Being in a business where you must assist customers means being proactive and always available. That can get challenging when your company expands and your teams can’t keep up with the workload. That’s where conversational AI comes into play.
Taking away manual work, conversational AI lets your employees focus on tasks that demand more attention. The technology reduces operational costs and attends to your customers’ requests around the clock.
In this article, you will learn about conversational AI and how it can streamline your business’ customer service operations.
What Is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is artificial intelligence that supports human-like interactions with customers through text or voice. The technology interacts with users in the most natural way possible while also analyzing conversations and improving based on them.
Conversational AI for customer service helps automate processes and resolve customer issues faster and more efficiently. Properly implemented AI is a groundbreaking solution to instantly solve common problems and engage in natural-language dialogs without your employees intervening.
How Does Conversational Customer Support AI Work?
Any AI system is based on massive amounts of text and speech data sets and algorithms that allow the technology to study and learn patterns. Conversational AI also combines natural language processing (NLP) that interprets the message and machine learning (ML) that analyzes all the previous machine-human conversations to deliver better results in the future.
Simply put, when the question is asked or typed, conversational AI breaks the message into blocks, deciphers them, and searches previous similar queries to generate the best result. It’s a long process, yet it takes mere seconds to create a response.
Uses of Conversational AI for Customer Service
Conversational AI can be speech-based and text-based, and it comes in a few forms that can serve customers and assist your employees.
| Examples of conversational AI for customer service | How AI helps |
| Chatbot | AI chatbots can start conversations, answer queries, ask follow-up questions, and more. They are text-based and can engage in human-like dialogs. |
| Voicebot | AI voicebots are just like chatboxes. Instead of texting, they handle queries over the phone directly with a customer. |
| Knowledge base | When customers cannot find information on your website, they can type a simple question and wait for AI to locate a relevant source. |
| Smart assistance | AI can assist agents in searching for relevant information or cases faster, suggesting responses, and more. |
Conversational AI is designed to solve customers’ queries so that your agents can focus on more complex tickets. Regardless of the AI you choose to implement, and how many common questions or calls your company receives, artificial intelligence can handle them all at once.
Automation in Customer Services: AI Capabilities
AI automation introduces many benefits that will streamline your processes and increase customer satisfaction. Even delegating repetitive tasks is enough to speed up waiting time and allow agents to divert their attention to complex issues. Here is just a fracture of functions you can expect customer support AI to handle:
- Respond to common questions: Common questions are the most received inquiries, so allowing AI to handle them quickly and accurately will ensure all customers get their answers on time.
- Collect and analyze data: Instead of manually analyzing data sets, AI can help you discover proactive insights. These include real-time team performance, ROI metrics, possible improvements, and more.
- Assist with responses: Finding the right words, especially when dealing with a demanding customer, will help your agents resolve issues without escalating them further.
- Provide customers with technical assistance: When it comes to simple technical issues, agents’ intervention is rarely needed. AI, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of providing users with step-by-step solutions on how to gain access to their accounts, change settings, and other similar easy-to-solve problems.
- Provide order updates: There isn’t a customer who wouldn’t want to know where their order is. Instead of learning this easily retrievable piece of information from an agent, conversational AI can happily and instantly provide the status.
- Suggest product recommendations: AI could be helping you with sales, especially when the wanted product is out of stock, but there are many alternatives your customers may be interested in. Based on previous purchases and behavioral patterns, AI can suggest items on sale that could match customers’ preferences.
What Benefits Does Conversational AI Offer?
No Training Costs
Implementing customer support AI is quick and doesn’t require much of your input. Artificial intelligence first processes your previous tickets, responses, and queries, analyzing available responses and solutions. As soon as your system is scanned, customer service AI can start working immediately.
If your AI is designed to assist agents, worry not; conversational AI technology is effortless to use.
24/7 Instant Customer Support
Conversational AI is a solution for closing multiple tickets outside of business hours. If you notice your customers tend to have basic inquiries like password reset or status check, let AI handle it and observe how satisfied your customers become.
In addition, you can focus on scaling your business while AI assists multiple customers at once without making them wait for a human agent.
Better Team Productivity
No matter how trained and experienced your team is, the amount of queries doesn’t reduce as your company grows. With AI answering common questions, your agents can free up time to resolve urgent cases or those that require more expertise.
Moreover, higher availability means you can train your employees and provide them with a different career path that will directly impact your company’s performance.
Lower Support Costs
Customer support AI technology is often used to take off the workload from your agents rather than replace them. Chatbots and smart assistants ensure your teams aren’t overwhelmed, meaning you won’t have to hire more agents when growing your business.
Stay Ahead of the Curve: Work Smart with Conversational AI
Does conversational AI for customer service make sense? If you want to stay ahead of the competition, improve your agents’ productivity, and lower the customer waiting time, then conversational AI makes a lot of sense.
It will remove the mundane and repetitive tasks and free up your agents for more meaningful work. If your customer support quality is average, AI will considerably improve it and engage with multiple customers instantly. So, conversational AI can maintain good customer service while taking some responsibilities from your agents.
If you want to learn more about conversational AI and how it can impact your business, watch a demo!
Frequently Asked Questions
How reliable is conversational customer service AI?
When implementing conversational AI into your workflow, it will scan through past tickets and solutions to minimize the risk of “AI hallucinations.” AI hallucinations are when the technology provides answers that are nowhere near the truth or purely absurd. To ensure natural communication, AI needs to be fed enough data to avoid making unwanted mistakes.
How is conversational AI different from a chatbox?
Traditional chatbots are capable of providing pre-registered information based on inputs, nothing more and nothing else. On the contrary, advanced AI isn’t limited to a few sentences; it can understand all sorts of questions and analyze what information can help the customer the most.
Can conversational AI work with both customers and agents?
Absolutely! Conversational AI can assist the customer, collect the necessary information, and later pass it on to the agent if their intervenience is needed. In addition, AI can assist agents in searching for similar cases and customer information or choose the correct wording to resolve the issue.
