AI keeps advancing in leaps and bounds and it’s changing almost every industry. That change is especially true when it comes to AI-powered customer support. Artificial intelligence is making it easier to handle customer queries and improve satisfaction.
But we have to think about the future as well. Will humans even feature going forward? The answer is that to truly future-proof our help desks, we’ll need a mix of human empathy and AI customer support.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can get ready for the new world of artificial intelligence.
The Impact of AI on Customer Support
Have you spoken to Siri, Alexa, or even Google recently? If so, you have an idea of what AI is capable of. Chatbots, like these virtual assistants, are changing the way we interact with clients.
Bots are available 24/7 and are becoming increasingly capable. If you compare what’s on the market today to what was available ten short years ago, it’s like chalk and cheese. Previous models relied on customers hitting the exact keyword to understand a query. Today bots can understand the context, making them more effective.
Virtual assistants can also assist human staff by suggesting answers, automating functions, and providing predictive analytics. AI will, however, carry on evolving, making it important for you to prepare for:
- Hyper-personalization: AI-powered customer support can scan through several data sources to get an accurate picture of your customers. It can then deliver tailored responses and anticipate your client’s needs. It can make recommendations accordingly. This greatly increases the chances of customers buying more products.
- Advanced Natural Language Processing: In the future, AI will be better able to understand context, tone, and intent, making it more accurate. As a result, it will deliver better answers and service.
- Autonomous Agents: AI-driven support systems will be able to handle increasingly complex queries without human intervention. We’re seeing advances in reasoning within large language models which makes AI more efficient.
- AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis: AI will use real-time emotional intelligence to help you respond empathetically. This will prevent churn because your customers will feel that you understand their needs.
Strategies to Future-Proof Customer Support
Now, how can you get ready for these changes?
1. Invest in AI Training for Support Teams
AI for customer support won’t completely replace your human agents, but will play a greater role in supporting them. You won’t need as large a team going forward, but you should look at improving their efficiency by:
- Teaching your employees how to use AI-driven systems. A lot of these are intuitive, but there might be small nuances that you have to consider. If you make sure your employees understand the system, there’s a better chance of them being happy to adopt it and get the most out of it.
- Providing ongoing education on new trends and updates. There’s a lot of fear about AI replacing humans and this may make your team more reluctant to adopt it. AI does close a lot of doors, but it’s also opening up more opportunities. By getting your team to think about this, you give them the chance to upskill themselves.
- Encouraging your team to move from reactive support to proactive engagement. Your team will have more time to deal with customers because of the AI tools. It’s time for them to up their game and start reaching out to clients to build relationships.
If you start integrating AI literacy into your training now, you’ll be able to enjoy greater adaptability and efficiency going forward.
2. Implement AI in Phases
You don’t have to do everything at once. You can test AI solutions, get feedback, and adjust your approach accordingly. Say, for example, you want to implement a chatbot, but you’re not sure how well it will do.
You can use an AI-powered customer support virtual assistant with your human consultants. It can suggest answers to questions clients pose and your team can choose the best one. That allows them to get familiar with the technology and see the benefits for themselves. It also shows you how accurate it is.
Another benefit is that the AI learns from every answer your team chooses. It uses this information to refine its choices going forward, making it more accurate as time passes.
You could then move on to use 100% AI customer support for simple tasks like:
- Answering frequently asked questions
- Ticket categorization and routing
Finally you can move on to advanced functions like predictive support and real-time sentiment analysis.
3. Leverage Predictive Analytics for Proactive Support
What if you could deal with issues before customers feel frustrated by them? This is the premise behind proactive AI for customer support. AI can:
- Identify common pain points and come up with solutions. AI can spot trends that mean that there’s trouble on the horizon. This lets you get ahead of these issues and deal with them before they frustrate your clients.
- Offer personalized recommendations and solutions. AI can recommend products, point customers to relevant content, and generally offer useful insights tailored to your client. This makes your company look like they really understand their customers.
- Reduce churn by recognizing at-risk customers and taking preventative action.
- Provide useful predictive analytics that can help you identify issues with service or products. You can then improve both and customer satisfaction at the same time. What’s more, your company looks like a winner because your clients feel less frustrated.
Conclusion
We live in an exciting time. Who knows what AI for customer support will look like ten or twenty years from now? To be ready, you need to start embracing AI technology now. You don’t have to go all in. Start with something simple, like a virtual assistant to support your consultants.
This allows you to experience the benefits without much risk. It also gives your team insights into how it can improve their productivity. Then you can move on to the next stage and start to reap the full rewards of hybrid human/AI-powered customer support.