Over the last few years, digital transformations have fueled the customer support space. We’ve seen businesses pivot at a moment’s notice in order to meet customer needs and implement new technologies that empower their agents to do more for their customers. And that’s exactly what conversational AI can do for support organizations. You’re probably wondering conversational AI is and what the benefits are; let’s break that down.
What is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI, or conversational Artificial Intelligence, is the technology allowing machines to have human-like conversational experiences with humans. It refers to the process that enables intelligent conversation between machines and people.
This technology is configured to recognize and understand voice and text messages and understand the intent and sentiment of them to ensure they get answered as accurately as possible. Conversational AI usually works in conjunction with other technologies such as natural language processing, natural language understanding, machine learning, speech recognition, and dialogue management.
Benefits of Conversational AI
Conversational AI, which is a step above a traditional chatbot, can do a lot for businesses, especially within customer support. Here are nine benefits of AI and how they can positively impact the customer service world.
Lower Customer Service Cost
Often, customer support is viewed as a cost center and nothing else. It costs money to train agents and then have them answer tickets all day long in queues that just seem to get longer and longer. Conversational AI actually has the power to lower customer service costs. This can be done in a couple of ways.
By implementing AI, support organizations can automate the most mundane and repetitive parts of their tasks. If customers are repeatedly sending in support tickets asking for an order status or asking to reset a password, it can be tedious for an agent to have to answer that question over and over.
It would be best to automate that process and query so that customers can automatically get the answers they need and reduce the cost of customer service — this can be done with the support of conversational AI. If customers can meet their own needs, there doesn’t need to be any agent interaction so if an agent is not having to respond to a ticket then you’ve successfully reduced the cost of answering a customer support question.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
We’re sure you know just how important CSAT is in the customer support world. Customer satisfaction is essential for business success. If your customers are not satisfied with the services, products, or support interactions you’re offering then they’ll let you know. Customer satisfaction can be greatly impacted by using the right technology that can both improve the ability for customers to find solutions on their own but also by empowering support representatives to do more and do it in a way that boosts satisfaction.
Utilizing AI within your business has proven to achieve a 3.5x increase in customer satisfaction rates. AI can help provide a more seamless and personalized experience for customers because it learns from data and can help with handoffs by relaying the learned information and reducing friction in these interactions.
Contactless Customer Service
Now, more than ever, customers are seeking contactless customer service.hether it’s online or phone interactions, curbside pick up, or a delivery, artificial intelligence can help provide these contactless interactions and help improve many different support metrics.
Conversational AI can help create physical distance between customers and business employees, helping improve customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, and employee satisfaction as well. When done correctly, both employees and customers are happy with the provided solutions.
Increase Agent Efficiency
Agent efficiency is a large focus when trying to drive down customer support costs and help improve key performance indicators. Support metrics can tell you everything you need about the state of your business and if you’re struggling to reduce response times or increase cases closed, then something must be done to help improve agent efficiency and improve customer self service.
Conversational AI can be a great solution to improving agent efficiency. It can help reduce wait times, which is the top customer frustration when seeking support. Support centers lose customers by making them wait. In a recent survey 2/3 of customers said they’re only willing to wait two minutes or less before giving up on support. By deploying conversational AI, contact centers reduce or eliminate wait times. This creates an immediate uptick in how fast customers receive service and delivers an easy, convenient option to solve their issues. Plus by implementing an aspect of AI within support, you allow agents to focus on other projects and tasks that could be more important than repeatedly answering the same query.
Unmatched Customer Service
Conversational AI allows your support organization to provide unmatched customer service. The chatbot will always be the superstar of your business when it can automatically deflect and resolve incoming support needs, provide knowledge articles at a moment’s notice, and help reduce friction between support interactions and handoffs.
Customer expectations are constantly changing. Every year customers expect more out of the service you offer and support orgs need to prioritize fulfilling these expectations. This can be done with the support of the right technology.
Consistent Support
Customers want nothing more than to know they’ll get the same level of support every time they interact with a business. In fact, providing consistency is actually how you amaze your customers, according to Shep Hyken.
Providing excellent customer support is really all about being predictable and being consistent. If a customer comes to you once and experiences the best support they’ve ever encountered, then they’re going to expect that same level of support every time they come to your business.
Conversational AI can help improve consistency across your organization by removing the amount of redundant and mundane tasks agents must do every day. When you can automate solving repeated inquiries and still maintain high customer satisfaction, then you’re providing the consistent experience customers wish to see.
Better Data Collection
Conversational AI does more than improve agent and customer experience–it’s actually a robust tech tool for businesses who are looking to better leverage their internal data and projected data collection.
The way AI works is by ingesting all the business data a company has collected and stored. This allows the AI to train on the data and learn what customers are asking about and looking for support for. The AI continues to learn from new customers and allows for better data collection and eventual analysis.
Easy Scalability
As businesses grow, so does their customer count. More customers means increased demand in support and the need for easily scalable practices that benefit the whole enterprise. Adopting conversational AI can assist in the strategy to scale and do it correctly.
Conversational AI can help streamline support processes, increase self-serve rates, reduce wait times, increase agent productivity, boost customer metrics, and so much more, and help do it at a rate that benefits teams growing at an exponential rate.
Boosted Customer Experience
All in all, conversational AI is a key brand differentiator when it comes to customer support. When you invest in your support center you can see great outcomes and the best outcome of utilizing and empowering your support agents with the right tech is boosting your overall CX, seeing the dividends in improved metrics and better customer feedback.
Do More With AI
When you have the right tools in place to do what you need within your support organization, you’ll be able to empower agents and empower customers. Conversational AI and the power it has to transform customer experience is more important than ever.
If you’re interested in learning more about the power of AI, watch a demo.
