How to Use Artificial Intelligence for Customer Support

It's common knowledge that customer support is currently among the top priorities for most companies today. Thus, they are constantly looking for new ways to level up customer support and improve customer experience.

It's no secret that customer services often have to deal with tons of inquiries a day, making a job of a customer support representative one of the most stressful. However, with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), we received features like machine learning and automation that fundamentally change the way how customer support works.

Implementing AI in customer support is not money spent in vain. Evidently, more and more companies are ready to invest in AI-powered customer services. It is expected that investments in AI will increase by more than 300% during this year and eight out of ten businesses have already adopted AI-powered customer services or are planning to do so.

Apparently, AI in customer support is an investment worth its money, bringing tons of benefits to both businesses and their customers, including:

• Reduced waiting time. What customers hate the most is waiting too long to receive a solution for their problem, especially if the issue isn't complicated. Introduced by AI, machine learning helps track similar issues, categorize them and search for solutions faster, reducing the time for resolving a ticket.
• Automated search. With the help of machine learning, customer service can create guides for their clients faster, referencing similar cases and offering quick solutions.
• Improved predictability. AI-powered features automate customer support to the point that a customer support representative can predict what the issue is from the very first clues, helping find a solution faster.

With these AI-powered features, your company will be able to reach stronger customer engagement, which will also positively influence customer experience and increase sales.

But what are the ways that AI can be implemented in customer support? Let's take a look at your options.

1. AI-Powered Customer Support Chatbots

The biggest achievement of customer support is introducing AI-powered chatbots. A chatbot conducts a conversation with the help of auditory or textual methods. Using machine learning and neuro-linguistic processing, chatbots have already changed the mechanism of how customer services operate.
Different statistics speak in favor of introducing chatbots to customer service:

• 95% of consumers believe that customer support services will benefit from implementing chatbots;
• 38% of consumers worldwide claim they are already using chatbots to resolve their inquiries;
• Millennials and Gen Z love chatbots due to the high speed of communication.

Customer support professionals often have to deal with tons of tickets a day, and not all of them can be resolved quickly. Sometimes a ticket can be received at nighttime when customer service doesn't work. Here's where chatbots can save the day. Based on cognitive technology, they are able to offer the correct solution within a short period of time.

Pro tip: to create a chatbot for your business, you don't always have to know how to code. Online resources like Botsify or Chatfuel can either help you create a bot for your website or a specifically designed bot for your Facebook page.

2. AI-Controlled Multi-Channel Support

There were times when one phone line and an email address were enough to contact customer support. However, it's not our reality anymore, as with the rise of social media, the approach of how customers contact businesses has changed.
According to Sprinklr, 80% of consumers use social media to communicate with brands and 54% of customers prefer engaging with brands through social media rather than over email or phone.

This leads us to our main point: your business needs to start operating multi-channel customer support. Although this might seem a lot of work, AI-powered solutions can help out.

While chatbots can tackle your website and social media, AI-based machine learning can help you create automated user guides. Customer needs regarding different customer support channels might vary depending on their needs. "According to our recent survey, customers want a mix of automated and human customer service, depending on what the nature of their inquiry is", says Martin Jefferson, a customer support representative at Flatfy. Thus, having AI-based solutions, like automation and machine learning, can help you tackle customer support via several channels.

3. AI-Powered NLP for Call Classification and Routing

If you have a big company, working with millions of customers on a daily basis, you might also have a customer service that consists of different departments. Here's where you can face the issue of the right person getting the right ticket to solve.

This problem can be resolved through the AI-powered feature called neuro-linguistic processing. This feature works with the inquiries to help customer service sort out, classify and rout written messages as well as calls. This is a helpful feature that gets a customer's message to the right department to resolve it quicker.

This AI-based feature usually works as a tracking system that can be compared to data visualization platforms, as it shows the route of every ticket customer service gets. It is a very helpful feature that helps increase ticket resolution time and lower average response time.