Automation is no longer the future, for it is the present. From autonomous home appliances to delivering food, from luggage check-ins at airports to automatic check-in at hotels, from doctor’s appointment booking to doctorless surgery, automation has become an integral part of our everyday living.
Customer service is no exception to automation. A survey by Gartner predicts that more than 80% of customer handling will be done by autonomous systems. The deployment of AI-powered automatic systems is not only going to benefit your customers (by enhancing customer experience) but will have a tremendous performance improvement of your agents. Agents can avail virtual assistants to go through rigorous data searches easily, saving time and effort.
This hassle-free support system enhances customer satisfaction and reduces agent distress. Powered by smart systems agents become even smarter and the reduced resolution time with increased accuracy saves a lot of expenditure on the support paradigm of your business.
If this wasn’t enough, virtual assistants today are backed by Artificial Intelligence that can handle most queries on its own. So now as an organization, you can fully automate front end support. Your back-end team can avail the required information automatically to enhance performance and accuracy. This paves the path to AI-powered resolutions occurring in real-time. Here are 10 reasons why AI-powered automated customer support is the future:
1.A new revenue streams
A lot of startups don’t have the resources to empower themselves with AI-backed customer support. Because of this organizations can produce a tremendous amount of revenue. All they need to do is to find a win-win situation while providing AI-backed customer support service.
And the fact that the new age businesses prefer opting for automated services rather than manpower-oriented services, provides the perfect timing to come up with an AI-powered customer support center.
It can be developed once and delivered it to multiple organizations which makes it a revenue stream of indispensable income at a fixed investment.
The fact that this is primal of the win-win situation which is considered as the boon of new age success for any organization itself speaks for the importance of automation of customer services. When combined with the tremendous betterment it brings along for the organization acquiring the service, it brings about the best possible mutual growth scenarios that b2b organizations thrive for. The implications of AI-powered automated customer support are monumental, to say the least.
As a customer, a company gets to enjoy the benefits of automation that may take several weeks and a generous amount of expenditure. This can be availed at a fraction of the cost to build it. Also, when acquired as a service, it is available on an immediate basis.
These two factors when combined not only saves expenditure but the valuable time that can be utilized at developing business. As for developing business (startups), since the elementary need is business development, they will opt for such a service any time of the year.
So undoubtedly automated customer service is one of the best and in-demand ideas to generate revenue.
2.Solve your customers’ problems before they arise
The success of apple can be credited to Steve Jobs’ understanding of customer requirements. To put it exactly in his words “People don’t know what they want unless you give it to them.” Artificial Intelligence can bring this to reality at the customer support paradigm.
Because AI-powered customer support systems can track user behavior at every minor step, when powered with deep learning, these systems can predict the problems that may be faced by your customers way before they even face it. One way to do this is by realizing how your brand interacts with your customers or vice versa.
The biggest advantage of having an automated AI for customer support system is that it can audit an unending list of applications and websites. When backed by artificial intelligence, an automated system can figure out the elements of distress that may be faced by a customer during the whole process. When realized, a resolution may be preempted before even the query is raised.
These solutions may be offered with virtual assistants or added as a part of the FAQs to smoothen customer queries. This greatly enhances customer retention rates as customers can get pre-emptive messages about the problem they might face. Imagine having a resolution delivered to yourself about a problem you are yet to encounter! Will you ever rather choose a different service?
3.Corporate messages are already autonomous
Most businesses today have already opted for automated message delivery. Because of this they can provide a better customer service. As soon as a customer opts for any service, the automated system can deliver the conformation, invoice and other relevant information instantaneously.
This also helps the organization by reducing the manpower that would have been invested in delivering messages and maintaining the customer database. Because of automation of messaging, organizations are now able to automate database management. Delivered messages are automatically stored in the database and can be easily pulled out for future references.
Messaging services have overtaken not just social media, but all digital platforms that send messages. Be it your cab service, hotel service, airline service, food delivery, or banking for that matter, they all utilize automated systems to deliver the messages, so how can you as a customer tell the difference? Well, you cannot! These messages may come from an autonomous system, but they are as customized as customization gets, courtesy of AI.
This way organizations can preserve the personalization factor of customer satisfaction even while going autonomous.
4.Practice makes a MAN perfect, but an AI Only Needs to Learn Once
A significant amount of time and capital is invested in training and hiring support agents. One of the biggest hurdles faced by most call centers across all industries is staff attrition. Staff attrition is a fancy way to elaborate on the reduced strength or effectiveness of a call center that may occur due to decreased employee strength.
