10 Best Ways to Use AI in Customer Service in Businesses in 2024

According to Gartner, "AI in the Contact Center: The First Steps Toward Customer Service AI”, by 2025, it's projected that AI-powered chatbots will handle 95% of customer interactions. In this rapidly evolving digital landscape of 2024, harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity for businesses aiming to provide exceptional customer experiences. Picture this: a world where AI seamlessly integrates into your customer service operations, enhancing efficiency, personalization, and overall satisfaction. Whether you're an industry veteran or a budding entrepreneur, you're about to embark on a journey through the 10 Best Ways to Use AI in Customer Service, uncovering innovative solutions that will revolutionize the way you connect, engage, and delight your customers. So, fasten your seatbelt as we dive into a realm where AI-driven interactions redefine the future of business-consumer relationships, all from your perspective.

How Can AI Improve Customer Service?

• Enhance Agent Efficiency: Elevate agent productivity through AI-driven tools and automations. Chatbots tackle routine queries, while automation streamlines repetitive tasks. This optimizes workloads, enabling agents to focus on intricate customer concerns.
• Sentiment Analysis and Smart Routing: AI analyzes customer interactions, gauging sentiment and intent. This aids in accurate ticket routing and prevents escalations. Agents receive valuable insights for smoother interactions.
• Proactive Recommendations: Utilize customer data to proactively offer personalized suggestions. AI-powered bots can prevent cart abandonment and boost sales by engaging customers with timely discounts and reminders.
• 24/7 Support: Deploy customer service AI-powered chatbots or AI-powered text messaging or SMS for customer service for round-the-clock assistance. Customers access real-time help, regardless of agent availability, ensuring consistent and seamless support.
• Personalized Assistance: Leverage customer data to provide tailored support, recommend products, and discounts, and communicate in preferred languages.
• Insights and Workflows: AI empowers agents with contextual insights, streamlining interactions. Intelligent workflows ensure efficient routing and timely responses.
• Multilingual Support: AI-driven multilingual capabilities enable immediate translation, delivering convenient and personalized support.
• Agent Onboarding and Training: Customer service AI assists new agents with virtual guidance, gradually increasing their proficiency and confidence.
• Customer Intent Identification: Advanced bots automatically discern customer intent and respond accurately, freeing agents from repetitive tasks.

Areas Where AI Can Add Quick Value

Approximately 80% of consumers place high importance on three essential aspects when engaging with businesses. These elements encompass speed, convenience, and the provision of friendly and knowledgeable assistance.

Customers desire swift responses, regardless of the communication channel they favor, accompanied by empathy and helpfulness in those interactions.

As the necessity to conduct sales across diverse platforms like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, webstores such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento/Adobe, and even social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp grows, support teams face mounting pressure to meet customer expectations and adhere to service level agreements (SLAs).

Encouragingly, customers are willing to pay a premium for a positive customer experience (CX). In fact, they are willing to shell out an average of 13% more for improved service from a seller. Consequently, investing in AI in Customer Support to enhance support services holds the potential to achieve such favorable margin increases.

The application of AI within eCommerce customer support has been ongoing for several years. However, a significant advancement is attributed to Generative AI, which is characterized by its pre-training on extensive datasets and accessibility to end-users and software developers via open APIs. As a result, support teams can now expect to incorporate AI-powered solutions into their daily operations. 

Already, we are witnessing the emergence of use cases that concentrate on accelerating response times across various channels. Additionally, these efficiency gains are coupled with enhanced sentiment analysis and knowledge, empowering teams to offer quicker and more intelligent customer responses.

AI exhibits prowess in three pivotal areas of value for online merchants:

• Automation: AI effectively automates repetitive tasks, diminishing human effort and boosting operational efficiency. It can be harnessed to automate responses to routine queries, enable self-service options, and provide comprehensive support beyond regular working hours.
• Natural Language Processing: AI possesses the ability to interpret human language, facilitating rapid comprehension of customer messages. This capability results in more accurate classification and summaries of customer inquiries, sentiment analysis, and even translation of foreign languages.
• Recommendation Systems: AI examines human preferences and behaviors to deliver personalized recommendations. The latest customer service AI advancements enable the provision of improved responses personalized to customers' queries and prompt identification of situations warranting escalation to human agents.

By examining each of these AI capabilities, we gain a deeper insight into the substantial and immediate benefits that support teams can derive from adopting AI-powered support solutions.

Types of AI that Can be Used in Customer Service

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is a recent development that is poised to continually progress and enhance. As technology evolves, business leaders have the opportunity to leverage novel and advanced AI-driven tools to elevate the customer experience (CX). Below are a few instances of AI and automation within customer support.

• AI Chatbots: These conversational AI platforms possess the ability to grasp customer queries and automate cordial responses.
• Natural language processing (NLP): Utilizing machine learning, this technology comprehends and addresses voice prompts and translates textual content.
• Facial and vocal recognition: Biometric AI that employs algorithms and mathematical calculations to detect and differentiate human facial attributes and voices, primarily for authentication purposes.
• Interactive voice response (IVR): An automated telephone system tool that handles incoming calls, interprets verbal responses, and presents choices for subsequent actions, such as directing caclls to appropriate agents or departments.
• Intelligent virtual assistant (IVA): An AI program proficient in understanding vocal commands and executing tasks on behalf of customer support agents.

