Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming Customer Experience (CX) by redefining the way that businesses interact with their customers. From chatbots to predictive analytics, this technology is truly revolutionizing how organizations provide customer service.
If your goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, you can’t overlook the potential of AI to improve your CX.
This article unpacks the future of customer service by looking at five emerging trends in the world of AI. We’ll also explain how AI will support human agents, not replace them.
5 AI Customer Service Trends You Need to Know About
At Loris, we’ve identified five top trends unfolding in the world of customer service and AI:
1. Easy will be automated
This customer service trend is a no-brainer—if tasks are simple enough to automate, then you should automate them.
AI-powered chatbots can answer 80% of routine questions that your customers have. They can also answer these questions much faster than your customer service reps.
In this way, you’re providing your customers with a huge amount of value as they don’t have to wait around for an agent to get back to them when they have a simple inquiry. Hello, satisfied customers! It also removes the repetitive and often mundane questions that customer service reps get, so they can focus on solving more interesting problems.
However, although AI self service tools will do some heavy lifting in this situation, there are still 20% of questions that are too complex for a chatbot to handle. This is where your human agents and their knowledge are needed.
A Nordic insurance firm adopted AI technology to help them automate a large part of their claims management process.
Instead of having their agents spend countless hours on repetitive tasks like analyzing claim documents to extract data, they’ve come up with an automated approach to handle this work.
As a result, their agents now have more time to cultivate stronger relationships with their customers. Although they’ve made the move to AI, the company is still placing humans at the heart of their operations.
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2. AI replaces tasks, not teams
AI can play a role in tasks like data entry, organization, and identifying trends based on customer data. These tasks are relatively simple, and AI could likely handle them faster and more efficiently than a human could.
However, when it comes to customer service interactions, you’re dealing with people. And people are complex. Customers require empathy, emotional intelligence, subjective decisions, and critical thinking in a social context.
Rather than replacing your customer service representatives with AI, consider how AI can free them from simple but time-consuming admin tasks so they can focus on complex conversations and decisions.
Let’s look at human resources teams as an example. HR employees naturally need to understand and manage complex human emotions and interpersonal dynamics, according to Ian Moore, managing director at HR consultancy Lodge Court.
AI can’t replace the human element here. However, it can provide HR managers with data-driven insights that can help them make decisions, improve recruitment processes, and personalize employee training programs. This is a case where AI is replacing tasks rather than teams.
3. AI will be your teammate, not your competition
As mentioned above, integrating AI into your customer service processes doesn’t mean replacing your agents.
AI should only enhance the experience you provide to your customers. This makes AI a valuable tool rather than something you have to compete with.
Most conversation intelligence platforms now use AI features that guide agents during live customer interactions.
This feature provides agents with the information and guidance they need to turn negative customer sentiment into positive customer sentiment. This improves your customer service performance, leads to happier customers, and makes your agents better at what they do.
AI-driven tools such as our Loris CoPilot can help agents when they need to provide customers with more information that they may not know already. By identifying what the customer is trying to achieve in the conversation, Loris gives agents the information they need to solve customer problems.
This helps agents say the right thing at the right time, with empathy and a human touch.
4. Metrics will prioritize value over efficiency
There’s no doubt that AI can make your business more efficient, which can save you money. However, the cost savings you get from greater efficiency won’t necessarily lead to better customer service interactions. And using the above methods, your efficiency gains would eventually plateau.
Delivering real value to your customers is more lucrative in the long term because it helps you grow your business. Great service that meets customer needs drives conversions, retention, and loyalty. This often makes a greater impact on your bottom line than efficiency savings.
AI can be used to deliver value, as well as efficiency savings. For example, a conversational intelligence platform like Loris allows you to monitor all your customer interactions across your support center.
This means you can predict and identify issues that customers face and fix them before they become larger problems. In doing so, your team can provide customers with more value.
American Express uses machine learning (ML) and AI to monitor for fraud in real-time. The AI is able to generate fraud decisions in milliseconds every time an American Express card is used.
