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If you’re not already using conversational AI for customer service, you’re missing out on opportunities to reduce operational costs, increase revenue, and improve customer satisfaction.
Conversational AI has the power to transform every customer support task and function. It can reduce manual work and repetitive tasks for your human teams, boost the ROI of your marketing and sales strategies, and help you retain more customers.
That’s why around 69% of support leaders are planning on increasing their investment in AI technologies going forward.
The longer you go without a conversational AI strategy, the more you’ll fall behind the competition, putting your business at a serious disadvantage. That’s why we created this guide to help beginners understand the benefits of conversational AI and implement the right strategy for success.
Are customer service wait times frustrating your customers?
Conversational AI can help.
What is Conversational AI for Customer Service?
Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that draws on machine learning algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and other technologies to recognize, understand, and respond to human input. In customer service, this technology allows businesses to automate interactions with customers, personalize experiences, and solve problems at speed.
The chances are you’ve already encountered conversational AI in customer service. In every industry, companies are using this technology to optimize conversational text messaging strategies, to add bots to their website, and to connect with customers across various channels.
Notably, conversational AI isn’t just another term for “chatbot.” Chatbots come in many forms, including traditional rule-based bots that can only respond to queries with pre-defined answers. Conversational AI brings genuine intelligence to bots, virtual assistants, and other systems, allowing them to understand human intent, and address complex queries.
Conversational AI For Customer Support
Conversational AI tools come in many different forms - the most common example of conversational AI in customer support being the “AI chatbot.”
What differentiates a standard chatbot from conversational AI is the technology behind it. Traditional chatbots responded to specific requests with pre-determined answers, usually relying on matching keywords to information in a knowledgebase.
Conversational AI tools use a combination of technologies to understand a customer’s query and “intent” then respond with a personalized answer. For instance, AI tools for customer support use natural language processing to understand a customer’s message or “input.” They then use machine learning and data analysis to find the right solution to the query.
From there, these bots use “generative AI” to create answers to questions, relevant to the customers needs and priorities. Though the exact functionality of each conversational AI solution will vary, all of these tools rely on a combination of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Common Types of Conversational AI Customer Service Tools
In the customer support landscape, conversational AI can power a range of different tools and resources. The most common examples of “types” of conversational AI solutions in customer service include:
AI Chatbots
These are bots powered by conversational AI that usually power an automated “chat” service, giving customers 24/7 answers to queries. Chatbot technology can be built into a website, a messaging app (like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) or enabled for SMS, with a conversational messaging platform like Clerk Chat.
Chatbots are excellent for the modern world of customer service, where about 40% of customers prefer chatting to a bot to interacting with a human agent. These bots are great for handling a range of tasks, from welcoming visitors to your website, to initiating two-way SMS conversations, providing product guidance, or even routing customers to support channels.
Virtual Agents
Virtual agents are similar to chatbots. Sometimes the two terms are used interchangeably. However, in many cases, virtual agents leverage more advanced technology than the standard AI chatbot. They might take advantage of LLMs and advanced generative AI capabilities, to deliver more human-like experiences to customers through a conversational commerce platform.
They might also use technology like “speech to text” or “automated language recognition” algorithms, to respond to spoken customer queries, as well as written questions.
Again, these agents are ideal for a range of customer service tasks. They can deliver self-service experiences, improve IVR interactions, provide information on product updates, or even automatically remind customers of upcoming events and appointments.
Agent Assistance Bots
In the world of conversational AI for customer service, agent assist bots are really just chatbots or virtual agents trained to support employees, rather than customers. Instead of interacting directly with your audience, these bots guide and empower service agents.
For instance, if you’re using conversational AI in banking, an agent assist tool might automatically suggest relevant products and services to an agent while they’re having a conversation with a customer, based on previous purchasing behaviors.
The same assistant could also automate various tasks, like transcribing and translating calls, assessing a customer’s eligibility for certain products, or surfacing information about services to an agent.
What Can a Conversational AI Tool Do for Service Teams?