10 Best Ways to Use AI in Customer Service in Businesses in 2024

1. Swift Resolution for Routine Inquiries

Addressing routine customer queries efficiently is a pivotal aspect of AI's impact on customer service. For instance, eCommerce customer inquiries often revolve around delivery updates and returns processing. Recent statistics from eDesk (2024) indicate that AI-powered automation can resolve approximately 40-50% of queries instantly. This enables customers to receive prompt responses while allowing support teams to focus on more complex tasks.

2. Accurate Query Classification

AI's language processing capabilities have led to precise and granular categorization of incoming customer messages. By training generative AI in Customer Support models on extensive data, businesses can effortlessly differentiate between query types. This enhanced sophistication streamlines ticket routing and empowers better reporting, ensuring that specific issues are effectively identified.

3. Condensing Complex Queries

AI-generated summaries of lengthy or intricate customer queries offer substantial time savings for support agents. Summaries distill essential information into a concise format, aiding agents in comprehending issues swiftly. Additionally, AI in Customer Support summaries alleviate the burden of summarizing conversations during agent handovers, enhancing efficiency and streamlining workflow.

4. Analyzing Customer Sentiment

AI's proficiency in deciphering customer sentiment revolutionizes customer interactions. By understanding sentiment, support teams can tailor their responses according to customers' emotions, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of communication. Accurate sentiment analysis by platforms of top CPaaS companies also aids in assessing the urgency and importance of addressing customer issues.

5. AI-Powered Suggested Resolutions

The integration of query classification, content summarization, and sentiment analysis facilitates customer service AI's ability to provide instant and accurate resolution suggestions. AI-driven recommendations range from pre-scripted templates aligned with brand identity to intelligent connections between queries and company policies. These suggestions reduce agent training efforts and maintain consistent quality.

6. Personalization at Scale

AI in Customer Support empowers businesses to craft personalized responses by considering comprehensive customer context, including purchase history, order details, and sentiment. Integrating well-crafted templates with personalized snippets like customer names and order information yields highly tailored resolutions that cater to individual needs.

7. Multilingual Support and Translation

AI-driven language translation models ensure seamless communication across language barriers. Real-time translation enhances multilingual support capabilities, allowing agents to provide clear and concise responses to customers in their preferred language, facilitating global communication.

8. Effective Escalation to Human Agents

AI's discernment of when to escalate complex or emotionally charged conversations to human agents enhances customer support quality. While customer service AI in Customer Support can autonomously address a significant portion of queries, its ability to recognize when human intervention is necessary ensures a balanced and effective customer service approach.

9. 24/7 Customer Assistance

AI-enabled automation enables businesses to offer round-the-clock support, meeting customer expectations for immediate assistance regardless of time zones. This capability to address queries beyond office hours enhances customer satisfaction and brand reliability.

10. Efficient Management of Peak Demands

During peak periods, AI-driven automation aids support teams in managing increased query volumes efficiently. By handling standard queries, customer service AI in Customer Support lightens the load on agents, allowing them to focus on more intricate issues. This strategic utilization of AI maintains service levels during high-demand periods, ensuring consistent customer experiences.

Benefits of Using AI for Customer Service

Based on findings from CX Trends Report, 72 percent of organizational leaders express a significant priority in expanding their utilization of AI in Customer Support and bots throughout the customer experience in the coming year. As enterprises allocate resources towards AI-driven customer service, a multitude of advantages become evident. Here are several of the primary benefits that AI brings to businesses.

• AI maintains cost efficiency: AI tools such as chatbots, intelligent routing, and workflow automation empower customer care teams to manage larger volumes of tickets without augmenting staff numbers. AI acts as a supplementary aid to agents, enhancing efficiency and output, ultimately leading to cost savings.

• AI ensures swift and uniform support: Utilizing AI, immediate assistance can be provided without requiring agent intervention. When a transition to an agent is necessary, AI supplies essential details and customer context, guiding the agent through insights and recommended measures to expedite issue resolution.

• AI elevates customer satisfaction and retention: As per CX Trends Report, enterprises employing AI bots observed a two percentage point enhancement in Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) year-on-year. The delivery of prompt, user-friendly, and consistent service plays a pivotal role in cultivating a loyal customer base.

• AI mitigates agent fatigue: AI in Customer Support takes charge of monotonous tasks, lessening the burden on support teams. By enabling agents to dedicate their efforts to tasks aligned with their skillset, their job satisfaction and fulfillment are increased.

Real-World Examples of AI Use in Customer Service in 2024

Snap Inc

The developers behind the widely-used social messaging app Snapchat have integrated conversational AI into their product. This AI entity, named My AI, is listed as a regular contact among the user's friends and is available for chatting at any time, whether for answering queries or simply for entertainment. Potential applications of Snapchat's AI include suggesting the ideal gift for a friend's birthday, assisting in planning a weekend hiking trip, or proposing dinner recipes.

