Today, Artificial intelligence, or AI, is slowly but steadily becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Alexa and Siri are now household names and the users of these smart virtual assistants have grown accustomed to how easy they are making it gain access to information. While these virtual assistants are mainly for personal use, Artificial Intelligence also presents wonderful opportunities for businesses of all sizes, particularly for customer service. It’s no brainer that a big majority of organizations today are making the use of AI to offer more efficient and better service.
The tech-savvy consumers of today are happy with automation and this is quite evident from the fact that whether it is about ordering a pizza or making an appointment with a doctor, everything has gone automated and everyone is actually appreciating it.
Let us access some statistics to find out how Artificial Intelligence is gaining prominence and getting accepted among consumers across the world.
AI Customer Service Statistics
- Seven in 10 consumers based in the United States say they spent more money to do business with an organization that delivers great service. Also, more than half of Americans have abruptly scrapped a planned transaction or purchase due to poor service. [American Express]
- 15 percent of all customer service interactions by 2021 will be handled completely by Artificial Intelligence, which will be an increase of 400 percent from 2017. [Gartner]
- 95 percent of consumers cited customer service as the most important factor in their selection of and loyalty to a brand. [Microsoft]
- A staggering $62 billion is lost every year by U.S. businesses because of bad consumer experiences. [New Voice Media]
- IBM, one of the world’s largest multinational information technology companies, recently predicted that 85 percent of customer interactions by the end of the year 2020 will be handled without a human agent. Obviously, this could lead to dramatic enhancements in the standard customer service experiences, especially when you consider how many customer support teams actually struggle to keep up with the needs and requirements of consumers.
Why Artificial Intelligence Is The Best Thing To Happen?
Organizations can deploy Artificial intelligence to provide a convenient, intelligent, informed, and delighting customer experience at all points during the consumer journey. This, in turn, will translate to redefined, personal, and integrated end-to-end customer journeys and consumer experiences so they feel more natural to consumers.
The Need For AI In Customer Experience
There is no denying the fact that the digital consumer experiences are in a mess today. The result criteria are puzzling and the regulations are undefined. However, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to change almost everything (and for the good) in the blink of an eye. The best thing about AI is that it can easily offer more and sophisticated control of required problem-solving strategies as it deals with meta-level questions & answers and semantic meaning. It is for this and many more reasons that AI is touted as the next generation of technology for the customer support industry. AI dialogue systems of today are catering to thousands of consumers who all may be calling, texting, or emailing at the same time.
- Frontline customer self-service
AI-powered devices and systems can be used efficiently in the frontline of customer service to help consumers get fast outcomes, instant answers, and consistency. The days of infuriatingly waiting for a phone call with a live agent are now over as they are replaced with AI-powered chatbot technology for immediate assistance and solutions.
Presently, chatbots are redefining customer experiences by sourcing data at phenomenally high speeds than individuals working behind the scenes. No wonder, it has improved the quality of customer service interactions besides freeing up the time of employees to concentrate on more value-added tasks.
- Customer acquisition and retention
Artificial Intelligence can help organizations deliver more personalized customer service interactions in real time. And, this proves out to be an exciting opportunity for organizations, whether a brick-and-mortar retail store or a big multinational company, to be more predictive and proactive in how they interact with existing as well as potential consumers.
For instance, if you visit a website and start searching for a kitchen appliance, the AI may instantly look at your past buying history and previous search terms (if any) and suggest potential (related) products that might be of interest to you. In other words, AI-powered devices and systems can save valuable time of consumers instead of them having to search for countless hours to search through an eCommerce website.
- Enhancing Automation
For years, organizations have been automating mundane tasks and Artificial Intelligence is second to none when it comes to automating repetitive tasks. This is for the simple reason that AI can easily go on to become the all-important layer that manages and monitors automated processes.
It can be done in two ways:
- Artificial Intelligence-powered devices and systems can simply replace the conversations that customers are presently having with automated systems with a technology that has the potential of understanding typed or spoken natural language input.
- AI can also be used to integrate the internal processes for enhancing automation. This may be done by inferring emotion, enabling image recognition, or inferring intent from the text-based input made by a consumer.
- Minimizing Customer Friction
Artificial Intelligence can assist in navigating the entire customer experience journey. In addition to this, AI can demonstrate great efficacy to identify where experience levels fall down and where friction points occur. This is due to the fact that AI can identify the most frequently asked questions where customers are not able to get the desired results when compared to humans reading through endless transcripts. In short, Artificial Intelligence can help businesses identify the problems quickly and amend the journeys of customers appropriately as AI enables instant identification, real-time customer engagement, and remediation of service-level issues.
- Increased Personalization
Many business owners are of the view that automation can actually lead to loss of a “personal” feel. However, Artificial Intelligence can actually do the complete opposite by delivering more personalized content to each of your customers. It is simply because AI lets organizations to adjust content and offers automatically based on the purchasing behavior and past browsing history of a visitor.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence, which is still somewhat in its infancy, has the potential of shaping and redefining how organizations interact with and help customers. Undoubtedly, AI is something worth looking into if your organization wants to improve customer service whether it is through creating custom chatbots, identifying customer issues, speeding up the response times, or improving the personalization aspect of your website.
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