While your product’s quality and price still matter a lot to your customers, there is yet another factor that impacts their purchasing decision and helps them choose whether they’ll put their trust in your brand or opt for your competitors.
This new factor is the quality of your customer service. As a matter of fact, 90% of Americans use customer service to decide whether to do business with a company.
If you’re successful at meeting your customers’ needs, your customer service creates an additional value that can build your reputation on the market, and make you stand out from all the others.
On the other hand, if you’re failing to provide your customers with the support they need, your poor customer service can be a reason for your downfall, as 33% of U.S. consumers consider switching brands after one single instance of poor customer service.
AI can be a powerful means to transform your customer service and improve it so that it fits your customers’ evergrowing needs.
Automating Customer Service
With the rise of the latest technology solutions and their implementation, your customers’ needs and expectations are rising too.
When they need information or support from your rep, they want it right away and for it to provide them with complete information or an adequate solution to their burning problem.
To bring your customer service quality to such a high level, you would need an army of human representatives and a matching budget.
That’s where artificial intelligence comes in, taking the form of conversational chatbots. AI-powered chatbots can automate specific tasks to provide your customers with complete service, without any need for human interference.
AI is being viewed as a virtual assistant that can autonomously interact with customers in a human-like manner, and successfully solve up to 80% of most common customer queries. The great thing about conversational AI is that it only gets better over time, as it learns from each interaction and new data it gathers. Hence, it becomes capable of producing spontaneous and meaningful feedback.
When a matter is too complex for a chatbot to handle, it can delegate the query to a human representative while providing your agents with an insight into all the data it has about the customer and each important touchpoint between the customer and the brand.
By automating repetitive tasks, AI-powered chatbots reduce the strain on your human representatives and allow them to focus all their time and energy into offering the best experience to your customers.
Reducing Waiting Times
The two most important factors that impact customer satisfaction are the speed of response and the speed of resolution.
Bearing in mind that your agents can only handle one customer at a time, the math is simple – when all your agents are busy, the rest of your customers are being put on hold, and there is hardly a thing that frustrates them more.
The longer the waiting times are, the angrier your customers become, and the closer they get to the point of no return when they decide to go to your competitor.
Leveraging AI in your customer service department can significantly reduce the number of customers being put on hold. Chatbots can, for example, respond to multiple queries simultaneously, which is a saving grace to all the companies that struggle with waiting times.
24/7/365 Availability
An affordable round o’clock customer service availability is another significant customer service improvement that we can thank AI for.
Back in the day, this kind of support was only the privilege of industry giants that could afford enough human staff, now even small companies and startups can enjoy the benefits of having an AI-powered employee around.
Your customers may come from different time zones, and they browse your website whenever they feel like it – before and after your official business hours. When they need extra information or have an issue to solve, they don’t want to wait for your business hours to start; they expect your response right away.
Your AI employee doesn’t need to sleep or rest; it’s always there to meet your customers’ needs. Plus, bots never have a bad day – they’re always polite and patient, even with the most demanding customers.
Personalized Customer Experience
Your customers are tired of receiving offers and messages that don’t fit their needs and interests, and 86% would choose to pay more to get personalized customer experience.
Apart from automating menial tasks, AI can improve the quality of the service you provide by personalizing your customer experience.
To better understand this kind of personalization, think about the way Netflix’s recommendations or Amazon’s suggestions function.
AI collects data about our existing and potential customers, analyzes their behavior, spots different patterns, makes predictions, and offers a highly-personalized customer experience as a result.
All this explains why you should consider implementing some AI solutions if you want to improve your customer service, as well as boost customer experience and their satisfaction with your brand.
