We can all agree that artificial intelligence has made its way into our everyday lives in a matter of one year. It may be in both our personal, but definitely in our professional lives. Most businesses use AI in some form or another, utilizing its efficient way of automating different processes and saving time and energy with its availability.
For reference, let’s look at some statistics Zowie listed about the general usage of AI:
- Right now, the conversational AI market weighs $10.7B. Its growth is 22% annually.
- 95% of customer interactions are anticipated to be handled by AI by the year 2025.
- 90% of customers expect to receive an immediate answer to their questions in customer service.
- 80% of customers state they have a positive experience with AI chatbots.
- The main reason why businesses decide to implement conversational AI into their customer support is to increase agent productivity. In addition, 96% of employees do believe that AI increases their productivity.
The numbers show you how AI truly is a big part of business processes and specifically customer support workflows nowadays. It plays an essential role in meeting customer expectations and enhancing the productivity of team members.
Now let’s see the specific use cases of AI in businesses and the exact benefits of it within the fields.
Chatbots with generative AI
Chatbots had been prominent parts of customer support workflows long before the conversational AI bubble popped. These were quite different from what we have now with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.
Traditional chatbots were created to be able to answer simple and very specific queries based on decision trees or rules. Contrary to this, conversational AI learns and understands customer queries and answers the questions based on the knowledge base it is provided with. AI-powered chatbots can be trained, and they truly understand the meaning behind messages.
I have talked with Ganel Kumar, Customer Success Specialist at Kommunicate, who explained that they are using AI in their company as well: “I work with a company called Kommunicate. It's basically a GUI CHATBOT Builder Platform like Google Dialogflow and IBM Watson. As you might already know, BOT understands and interprets the user text or voice based on its NLP engine, which I would say is a subset of AI. Apart from that, we use Generative AI features like Document Scanner and Website Scraper in our Bot Builder, Kompose.” So yes, we can see that AI holds tremendous potential and can be used for many activities within a business.
In customer support, AI chatbots can add great value to the service, because they offer support without a break, in different languages, at great speed and high accuracy.
Anwersing Emails with AI
We’ve talked about chatbots and that they can answer incoming chat messages very effectively. However, many queries come to the customer support team through emails. This traditional way of contacting support cannot be handled by chatbots.
However, there is an AI solution for answering emails as well. SAAS First’s Reply with Milly function provides a quick fix just for that.
The Reply with Milly function allows you to answer incoming emails within just 10 seconds after clicking on a couple of buttons. The AI Reply draws information from the knowledge base it is provided with and crafts a compelling answer to the customer.
What is more, the whole process is customizable, where you can set up the level of formality, empathy, technicality, humor, positivity, and response length.
AI-Powered Ticket Management
We cannot overlook the importance of ticket management when talking about customer support and help desk services. Even in this specific field, AI can come in handy. It has the ability to:
- Categorize whether the customer has a question or issue. If the latter, it can automatically create a ticket for the issue that can be forwarded to the rest of the team
- Summarize the issue that has been presented by the customer and put it on the ticket
- Categorize the ticket
- Decide who is the right person to deal with the issue and assign the ticket to them
- Prioritize tickets based on the urgency and severity of the problem
In short, with AI, ticket creation and a very significant part of the ticket management process can be handed over to the new technology, without human intervention. This way, customer support team members can focus on the real issue, trying to solve it as soon as possible and skip on the routine tasks that take up most of their time.
If you are interested in a ticket management system like this, stay tuned, SAAS First is working on delivering this service for you soon!
Detecting the Attitude of Customers
This connects back to the previous section, where I discussed ticket management and prioritizing tickets based on the urgency of issues.
How good would that be to see which customers are most frustrated about their problems and how fast they need to be replied to? With AI, we could analyze their behavior and stance to see if we need to put them in the first place when replying to messages.
There is a great technology called sentiment analysis that can give us a helping hand in that. Sentiment analysis uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing techniques to examine and collect information on emotions, opinions, and other subjective information from users.
This can not only be used for prioritizing customer issues but also for sentiment analysis on social media, analyzing and keeping track of customer satisfaction through reviews and customer feedback.
Once we use this technology, it will be much easier to track and keep a record of different subjective elements connected to the users and customers. Understanding their frustrations or resentment will be easier than ever.
Searching in Knowledge Base with AI
Has it ever happened to you that you wanted to find something but you didn’t know the exact words you should search for in order to get to your destination? It’s a common issue that AI-powered search can overcome.
With this new technology of searching, you can find the relevant information you are looking for without needing to know the word-for-word content it contains. You can search by synonyms, so if you only have a vague idea of what you’re seeking to find, the content will appear to you immediately. What is more, you can even search in different languages as well.
This technology can be used, for example, in the inbox of your customer service, if you want to find an important conversation with someone, or in your knowledge base when you or your customers are searching for data for a specific purpose.
Content Creation with AI
Many of you are probably familiar with generative AI’s ability to create content and write specific texts based on the prompts we provide it with. We have a really interesting article explaining how you can create blog posts and articles with the help of AI, while also maintaining a high-quality rating by Google.
If you know your audience, the main purpose of your writing, something that will make your content stand out from the rest of the articles out there on the Internet, and provide true and reliable information, your blog will perform outstandingly.
The best part of this is that AI can help you in the writing process. It can reduce the amount of time you work on crafting sentences and trying to figure out how to put your thoughts into words.
In my conversation with Md. Julkar Nain, Digital Marketing Executive at MonsterClaw LLC, he explained he uses AI for content creation as well: “I use AI in my business to make things easier and better. For my SaaS, it helps me write and improve articles automatically. In my affiliate service, AI recognizes and responds to prospects' messages without me having to do it all manually. It's like having a helpful assistant that makes my work smoother and more efficient.”
I couldn’t have said it better: AI is like a personal assistant that aids your work in every way it can.
Conclusion
In summary, AI's role in customer support is transformative. Chatbots offer round-the-clock, multilingual assistance, while systems like Reply with Milly ease email responses. AI-powered ticket management helps with issue resolution, and sentiment analysis helps prioritize customer needs. AI-enhanced search functionalities make information readily accessible.
Using AI is essential for modern customer service as it ensures businesses meet increasing market demands, keep up with their competitors, and exceed customers’ expectations.
