AI and automated customer service are making customer service more convenient and personal by automating high-quality resolutions on consumers’ terms and empowering human agents to work smarter. The use cases for automated customer service seem endless, so we’ve pulled together the best opportunities for leveraging the power of helpdesk AI in customer service that we see today.
Here are the Best Automated Customer Service Use Cases
Use Cases for Customer Support on Autopilot
- Constant, Direct Attention to Customers
- Automated Customer Service Responses to FAQs
- Facilitate Routine Actions
- Payments
- Intent Discovery
- Account Information
- Troubleshooting
- Tag-team AI / Human Support
- Ticket Routing
- areas of expertise
- real-time availability
- the number of other open tickets they are currently managing
- AI Recommended Replies to Agents
- Telecom Customer Service
- 50 Customer Service Statistics You Need To Know (Updated For 2023)
- SMS Customer Service and SMS Chatbot Strategies
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys: 17 Questions and Templates
- Best Help Desk Software Platforms In 2023 [Features, Pricing, and More]
- 7 Ways to Provide Personalized Customer Service (Plus Benchmarks and Stats)
- Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: Which Is Better?
- What Is a Virtual Contact Center?
- Measures of Success: Our Top 10 Chatbot Evaluation Metrics
- Email Support: The Pros and Cons of AI Customer Service Tools
- Best Chatbot for a Website in 2023 and Beyond [Review and Key Features]
- The 15 Best Knowledge Base Tools
Automated customer service software can respond instantly to customers, negating the delay that comes with human assistance. This instant response is available all the time, making time zones irrelevant in the first few interactions with customer service. Human attention isn’t required for every scenario, and chatbot statistics show that a chatbot operating 24 hours a day can make an enormous impact on those tenuous first steps. By using customer service automation software, companies can even the playing field against others that might have more resources at their disposal.
Use AI to respond to the repeatable, and costly, issues that consumers ask about frequently such as return/exchange policies and processes. AI can also educate customers about complex services or products, like applying for a mortgage or comparing credit cards. We worked with Aflac to create an AI Agent to help educate people during the health insurance open-enrollment season, offering support through an insurance chatbot.
Automated customer service software and artificial intelligence can also help answer customer questions about the shipping status of their eCommerce order. AI can help facilitate routine actions like checking in for a WestJet flight, ordering your favorite Starbucks coffee or a Domino’s pizza. Bank of America is using AI to make everyday banking more pleasant: instead of a website search and navigation to various Web pages, a customer can check their balance, confirm due dates and pay bills via a natural language conversation with virtual assistant Erica, a banking chatbot. Customer service software and artificial intelligence can also help answer customer questions about the shipping status of their eCommerce order.
Sometimes a customer service human being is more than you need, and that is no more often the case than in simple transactional exchanges, like a customer paying for a product or service that your company offers. That’s where AI for customer experience comes in. Those self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores are popular for a specific subset of customers for a reason: for a fast, no-frills payment process, nothing beats DIY with AI. Chatbots can serve the same function in an e-tail setting, acting as automated cash registers when a human is best utilized elsewhere.
Bonus: Three More Simple Use Cases for Automated Customer Support
The customer might not always be right, but they are rarely shy about telling you how they feel. Gauging a user’s mood, and finding out what kind of help they need, is all part of discovering customer intent. Are they mad? Probably best to get a human on the line ASAP. Are they sick of trying to get a hold of a human at other places and hope they don’t have the same issue with your company? Also, probably a good time for a human to hop on the line. Either way, it makes a lot more sense for AI to ask the question “what can I do for you?” before any valuable human time is spent doing what a machine can do.
Nobody likes to put the same information repeatedly into web forms, then give that information again to customer service, and then again every time they’re routed to a new customer service agent. This is especially true when the information they’re looking for is simple customer information, like how long until their subscription ends or whether the address on file is current. Customer service chatbots are perfect for this kind of application, where the task is no more complicated than updating a database or reporting on its contents. Human agents used to spend swaths of their day processing simple requests, but customer service automation software helps reduce swivel chairing for information.
If your company offers products or services that need troubleshooting, say a TV or refrigerator, you could use automated customer service software to help customers first identify the problem and offer the steps to remedy the issue. Depending on the deployment channel, a knowledge base article, or rich video and images could be shared at optimal times to help customers more effectively help themselves. AI can also be used to proactively offer care advice. For instance, Nespresso uses AI to help customers descale their coffee machines using step-by-step tips delivered naturally via conversation.
Automated Customer Service Use Cases for Service Ops
AI-powered automation tools can gather key important information from a customer before bringing in human service agents, such as account number, current needs or details around the issue they are facing. AI can also be used for account verification, like confirming security questions or matching account numbers to birthdays. This will optimize the agent’s time, ultimately getting a customer’s issue resolved quicker.
Based on a customer’s interactions, need, profile, and loyalty status (via integration with a CRM), machine learning can route the ticket to the right agent based on their:
British supermarket Ocado, for example, uses support automation AI to intelligently route its 10,000+ daily emails to the right agent taking into account the topic, sentiment and the priority needed for a response. This makes sure the frustrated customer who had an issue with their online order is treated differently than someone who is providing positive feedback on the website.
Once the ticket is in the right human hands, automated customer service can still help get tickets resolved quicker. AI can suggest replies or actions based on various contextual factors, the customer’s profile, and information the AI gleaned from an earlier exchange to enable the human agent to easily select the best response or update the response if needed. Sprint, for instance, is launching AI in its call center to analyze a topic and recommend real-time solutions to agents in real-time.
Conclusion on AI and Customer Service Automation
AI is now a member of the workforce, enabling companies to create customer satisfaction for high-quality, fast support. Working in tandem with human agents to deliver exceptional customer experience. Customer service automation software today is best used in highly repeatable, simple scenarios like live chat, but in the future, AI will be able to manage more complex situations, playing an even greater role within an organization’s support team.
For more information on AI and customer service, visit: