Customer support is a tricky business, and you want to get it right as much as possible. Happy customers are return customers, after all.
Which is why we’re going to be real. Sometimes human customer support just doesn’t cut it.
But can customer service automation really help you get better results? The short answer is YES. The long answer, though, is that we’ve gone over 10 practical ways in which AI can help you turn the meanest customer’s frown upside down.
We’ll cover:
- How to make things easier for customers with chatbots
- Using AI for email management
- Enhance live chat with AI assistance
- Automate ticket routing and management
- Personalize customer interactions
- Utilize AI for voice support automation
- Monitor and analyze customer sentiment
- Predict customer needs with AI
- Streamline knowledge management
- Automate feedback collection and analysis
Let’s get started.
1. Simplify customer interactions with AI chatbots
AI chatbots can handle initial customer chat, providing instant responses and reducing wait times.
They’re always available, and they can handle as many queries as you like simultaneously.
Let’s take a look at some of their benefits:
- Chatbots (almost) always have an answer. Use chatbots to respond to frequently asked questions like store hours, return policies, or account balances. Or they can even answer more complex queries.
- AI bots can get you actionable insights. The data from customer interactions provides valuable insights into common pain points, opportunities for new products or services, and ways to improve the overall experience.
- Chatbots know when to escalate. While AI chatbots handle straightforward inquiries, they escalate more nuanced conversations to human agents. This approach provides the benefits of automation without removing the possibility of a personalized customer experience for more sensitive issues.
2. Use AI for email management
Implementing AI for email management is a great way to streamline customer service.
AI can sort through incoming emails and automatically respond to common questions — and that’s going to be a huge load off your shoulders.
Here’s how:
- Like a fine-tooth comb. AI-powered email management systems can analyze messages to determine the sender, urgency, and topic. They then intelligently route emails to the right department or agent, getting you the fastest response time. For FAQs, AI can draft and send appropriate email responses instantly.
- Frees up brainpower. With AI handling basic email inquiries and routing, human customer service agents have more time to help out customers with challenging problems. They can give the human touch to sensitive issues — a win for both rapport and loyalty.
3. Improve live chat with the help of AI
AI can improve your live chat system by helping agents respond faster and more accurately to the most common questions.
Here’s how these chatbots can help supplement humans (without outright replacing them):
- Intelligent response suggestions. With AI, chat agents get real-time suggestions for responses based on the customer's inquiry and context from previous messages. The agent can quickly choose the most appropriate response, improving response times.
Agents can also get suggested responses for common questions, which helps you make sure that you provide consistent and accurate information to customers.
- Quick access to the knowledge base. AI also provides chat agents with fast access to your company's knowledge base so they can quickly find information to address customer questions. The AI can search the knowledge base, pull relevant articles and snippets, and display them for the agent, speeding up response times. This ultimately leads to higher-quality service — and happier customers.
4. Automate ticket routing and management
AI can scan incoming support tickets and automatically route them to the appropriate department or agent. AI examines details like the ticket topic, urgency, and complexity to determine where to direct each inquiry for the quickest resolution.
Here’s what you can gain from this:
- Major efficiency gains. Routing tickets with AI improves operational efficiency by making sure that customers connect with the correct resources right away. So, agents spend less time redirecting tickets, allowing them to focus on solving issues. Also, customers benefit from faster responses and interactions with knowledgeable experts.
- You can categorize tickets better (and faster). Some companies use AI for basic ticket sorting, separating requests into categories like billing, technical support, or account management. More advanced AI can actually assign tickets to specific agents or groups based on skills, availability, and historical data. AI may also notice connections between tickets and group them together so agents have the full context to resolve complex, multi-part issues.
5. Tailor customer service interactions with automations
Using AI to analyze customer data and past interactions allows you to personalize communications and recommendations, enhancing the overall customer experience to:
- Personalize those recommendations. By tracking a customer's purchase history and browsing behavior, you can send tailored product recommendations and special offers based on what they’ve liked in the past.
- Give it a human(ized) touch. You can also use AI voice recognition and natural language processing to personalize voice-based customer service. The AI system can analyze the customer's speech patterns, word choice, and tone to determine their emotional state and personalize responses accordingly. For example, if a customer sounds frustrated, the AI may adopt a more empathetic and apologetic tone.
- Treat people like unique beings. AI-enabled personalization helps to build loyalty by demonstrating that you value each customer as an individual. According to Epsilon Research, over 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that provides a personalized experience. Personalization is the future of customer service, and AI paves the way for deeper, data-driven personalization at scale.
6. Use AI for voice support automation
AI isn’t just limited to chatting via text. AI voice technology can handle simple customer calls, providing super-quick responses to increasingly complex questions (while still keeping humans in the loop).
Here’s how they help:
- They talk like real people. Virtual voice assistants use natural language processing to understand speech and respond appropriately based on a knowledge base of possible inquiries and answers.