The connection between artificial intelligence and customer experience is constantly evolving, as companies discover new use cases for next-level AI tools. Some of the most common ways to use conversational AI for customer service include:
- Responding to common questions, like queries about order times or return policies.
- Providing customers with automatic order updates and tracking numbers.
- Handling returns and exchange processes.
- Sending custom SMS messages to customers about new products and services.
- Delivering personalized product or content recommendations to customers.
- Collecting customer data or requesting feedback.
- Triaging support requests and routing them to the correct team.
- Troubleshooting common technical issues.
- Helping employees access valuable information for customer support.
- Suggesting responses to customer queries.
- Handling appointment scheduling and reminders.
- Delivering multilingual support to global customers.
The Top Benefits of Conversational AI for Customer Service
The benefits of this technology for customer support are astronomical. The biggest benefits of conversational AI for customer support include:
Improved Customer Experiences
Ultimately, the main reason to use conversational AI for customer service is that it improves the experience customers have with your business. With an AI solution, you can give your customers more avenues and tools to resolve common problems on their own, whether you’re taking advantage of web-based chatbots, or AI SMS for customer service.
Conversational AI allows companies to deliver 24/7 personalized support to customers across a range of channels, reducing wait times, and improving customer satisfaction rates. It ensures you can always be on-hand to guide your customers, no matter how busy your human team members are.
Plus, with agent assist bots, you can give your team members extra resources that help them to personalize and improve customer interactions too.
Increased Revenue Opportunities
Improving the customer experience is one of the best ways to boost your revenue potential in any industry. However, conversational AI tools can help increase your profits in other ways too. They can allow you to send personalized AI text message promotions to customers, guiding them towards relevant products, and keeping them engaged with your brand.
Conversational AI tools can even draw on historical data and machine learning insights, to identify the best times to up-sell and cross-sell customers, increasing average order values. They can also follow up with customers and request feedback, boosting your chances of retaining customer loyalty and developing better products and services in the future.
Plus, whether you’re using conversational AI for finance, education, or retail, this technology gives you the power to interact with customers wherever they are. After all, bots can interact with customers in any language, giving you the power to scale globally.
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
While using conversational AI for customer service doesn’t mean you can just “replace” your human team with bots, it does ensure you can accomplish more with less. Conversational bots can automate repetitive low-value tasks for teams, like answering FAQs, and manually entering data into systems.
This means they free your team members up to focus on the tasks that really drive value – such as delivering empathetic support to customers or developing new marketing strategies.
Not only does this save you time and money when it comes to running your business, and reduce the number of team members you need to hire, but it improves team experiences too. When employees can spend less time on repetitive tasks, they enjoy the work they do a lot more.
In fact, 81% of support leaders believe that chatbots and conversational AI reduce attrition and improve employee engagement, minimizing turnover and business disruptions.
Are customer service wait times frustrating your customers?
Conversational AI can help.
Using Conversational AI in Customer Service: Best Practices
Obviously, the benefits and use cases for conversational AI in customer service are incredible. However, just like any advanced technology, AI comes with risks and challenges to consider. Here are some best practice tips to make sure you get the most out of your AI solution.
1. Get to Know Your Customers First
Before you start using conversational AI for customer service, it’s important to identify where this technology is going to have the biggest impact. Get to know the journey customers have with your company and the pain points they have along the way.
Do they spend too much time waiting on hold when they contact a call center? If so, maybe you could use conversational AI to enhance the IVR experience and improve your routing strategy. Do your customers need more ways to interact with you? That could mean you’d benefit from using AI for text message automation and SMS customer service.
Are your customers happy with your current support channels, but want to be able to speak to more knowledgeable and efficient agents? If so, you might look at using conversational AI “agent assist” tools to empower your team.
2. Organize your Data and Information
Next, to get the most out of conversational AI, customer service teams need to ensure they have the right repository of data and information. Your AI tools should be able to draw on your knowledgebase articles, FAQs, product documentation and more to answer questions.
You may also need to take advantage of CRM data, through a Salesforce, Zendesk, or HubSpot SMS integration, so they can create personalized responses for customers.