This isn’t something a human could ever do. So, in this situation, implementing AI doesn’t save time or reduce the number of staff the company needs to serve its customers. But it does protect its customers against fraud, providing a huge amount of value.
5. When AI is everywhere, people will be the differentiator
More than 77% of companies worldwide are either using or exploring the use of AI. This means that AI is already everywhere we look. Some customers even expect to interact with AI when engaging with a business.
The rise of AI-powered customer service means customers expect fast responses and quick solutions to their problems.
However, customers also expect their inquiries or complaints to be handled by someone knowledgeable. This is where the human element comes in.
Human agents are highly professional and knowledgeable about your product. They also have high emotional intelligence, which AI can’t compete with. Humans are also more able to navigate complex customer complaints and inquiries.
What Does the Shift in Customer Experience Look Like?
When you use AI within your customer service department, you’re creating value for your entire company.
Traditional methods of gathering customer service feedback, like surveys and quality assurance (QA) tools, have two major drawbacks:
⚠️ They only collect data from a handful of customers or customer interactions.
⚠️ They are built on the assumption that all this feedback only relates to your customer service and is representative of all customers.
An AI conversation intelligence platform like Loris can provide insights drawn from all customer interactions that can help inform all aspects of your business.
Our platform then uses AI to identify trends, highlight the interactions that matter, and give you insights.
These can be used to inform your company strategy and drive changes across your entire business—not just your customer service team.
For example, if your insights show that customers are contacting you because they’re unhappy with a product feature, your product development team knows this needs improving. This, in turn, improves your customer experience.
Let’s look at some of the other ways that this shift in CX will impact your business:
Implementing AI technology in your business to improve your customer service will also change the roles within your CX team. Let’s look at these differences:
➡️ Handling general inquiries
Traditionally, customer service agents handle general inquiries. Now, AI is used to handle these inquiries faster. The outcome could be more satisfied customers.
➡️ Relying on scripts
Currently, many customer service processes rely on rigid scripts. AI can provide more suggestions and flexibility, making your customer interactions more personalized.
➡️ Quality vs. efficiency
Some customer service teams may focus on efficiency over quality. The introduction of AI can reverse this and help your CX teams prioritize providing customers with quality service.
➡️ Differentiating your brand
Not long ago, AI technology was what made brands stand out. Now, standing out from the competition means making a human connection when you deal with customers.
➡️ From how to why
CX roles are largely focused on the ‘how’ of the job, meaning the process of logging tickets or moving through a defined workflow from inquiry to resolution. Our analysis of the future of customer service is that the focus of these roles will now be ‘why’ you do your job, as in what is the fastest and/or best way to achieve the customer’s end goal. The “how” will not necessarily be replaced by AI, but will certainly change. The “why” will always remain.
Understanding The Changes AI Will Bring to Customer Service
AI won’t take over the role of quality customer service. Instead, business leaders need to understand where their companies can benefit from AI.
You don’t necessarily have to understand the complexities of how AI works, but you do need to know how to use it to enhance your customer experience.
While AI is changing how customer service is being delivered, there will always be a need for a human touch.
Your role in a customer experience team may change. However, your knowledge of how to deal with your customers translates beyond your role.
If your position is focused on providing valuable outcomes, it will remain—likely with some help from AI. In fact, new CX-focused roles will emerge that we can’t even predict yet.
Enter the Future of Customer Service with Loris
While AI is here to stay, it doesn’t mean that the role of humans in customer service will become obsolete. On the contrary, AI is revolutionizing the way that CX is delivered by enhancing how you serve your customers.
Loris is a conversational intelligence platform that uses AI to collect and analyze data from every customer interaction across all your service channels. The platform then generates invaluable insights that can be used to inform every aspect of your business, from marketing and sales to agent coaching programs.
Our tool is designed to help you elevate your customer experience rather than eliminate the need for human intervention. Our insights help your team provide customers with more value.
Loris won’t eliminate the need for your role in customer service, but it can help you deliver a better customer experience.
Visit our website to speak to one of our experts and get a hands-on demo of our platform. We’ll show you how AI, combined with a human touch, is the future of customer service.