Slack

The collaborative workspace platform Slack, headquartered in the US, has introduced an app that empowers its users to harness the capabilities of ChatGPT for tasks such as managing workflows, enhancing productivity, and communicating with colleagues. Through this plugin, users have an ever-present assistant ready to provide answers to inquiries and offer guidance on navigating their ongoing projects.

Octopus Energy

Octopus Energy, an energy supplier based in the UK, has integrated ChatGPT into its customer service channels. This implementation has led to ChatGPT handling 44 percent of customer queries. CEO Greg Jackson has remarked that the application now performs the duties of 250 individuals and achieves higher customer satisfaction ratings compared to human customer service representatives.

Cheggmate

Cheggmate, a platform designed to aid college students with their assignments, has introduced a novel service called Cheggmate, driven by GPT-4 technology. In the past, the company's model involved students paying for answers from human experts. Following a significant drop in its stock value after CEO Dan Rosensweig revealed the impact of ChatGPT on the company's growth, Cheggmate promptly devised strategies to incorporate this technology into its services.

Freshworks

Software firm Freshworks has reported that its developers have considerably shortened the duration required to develop intricate software applications, reducing it from 10 weeks to less than a week. Beyond processing written human language, ChatGPT possesses the capability to generate code in several widely-used programming languages, such as C++, Python, and Javascript. It also functions as a coding tutor, elucidating the operations of the code it creates and diagnosing issues within its own code or that of others.

What are the Challenges of AI in Customer Service?

Similar to any nascent technology, the introduction of AI in a professional setting could present distinct hurdles. Here are some of the primary impediments to take into account when embarking on the integration of AI into your enterprise. When selecting AI software, ensure that the chosen solution addresses these challenges effectively for your team.

• ‍Human Interaction Preference: The primary hindrance to the adoption of AI/automation tools in customer service is rooted in the fact that customers have a distinct preference for engaging with human agents. This inclination towards human interaction leads to a perception of AI-driven support as impersonal and distant.‍
• Accuracy and Workforce Impact Concerns: Further concerns revolve around the reliability of generative AI and the potential consequences of AI integration on the workforce. A considerable 39% of customer support specialists express apprehension about AI replacing their job in the near future. Additionally, 55% acknowledge that Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can sometimes provide inaccurate information. Surprisingly, only 42% feel confident in their ability to discern erroneous information from tools like ChatGPT.‍
• Personalization vs. AI Use: The most prominent challenge faced by those who are already employing AI/automation in their customer service roles lies in the difficulty of upholding a personalized customer experience while simultaneously leveraging AI for support. The struggle lies in achieving a balance between automation and maintaining a human touch in customer interactions.‍
• Identification and Routing of Valuable Conversations: The ability to correctly identify and direct high-value customer conversations to human agents is pivotal. According to Simplr’s 2022 Consumer Study on Chatbots, a seamless transition from AI to human support leads to a 60% increase in the likelihood of customers continuing business with a brand. This process is not merely a supplementary benefit but a crucial necessity for businesses.‍
• Obstacles in Achieving Seamless Conversation Transfers: A staggering 52% of customer experience decision-makers in global enterprises acknowledge their organization's challenges in efficiently routing high-value conversations between AI and human agents. This deficiency leaves organizations ill-equipped to meet customer expectations and preferences for uninterrupted interactions.‍
• Integration Issues among Customer Service Automation Technologies: The marketplace is brimming with various customer experience (CX) automation technologies. Enterprises, in particular, grapple with the risk of technological overload, where legacy systems persist, departments operate in silos, and the business scale necessitates substantial investments in disparate solutions. Careful consideration of the role an automation vendor plays within the larger tech ecosystem is imperative.‍
• Financial Burden of Maintaining and Enhancing AI Initiatives: Implementing chatbots and AI programs entails substantial costs, some of which might not be apparent upfront. The resources and time required for both implementation and ongoing maintenance can potentially outweigh the initial investment. It's crucial to invest in AI-based solutions that demonstrate continuous improvement over time while keeping costs manageable without compromising quality.

Conclusion

Incorporating AI into your customer service strategy in 2024 has revolutionized your business's approach to modern service. By adopting these 10 AI-powered methods, you've unlocked unparalleled customer experiences, streamlined operations, and remarkable growth. From personalized interactions nurturing loyalty to rapid issue resolution boosting satisfaction, AI has become your ultimate partner in achieving success. Stay adaptable and open to future AI advancements as you navigate this dynamic landscape. Embracing the blend of technology and human touch will keep you at the forefront of exceptional customer service. As your business evolves, so does the role of AI in shaping extraordinary customer journeys.

Enhanced effectiveness and excellence in your customer support operations result in more contented customers. The satisfied customers evolve into champions for your brand and elevate the company's standing and positive endorsements draw in additional clients and result in increased earnings.

App0 messaging platform has AI built into its core that can automate your customer experience using messaging. We use AI to turn every notification into an action based conversation to get the results you want, reach your users at exactly the right time on their preferred channel and help you make data-driven business decisions and improve CSAT. If you are looking for a solution that can automate the entire workflow and elevate customer experience of your business in the US with AI, Request a Demo today!

AI in Customer Service: FAQs