If the data that’s going to fuel your conversational AI tools is incomplete, inaccurate, or inaccessible, then you’re not going to deliver a great response to customers. Take some time to organize your databases, before you start implementing new tools.
3. Choose the Right Conversational AI Tools
Now it’s time to explore your options for conversational AI technology. There are a few options you can explore here. You might decide to build a bot or system from scratch, or you could choose to take advantage of the AI tools offered by other software and platform vendors.
For instance, if you want to use AI to enhance your conversational marketing strategy, as well as customer support, it makes sense to use a platform like Clerk Chat, which gives companies a convenient way to automate and enhance SMS marketing, with built-in templates, analytical tools, and integrations to existing systems.
Plus, Clerk Chat comes with AI functionality built-in, allowing you to create and use customized bots to support, inform, and engage customers throughout the buyer journey. Whatever platform you choose, make sure you think about the following:
- Data sets: What kind of data is the AI solution trained on already. Is it tuned to your specific business needs? For instance, if you’re using conversational AI in education, it makes sense to choose a system based on educational industry data.
- Security and compliance: Is the bot safe to use in your industry? Does it adhere to specific compliance standards and give you control over your data? How does it handle and store sensitive customer information?
- Integrations: Will your solution integrate seamlessly with your tech stack? For instance, Clerk Chat enables CRM integrations with tools like Zendesk and integrates with tools for data archiving, and UC platforms like Microsoft Teams.
4. Customize Your Technology and Train your Team
Once they’ve invested in the right solution for conversational AI, customer service teams need to invest a little time into customizing and fine-tuning the system. This could mean feeding your bot relevant data about your products and services or connecting it to your knowledge base.
It might mean using built-in tools to adapt the bot’s tone of voice and use of language to match your brand’s personality too. You’ll also need to put rules and policy guidelines in place that help you control how data is collected, managed, and used by your software.
On top of that, you might want to experiment with SMS templates for customer service, to ensure customers get a consistent experience whenever they interact with your brand. You’ll also need to set up custom integrations with all of your tools, like Microsoft Teams, Intercom SMS, Global Relay (For archiving), and so on.
While you’re customizing your technology, make sure you’re providing your team members with plenty of training and resources on how to use the technology. Ensure they understand how the system you’re using works, which best practices they need to follow when using AI, and how they should be protecting and securing sensitive data.
5. Implement, Test, and Optimize
Finally, you’re ready to start using conversational AI for customer service in your day-to-day operations. Once you deploy your new technology, however, remember that the work doesn’t stop there. You’ll need to monitor the performance of your tools and pay attention to crucial metrics to ensure you’re getting the best return on your investment.
Track changes to customer satisfaction rates and engagement levels after you introduce new conversational AI features, like automatic text reply options or chatbots for troubleshooting.
Look at how often customers abandon conversations with a bot to speak to a human agent instead. This could indicate that you need to improve the quality of your conversational AI tools or give customers a path to a human earlier in the service journey.
Additionally, constantly check your AI system to make sure that it’s delivering accurate responses. Remember that AI tools can make mistakes and suffer from hallucinations. Checking for accuracy will help you to avoid damage to your reputation and problems with customer satisfaction.
Ready to Use Conversational AI for Customer Service?
It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of conversational AI for customer service teams. While AI tools can’t replace human agents in your customer support team, they can improve the efficiency of your business, boost productivity, and reduce operational costs.
Plus, they give you an excellent opportunity to enhance customer satisfaction and unlock new avenues of revenue, too. If you want to discover the benefits of conversational AI for customer support yourself, the best strategy is to take advantage of an AI-powered messaging platform.
Clerk Chat doesn’t just give you an opportunity to access the benefits of SMS for rapid customer engagement and enhanced marketing strategies. It also offers access to powerful AI tools you can use to improve customer service, increase conversions, and boost team efficiency.
Dive into the world of conversational AI with the ultimate AI-powered SMS platform today, and discover what this cutting-edge technology can do for your team.
