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AI for customer service: Unlocking efficiency and personalization

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Every time customers choose to interact with a business and its products or services, they expect to receive good customer service in return. When organizations fail to consistently engage consumers with positive customer experiences, they lose clientele, waste leads, and damage brand reputations. Long-term success requires every business to support customers before, during, and after each transaction. While good customer service is traditionally difficult to maintain, modern innovations like AI present organizations with cost-effective solutions that help them build customer relationships and operate more efficiently.

What is AI in customer service

 

Incorporating AI within your organization’s customer service strategy restructures how your support team recognizes and caters to every person’s needs. Regardless of where, when, or how customers might interact with your business, intelligent systems can help your live service agents provide exceptional customer experiences on a consistent basis. Smaller businesses with fewer service agents may struggle to engage every potential customer on every channel manually. However, virtual assistants can help these organizations convert more leads by directing web traffic toward the most relevant products and information for each visitor. Specialized virtual assistants, such as customer service chatbots, help streamline support processes for service agents by initiating customer support tickets before handing them off to the best-suited individuals.

Using AI in customer service

In recent years, AI has become widespread throughout the service industry. Businesses of all types and sizes are reducing costs, assisting service agents, and improving customer experiences by integrating intelligent apps and systems within their customer support. Your organization can use bots in customer service to help live service agents identify customer issues more quickly and solve them more efficiently.
 

AI chatbot customer service solutions are some of the most common intelligent systems and for good reason—chatbots are always available and ready engage customers on any channel. Although they may not be able to solve more complex problems and issues, chatbots drastically improve customer satisfaction during off-hours when fewer live service agents are available. Augmenting your support team with AI may seem expensive and unrealistic, but small business virtual assistants also provide organizations with accessible AI capabilities that help improve customer satisfaction while reducing costs.

 

How does AI work?

AI technology uses math and logic to simulate human reasoning and quickly make calculated decisions. Intelligent systems are typically built for specific tasks and taught how to function by ingesting and making sense of various information. By teaching AI to make sense of structured data, like spreadsheets or structured query language (SQL), and unstructured data, like images or videos, it establishes a pool of information that it can reference later.

 

Machine learning is a major subset of AI that influences a computer system’s ability to serve customers effectively. It uses data models to help computers learn new things without direct training or instruction. In other words, machine learning develops AI systems by training machines to learn from information in the same way humans do. For example, conversational chatbots may use machine learning to simulate human conversations more accurately.

 

Natural language processing is another noteworthy branch of AI that can help improve your organization’s customer experiences. While most computers only recognize complex programming languages, AI can be taught to read and understand human words in the same way humans do. In customer service, virtual assistants may process language to make sense of the things your customers write or say, and then respond similarly to how your live service agents would.

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How does AI help automate customer support?

 AI cannot replace your live service agents, but intelligent systems can help improve the overall efficiency of your organization’s support team by automating various aspects of your customer service practices, including:    
  • Customer inquiries and troubleshooting. AI can automate the initial stages of customer support to help your service agents focus on solving problems rather than identifying them. Many chatbot customer service solutions may use AI to instantly interpret voicemails, emails, and social media—then automatically resolve simple issues or forward complex ones to the right agent.
  • Text analysis. Intelligent apps help organizations optimize their service strategies by analyzing customer messaging and survey responses at scale to uncover valuable trends and insights for your organization.
  • Sentiment analysis. Intelligent systems can process human conversations to instantly understand customer responses and personalize replies based on perceived customer sentiment.
  • Multilingual support and translations. AI can automatically identify and translate different languages to help every service agent engage every customer with positive experiences. Considering it may not be viable for many small and medium-sized businesses to establish an international team of support agents, AI can help growing organizations cater to new markets.
  • Support ticket sorting. Intelligent apps may process natural language to understand customer inquiries, problems, and concerns. Afterwards, these systems can automatically assign each support ticket to the most qualified person, reducing the time each service agent spends looking for relevant tickets.

Benefits of AI for customer service

 As consumers continue to demand faster and more personalized customer experiences, meeting service expectations becomes even harder and more expensive. Without AI technology, service agents may struggle to maintain standards as their organizations grow. By implementing AI systems within your customer support methods, you generate significant benefits for your business, employees, and customers, including:    
  • Improved lead conversion. AI solutions help your organization increase revenue by guiding leads toward the unique products, services, and information that will most likely convert them into paying customers.
  • Refined customer experiences. Intelligent apps provide service agents with powerful tools and capabilities that help them serve customers faster and more effectively than ever before. Additionally, AI can help ensure each customer experiences a personalized interaction that leaves them feeling satisfied.
  • Enhanced employee engagement. AI presents small businesses and large enterprises with innovative ways of getting more out of their support teams. Employee engagement software for small businesses use AI to strengthen the connection between organizations and their support teams. Enterprises, on the other hand, can dramatically improve employee experiences by training AI chatbots to help their team handle large influxes of service tickets.
  • Saved time and money. AI solutions can reduce the costs associated with excellent customer service by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization’s existing support team. By automating tedious and time-consuming customer support duties, intelligent systems also can decrease the time your team wastes on low-value tasks.
  • Reduced employee burnout. AI helps minimize the feelings of stress and boredom that result in a burned out, ineffective support team. Businesses with fewer live agents can use intelligent apps to help their support teams focus on fulfilling tasks and responsibilities.

Potential risks of AI for customer service

While intelligent systems may save your organization time and money in the long run, there are several reasons why your organization might decide against using customer service AI solutions, including:
  • Lack of human empathy. AI lacks the ability to understand and react to the emotional nuances of customer concerns. Since intelligent systems can’t empathize like humans can, an overreliance on chatbots to support your customers can leave them feeling irritated and unappreciated.
  • Implementation and maintenance costs. AI customer support solutions require substantial upfront investments of time and money into your organization’s training and technology. While virtual assistant services for small businesses exist to help make AI more accessible, many organizations are not realistically able to dedicate the necessary resources toward implementing and maintaining an AI model.
  • Technical limitations. Intelligent systems require considerable processing power to function properly. If your organization can’t regularly access suitable technology, then technical limitations will prevent you from taking advantage of AI capabilities.
  • System errors. AI models are difficult to build and maintain without proper training. AI development requires an understanding of different programming languages, frameworks, and algorithms—without it, your organization may implement an AI solution that’s prone to system errors and inaccuracies.
  • Privacy concerns. Intelligent systems can store customer data to continually improve their accuracy and ability to simulate human conversations. While this may improve an AI solution’s effectiveness, cyberattacks or data breaches would likely jeopardize customer privacy.

Organizations looking to improve the effectiveness of their customer support must remember that AI solutions will not replace their human agents. Nevertheless, there are many ways that intelligent systems can be implemented alongside your service team to bring benefits to your business, employees, and customers. Business leaders interested in using AI for customer support should carefully consider which intelligent apps and capabilities would be the most helpful based on their organization’s specific needs and goals.

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Business Insights and Ideas does not constitute professional tax or financial advice. You should contact your own tax or financial professional to discuss your situation.

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