily understand the context of your customer’s question and ease the process of finding the answer they’re looking for.

You can use Help, Aivo’s self-service intelligent help center to not only enhance their support experience but collect more valuable insights about their needs and behavior. Help allows you to create a self-service experience that’s customized according to your brand’s identity.

It also uses a natural language understanding engine that understands conversations and learns from every request. It collects insights about your customers’ needs and intentions that you can use to further enhance their experience.

5. It Makes Omnichannel Support a Reality

With the multitude of channels available for your customers to interact with you, there is an increasing need to provide a consistent omnichannel experience. Besides your marketing efforts, you have to consistently extend the same experience in customer support as well.

First of all, customers should be able to easily interact with your business through their preferred channels. 

According to Zendesk, 28% of consumers say they have a good experience if there are multiple options to contact customer service. 27% say not being able to use their preferred method to contact customer service gives them a bad experience.

At the same time, it’s not enough to simply provide customers with the option to choose between multiple channels. They should also be able to seamlessly continue an interaction when they switch to a different communication method.

For instance, a support inquiry that began over email should be able to easily end through a phone call without causing additional trouble for your customers.

AI-powered customer support has made that possible by allowing you to integrate all of your service channels and follow a unified approach to enhance customer service. So customers can enjoy a consistent support experience no matter which method they use.

The Aivo Suite allows an enhanced omnichannel experience. It can construct coherent conversations whether it’s through text or voice channels. Aivo integrates with different customer service platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Zapier, and Genesys.

This allows for a seamless switch between different conversations and support channels depending on the needs of your customers.

The Aivo dashboard further provides you with insights about channel preferences. This helps you understand which channels your customers are using and which ones are getting the most transfers. You can then transform these insights into practical decisions that can help you enhance omnichannel customer service experiences.

Bottom Line: Taking a Unified Approach to Customer Support Using AI

While AI has a long list of perks and features that enhance the customer service experience, it cannot replace humans altogether. There are still complex issues that need human intervention. Not to mention, some people prefer talking to a real human.

So rather than using AI-powered customer support as a separate tool, you should take a unified approach and use it to optimize your existing systems. AI has the power to simplify tasks and streamline certain processes to assist your support agents, and that’s exactly how you should use it.

The Aivo Suite makes all of this possible by providing you with essential AI-powered customer support tools to optimize your omnichannel service experience. It lets you provide automated customer service via chat and voice conversations while empowering agents to enhance their response time and accuracy.

This makes the suite a full-stack solution that’s perfect for enterprise customer service. If you’re ready to start using Aivo to set up an AI-powered customer support system, request a demo today.