AI technology is already being used by high performing customer service teams across the globe to help them deliver outstanding customer service. With 69% of consumers in the US who are willing to shop with companies that provide high-customer service, businesses are realizing that customer service can be a true market differentiator.

AI can help businesses scale highly-personalized customer service initiatives. Customer care apps such as Zoho SalesIQ, Intercom’s Operator Bot, Zendesk’s Answer Bot, are starting to fill this market gap as are apps such as Drift, who specialize in AI chatbots.

AI Assistants can increase customer satisfaction

When consumers are on your site with a burning question, their number one concern is that they get their questions answered immediately and accurately. This is where AI can truly shine. Not only is it a bot that never tires so can work 24/7, it pulls from existing contextual data to deliver accurate answers.

This prompt service to low-level questions increases customer satisfaction and frees up time for your customer care team time so they can focus on the more complex customer cases.

You’ll be amazed how many questions your customer care team field that are repetitive and could literally be answered by a bot. Insurance company oMelhorTrator uses chatbots to automate low levels customer inquiries. The result? Their chatbot answers 56% of incoming questions.

AI expert, Gokul N. Solai, MD, CEO of Novatio Solution said that AI can help reduce customer frustration.

“Customers are often frustrated due to long wait times,” he said, “AI can improve this in many ways, but the most impact is derived from agents being able to take calls faster – and this ultimately leads to much faster resolution.”

AI Pre-sales Customer Service Boosts Conversion and Revenue

The biggest hindrance to selling anything online or an intangible product like an app, is the uncertainty the online environment creates in consumers. Online shoppers are notoriously wary about products that they haven’t encountered physically.

Your AI infused chatbots can pop up at key moments to help guide your customers through the customer journey, such as to make product recommendations based on context, give them a gentle nudge during checkout, or ping them when sessions are inactive.

CTO and CoFounder of oMelhorTrator, Cristian Renella, said that their sales increased by 24.4% thanks to the chatbot “This equal to USD 3.7M in revenue a year. It has been the single best sales strategy in the last 4 years.”

Increase Customer Engagement during Onboarding

If you’ve got an on-boarding process that is long or complicated, your customers might decide it’s not worth the trouble and go look for a solution. This is where AI can step up and step in.

AI can help with customer education, feature discovery and in-product guidance. It can also track customer activation during onboarding, customer’s health and predict customer satisfaction. “They use algorithms that calculate satisfaction scores from attributes such as wait times, reply times, incident details, and effort metrics and then decide on what escalation actions to take if they receive poor scores,” says the Forrester report.

Want to up your onboarding game?

  • Test your onboarding experience with services like UserTesting.
  • Get inspiration from UserOnboard’s teardowns. They walk you through the onboarding process of big names like ZenDesk.
  • Use AI infused onboarding apps such as WalkMe.

AI advice from those who’ve been there

Thinking about implementing a bot? Take some advice from those who have been there.

Don’t just set it and forget it, monitor the chatbot’s progress and make adjustments:

“During the first few weeks, it is essential that some people on your team are monitoring each conversation to correct the bot when necessary. We made the mistake of thinking that everything was solved and we lost some sales, and had angry customers. Do NOT forget to monitor the chatbots full-time minimum for 1 whole month and on special sales or events,” Cristian Renella CTO and CoFounder of oMelhorTrator

Get a bot that can offer helpful, contextual information or you’ll get customer frustration:

“Using a template I was able to implement a common FAQ that helped my customers navigate through my website. A lot of irrelevant information was being shared through the bot. My customers response was not positive and frustration became very common. I had to ultimately delete the bot and go back to a human customer service agent. However technology has improved leaps and bounds since I first used a chatbot,” Lisa Chu, Business Owner, blacknbianco

A hybrid customer service team made of human and AI is the key:

“Right now we see this as a collaboration where we utilize the best attributes of humans (their judgement, anticipation, and ability to relate to customers) and the best attributes of AI (data analysis, continuous learning, and flexibility). As such, we are able to provide an augmented experience to customers that neither humans nor AI could provide individually,” Gokul N. Solai, MD, CEO of Novatio Solution.

Originally published on PieSync Blog