- Make things go faster. Rather than waiting on hold, customers can quickly get answers to basic questions about store hours, order status updates, or account balances. The virtual assistant can also collect information from the customer to start addressing the purpose of their call prior to transferring them to an agent for follow-up.
- Cuts down costs. For companies, automated voice support reduces costs associated with live call centers and improves key metrics like reduced wait times, decreased abandoned calls, and increased first-call resolution rates. Integrating virtual voice assistants into an existing call center operation or as an automated self-service option gives you a lot of flexibility based on your customer support needs and budget.
7. Monitor and analyze customer sentiment
Using AI, you can analyze the sentiment of customer interactions across channels like live chat, phone calls, and social media. These tools can detect positive, negative, or neutral sentiments in customer comments and conversations.
Here’s how AI can help you get a feel for things:
- Detect sentiment in live chat and calls. With artificial intelligence, you can analyze the sentiment of live chat conversations and phone calls in real time and alert agents if a customer seems dissatisfied or frustrated. The agent can then adapt their response to address the customer's concerns and improve satisfaction.
- Total transcriptions in seconds. AI speech recognition technology can transcribe phone calls and analyze the sentiment of the conversation. This helps identify any pain points or frustrations for the customer and opportunities to improve the experience.
- See what people think on social media. AI social listening tools can track mentions of your brand on social platforms and gauge the sentiment. This helps gauge customer opinions, pinpoint common issues, and spot potential PR crises before they escalate.
8. Get ahead of customer needs
You can use AI to analyze customer data and interactions to anticipate needs and concerns. This allows you to take preemptive action and provide personalized service.
- See positive and negative trends. Monitor past tickets, chat logs, calls, and emails to identify common issues. Then, reach out to customers proactively to address questions before they arise. For example, if a customer recently purchased a product, send an email with helpful tips for getting started and your support contact information.
- Detect shifts in the tide. AI can also detect subtle changes in customer sentiment through voice and text that may signal future problems. If a longtime customer seems frustrated or impatient, a call to check in and see how you can help may prevent them from churning.
- Get ahead of the game. Predictive analytics apply machine learning to historical data to identify relationships and patterns. Use this to foresee customer needs, preferences, and potential issues. Create personalized campaigns, product recommendations, and service offerings tailored to each customer’s predicted needs.
9. Streamline knowledge management
You can use AI to manage and retrieve information from a centralized knowledge base — enabling quicker and more accurate responses to customer requests. AI can index and organize knowledge articles, FAQs, and other resources to make them easily searchable.
Here are some examples of how this works in your favor:
- From the knowledge base to the user. When a customer contacts support, the AI searches the knowledge base for relevant information to instantly provide an answer. If the AI finds multiple potential solutions, it can present the options to the customer to choose from. The customer gets a quick response, and agents avoid repeatedly answering common questions.
- Help your agents get to knowledge quicker. Agents spend less time searching for information to resolve customer issues. Plus, management gains insights into what types of questions customers frequently ask, which can help them improve resources to address common pain points.
- You’ll have an easier time keeping things updated. As new products, features, or processes are released, you must revise documentation. AI simplifies this by automatically suggesting knowledge-base articles that need to be updated or created based on trends in customer questions and feedback.
10. Automate feedback collection and analysis
Use AI to automatically collect and analyze customer feedback across various channels, providing insights into service performance and areas for improvement.
Here’s how:
- AI can get data from all over. AI tools can monitor online reviews, social media, call recordings, chat transcripts, and customer surveys to gain a holistic understanding of the customer experience. Sentiment analysis allows AI to detect how customers truly feel about your business by interpreting the tone and emotion of feedback.
- And then put it all together. By aggregating data from multiple sources, AI achieves a complete view of customer opinions that human teams would struggle to accomplish manually. This information is invaluable for improving service strategies and addressing recurring pain points.
Summing up
You now have 10 powerful ways to leverage artificial intelligence to elevate your customer support.
All in all, your new customer service automation will give clients quicker response times, more personalized and proactive interactions, and an overall smoother support experience.
With AI's help, you can provide service that feels (almost) human while scaling your operations in a cost-effective manner.
Next steps
Feeling overwhelmed by a never-ending stream of emails and support tickets? Lindy, a versatile AI tool, might be just the solution you need. It's designed to handle a wide range of tasks, allowing you to focus on growing your business.
Here's how Lindy can transform your customer experience:
- One-stop shop: Lindy handles emails, support tickets, lead generation, sales, and more, taking the burden off your shoulders.
- Easy to get started: Setting up Lindy is a breeze — no technical expertise is required.
- Fits right in: Lindy integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and data, with over 3,000 integrations available.
- Always available: Lindy works around the clock to answer questions and qualify leads, ensuring you never miss an opportunity.
- Human touch when needed: Lindy knows when to bring in a human teammate for more complex issues.
- Speaks your language: Teach Lindy your brand voice, and it will communicate like a true team member.
- Boosts conversions: Lindy asks the right questions, scores leads, and gathers contact information to help you close deals.
- Constantly improving: Lindy learns from your feedback, adapting to provide even better service over time.
