Evolution of Customer Service! The Era of AI Customer Service Has Arrived
Beside the quality of the product itself, “customer service,” which runs through the entire user experience, is often a prominent factor that affects brand favorability and loyalty. Hence, companies have begun to import intelligent customer service to assist traditional human customer service. Nowadays, in response to customers’ multi-scenario and multi-channel interaction modes, intelligent customer service provides a more powerful customer service experience through the integration and evolution of digital technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that has gained media attention for its superlative human-like interactions and personalized responses. Enterprises are increasingly integrating AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, into their customer service strategies to remain competitive. For instance, businesses can now automatically respond to customer inquiries and even facilitate product orders.
“In the future, nearly 95% of customer service interactions will be dominated by AI to make up for the shortcomings of traditional human customer service.” – Trend of Intelligent Customer Service Digitalization and the Transformation of Central State-owned Enterprises
Previously, dedicated one-to-one human service was used by companies to provide customers with corresponding consultation and services. However, data statistics reflected that more than 90% of enterprise customer service call times are less than 60 seconds, which has caused customer service departments facing high labor costs, low service operating efficiency, and weak data analysis capabilities. Additionally, customer service personnel often face more negative emotional pressures from customers, leading to more unstable personnel turnover. Intelligent customer service is highly favored by enterprise merchants undoubtedly due to numerous benefits it brought: low cost, quick response, high efficiency, high stability, and 24/7 service.
Online AI chatbots are popular in customer service, but are they “intelligent” or “off-topic”?
Despite the many advantages of intelligent customer service, it also faces some challenges. The most common issue is the “off-topic” and “repetitive” responses that often occur in automated question-and-answer settings. AI chatbot somehow would misunderstand the questions and respond inefficiently without a proper framework. For customers who urgently need assistance or have complex inquiries, this “foolproof service” cannot solve actual problems and seriously affects the user experience. Even when intelligent customer service is transferred to human agents, customers may choose to give up their inquiries due to difficulties or long waiting times. An undeveloped AI chatbot may also trigger public relations crises by its inappropriate responses. Giving an example of Microsoft’s Tay. This AI chatbot was designed to engage with Twitter users but quickly became corrupted by inappropriate tweets. Within a day, Microsoft had to shut down Tay as it was regurgitating racist and hateful content.
While intelligent customer service can solve the labour cost and response efficiency problems in the short term, it can also lead to more operational management difficulties and lower customer satisfaction for many businesses. In a complete service system, “human” and “intelligent” support are both indispensable and not in a completely replacement relationship. Rather, they should work together and perform corresponding tasks in different service scenarios and stages.
5 tactical tips to prioritise the essence of customer service
In customer service, how can companies better allocate resources between human and intelligent customer service to provide a better user experience?
Firstly, companies should recall and reflect on the goals and essence of customer service. The purpose of customer service is to build brand trust, support, and goodwill by addressing consumers’ doubts about products/brands, encouraging new customers and existing customers to try products/services and make repeat purchases respectively. An inferior customer service experience can damage a brand’s reputation and cause loyal customers to gradually lose faith. Another reason is that splendid customer service can increase the value of the product in the consumer’s mind, making the price easier to be accepted and accelerating the willingness to buy.
After understanding the value of customer service to companies, what are the key factors in providing splendid customer service?
- Smoothly omnichannel experience: It approaches in a customer-centric form that consumers could enjoy seamless experience smoothly through different channels, such as online, in-store, phone apps. To do so, you could ensure that best quality services are provided to consumers from different channels.
- Providing user engagement choices: Provide customers with multiple choices to interact anytime, anywhere in the way they prefer, which increases the flexibility and favorability of them.
- People-oriented service experience: Provide customer-centric and thoughtful service that exceeds expectations and provides immediate assistance
- Personalized responses: Quickly provide the correct answer through the best knowledge management or automated personalized recommendations
- Automated processes and interactions: Use automation and intelligent functions to predict, improve, and enhance customer experience and the transfer process between human and AI customer service
Undoubtedly, companies are required to achieve both service automation and personalization to meet consumer demands for customer service.
[Further Reading]
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Balance between manpower and artificial intelligence in customer service
1. Boost Customer Satisfaction with Smart Customer Service Solutions
Customer service teams can organize common customer inquiries into a set of fixed Q&A processes and design them as “FAQ templates” to speed up. In addition, personalized message activities in chat boxes, such as those available in Freshdesk Support Desk, can be used to customize message themes and display tailored messages, providing a warmer and more humanized service.
2. Integrate Multi-Channel Messages and Automate Ticket Assignment with Customer Service Systems
Facing more diverse message channels, customer service systems such as Freshdesk Support Desk offer a single inbox for customer service personnel to view messages from various channels like in-app chat, website chat rooms, WhatsApp, Line, or Facebook Messenger. They can also obtain information about the pages viewed and time spent by customers before sending messages, helping customer service to immediately understand and address individual customer issues by providing more detailed explanations and assistance. Additionally, automated ticket assignment based on skills, topics, and roles can be achieved with the system’s intelligent assignment feature.
Intelligent and personalized customer service is the first step to improving customer satisfaction!
As the first and only Freshworks preferred reseller in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and mainland China, Master Concept helps businesses simplify and optimize their customer service workflows and provide the best combination of human and intelligent customer service with Freshworks’ diverse SaaS solutions, such as Freshdesk Support Desk. We enable customers to contact businesses instantly through various channels without any obstacles.
