AI is becoming a key selling point of every e-commerce startup. But until now, most of those products focused on the business side. AI has the potential to improve customer service, too. What are the possibilities?
Potential to Provide Guidance
Automated customer service chatbots offer AI in the form of chatbot assistants. If you run a customer service call or a help desk, these assistants can solve customer service issues. They can also answer frequently asked questions, provide a range of accurate answers, and filter through a limited set of responses, providing high levels of service.
The problem with AI assistants in customer service is that they are not aware of everything. They can give the same guidance or answer questions as a human assistant, but if the customer asks something they are not aware of, the customer can never get the right answer.
Automated Call Centers
But AI is improving on that aspect of technology, as long as you pay attention to what you ask. For example, Google Assistant does not learn from the customer in the same way that Google has done with voice search. So, it is not going to come to the right answer if you ask about traffic conditions.
The cases when the caller has a very unique problem that requires human intervention will naturally be rare and that’s essentially what something like a PCS automated call center seeks to achieve. Unnecessary load on the customer support system is offset.
Potential to Use Natural Language Processing
AI works better in the form of Natural Language Processing, which is a sort of natural language processing, in the sense that the voice input is analyzed through data collected from historical conversations. That is why chatbots come with a lot of filters. You can filter through a list of suggestions for an answer, or even filter out that response. If a customer says something strange, the customer service chatbot will let them know, and then give you a suggestion that may help.
In fact, it is now possible to build chatbots without a real human assistant, by developing AI assistants based on Natural Language Processing. At this time, Natural Language Processing is still not as accurate as chatbots. But Natural Language Processing can make a massive improvement over the way things used to work. Natural Language Processing can recognize a lot of queries, including the difference between informal and formal language.
AI Customer Service Automation Trends
Even though AI is a key trend in customer service, the market does not really support AI customers service applications yet. Those applications can solve specific customer service issues, and are supposed to do so within the framework of existing customer service tools. But that is not the case. Because of that, there is not a single solution that can support everything a customer service chatbot can do.
To be sure, the potential to use AI for customer service is still enormous. Many companies that do not have access to strong AI technology will find themselves relying on AI assistants that will take care of customer service issues. But there are no completely autonomous AI assistants that can take care of customer service tasks, and that is a problem.
