Artificial intelligence is arguably one of the biggest technological developments in recent years. And it has a strong influence on different business areas like customer service. Discover how you can ride the AI trend to serve customers with the help of Virtua Solutions Outsourcing.
What AI Brings To Customer Service
Okay, so you are likely familiar with some of the things that artificial intelligence has introduced to the field of customer service. These include more advanced chatbots that respond to customer questions. However, there is more to it that you want to take notice of.
Improving Agent Efficiency And Productivity
By now, you have already heard all the horror stories of “AI replacing people in their jobs”. But while this is a valid concern, AI has its own merits for customer service agents. One is the fact that it can help them in their work.
Image from Shelf.
The aforementioned chatbots are surprisingly one of the tools that agents can turn to. For starters, they can help in filtering incoming customer questions. With that, your agents can focus on more complex customer service concerns.
Additionally, AI can help agents study customer behavior in greater detail. These tools can help them process engagement data and analyze interactions for intent and sentiment. With these, they can better plan out engagement strategies.
Delivering More In-Depth Service
Greater personalization is one of the growing trends in customer service these days. Agents can use these AI tools to create more detailed customer persona maps. From there, they can create custom responses geared towards these customers.
Image from Hubspot.
Going further, agents can use artificial intelligence to make proactive recommendations. These recommendations run on the same personalized engagement models as above. Using proactive recommendations, your customer service team can be ahead of customers and help them with issues they have yet to encounter. For instance, you can use these tools to prevent them from abandoning shopping carts.
Enhancing The Agent Experience
The impact of artificial intelligence on customer service goes beyond the customer-facing aspects. It can also help you hone your agents during their training. For instance, you can use intelligent routing to gradually increase the complexity of service requests they handle. That helps them get a better feel of the work and adapt to the situation.
Image from Call Center Studio.
Another way that AI can help the agent is by providing them with suggestions for their next course of action. That is a lot of help for situations the agent might be unfamiliar with. With that, they can adapt and learn faster to manage such scenarios.
How You Can Ride The AI Revolution
Of course, just going along with the AI trend is not enough to get the most out of it. You need to plan how to integrate it effectively into your overall customer service process. For that, you need to have the right plan.
Here, you need a clear idea on what role AI plays in the process. Will it be relegated to handling minor customer requests, or will you use it for more complex tasks? You might also want to consider other relevant tasks that can benefit from AI and enhance customer service.
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Once you have mapped out the role of AI in your customer service, you can start the actual implementation. That includes careful selection of the AI tools you wish to implement. The idea here is ensuring the tool is compatible with your existing tech infrastructure. On the other hand, you will also need to explore what new tech you might need for the purpose.
Expanding Your Customer Service Team
Beyond the technological needs, you should also consider how to make your customer service team more capable of using AI. Here are several new roles you might want to add to your team for that purpose.
- Knowledge manager: They are the ones who manage the content being fed to the AI, ensuring that it is performing as intended. Knowledge managers also do performance analysis.
- Conversation designer: As the name implies, the conversation designer develops the end-to-end conversation experience for customers. Their goal is to make the journey more streamlined and seamless between AI and human customer support.
- Conversation analyst: The conversation analyst studies how your customers interact with AI and devises ways to improve that interaction and get more insights about customers.
- Problem formulation engineer: The problem formulation engineer’s main task is to identify the problems customers might encounter when using your AI tools and provide solutions.
As you can see, these are very technical positions. Which is why they are sometimes included in the IT department. However, making them part of the customer service team allows for a more cohesive engagement strategy between human agents and AI.
Of course, hiring these specific personnel might not always be an option for your business. Virtua Solutions offers you easy access to experts in these roles. We can also search for candidates that fit the specific AI tools that you intend to use. With us lending a hand, you can create a more competent team to handle the AI integration and management.
Ride The AI Revolution In Customer Service With Virtua Solutions
With how fast the artificial intelligence revolution is taking over the business scene, you definitely would not want to be left behind. And with Virtua Solutions by your side, you can tap the potential of this high-tech new tool to help customers more. Contact us today and let’s bring AI to the forefront of your service.