This calls for a recurrence of the hiring and training process that requires reinvesting in the resources already once invested in. This, when combined with the increased customer handling time, caused because of frustrations that develop in the course of elongated call, leaves a bad customer experience.
When
compared against the automated service available at the fraction of the price
of setting up once own call center, the former is unequivocally superior. Also,
even if your employees are very satisfied, there may be an alteration or
revision of the process following which the employees need to be retrained.
An AI-backed service center, however, is built to be able to cope up with the
changes (at worst, requiring minor reconfiguration). Combine all of this while
still emancipating your workforce from the mundane tier-1 tasks, you not only
save capital but are able to utilize your workforce at more complex problems
that still can’t be resolved without human intervention.
5.24×7, 365 days, your customer never waits
While a company needs to follow the respective government regulations in defining its customer support policies, it can utilize the automated counterpart of human agents which is not bounded by any regulations. The implications of this are immense. The most prominent of these encompasses catering to your customers even on public holidays!
There is an add on advantage of time efficiency. What may require a few days for an agent to resolve can be resolved by an AI-backed automated service in a few hours. Consequently, the brand image and brand value are greatly enhanced as the customers feel more satisfied. When topped with the personalization of the cadre of human interaction that comes with automated customer service, it serves as the perfect icing on the cake.
6.Reliability redefined
Automated service support backed by AI can provide the ideal service environment that customers stipulate, and organizations solicit. One of the greatest advantages of using automatic customer support is that it comes with all the personalization possibly available with no emotions.
Because emotions form an integral part of human nature, a human agent is very likely to get biased by the interaction with a customer. An automated agent, however, is devoid of these emotions and consequently is capable of catering to customers of all varieties.
Having said this, if you are wondering how then do you cater to a client that may require complex reasoning that can only be provided by humans, well, AI-backed automated systems have the option of transferring the query to a human agent/manager shall that be the need of the hour.
The agent/manager being backed by AI has the minutes of the issues and consequently, the required beforehand and underlying information at fingertips. This helps them resolve the issue in minimal time possible, with little to no hassle or frustration that may come with handling all the calls from greetings to thank you note.
7.Innovation meets economics: the call computerization case study
Case studies done for call computerization have shown a significant amount of reduction in investment when compared against the outsourcing of traditional call centers. Outsourcing a call center itself has severe complications. This includes but is not restricted to limited control of agent monitoring and performance evaluation.
On top of it, with computerized call centers are backed by machine learning and advanced speech recognition which also boosts the performance of your IVR (interactive voice response).
8.Self Service: The Millennial choice
The customer service paradigm is changing at a faster pace than most companies imagined. The need to disband human interaction and the fact that most surveys never saw this coming is exemplary of the new demands.
All of this, when combined with the millennial mentality today makes up for the best of all possible scenarios in handling customers. Millennials don’t like talking to a human agent. After all, we are tach-savvy. Nothing suits better to us than getting our problems resolved by an interactive system that outperforms most humans by a significant margin.
The most prominent factor for businesses today is adapting to the changing times. Those who don’t fall prey to those who do. As a business, it is imminent to gauge the requirements of not only the current customer base but also the upcoming customer base. The next generation is going to be even more self-reliant, and hence the need to adapt to automated customer support was never direr.
9.Personalization automated
Organizations can track and collect customer data from a variety of platforms. This data can then be processed by Artificial intelligence backed by machine learning, deep learning together with big data analysis to deliver an outcome not humanly possible.
This renders personalization redefined. More understanding of human behavior can be derived from automated behavior analysis in minutes than humans can do in even months.
A simple example of this was in conventional stores. When backed by big data and machine learning, a weird projection came out. It was to put beer next to baby diapers. This saw increased sales of beer. Upon human inspection, it turned out that there were a lot more fathers shopping for their new babies than there were mothers. And consequently, when you put beer next to it, they tend to buy it more often than they would otherwise.
This is just one example of how the understanding of human behavior derives the capital gain of an organization and the role that automation plays in it.
10.Unrivaled Scalability
Another great application of automated customer service is that it provides scalability options that just cannot be matched by human agents. Let’s consider a scenario wherein you are escalating your market consequently you need to cater to a wider range of audiences with an increased number of customers.
Using AI chatbots and voice responsive agents an organization can satisfy these demands without any significant increase in capital investment. You end up not needing to hire agents that speak the local language and training those.
Take Away
Using AI-powered customer service is the primal need for sustainable growth in today’s day and age. The dusk of self-service customer support is set to see the dawn of traditional call centers. Agents are already been backed by AI; they soon will be replaced by AI. This has more significance than just reducing your expenditure as a business, it is the demand of the current and the upcoming generations.
