Artificial intelligence surrounds us, and the benefits of the technology are starting to become extremely obvious. Many companies have integrated AI into their own work, especially within the customer service field. In this blog we decided to have a look why AI chatbots are becoming so popular and how it will effect the future of customer service, while also mentioning some of our favourite companies helping to integrate the new technology.
Receiving great customer service can really make a difference between retaining or losing a valuable customer for your company. Making your customers wait can be a reason for the consumer to switch to the competitor - which is why it's extremely important to meet the customers needs by providing quick, easy, and efficient customer service.
After many decades of being viewed as a low priority for companies, customer service has now become a huge area of focus for investment over the last few years. While most investments so far have been improving software and adding more ways to communicate faster, the new frontier of innovation in customer service now revolves around artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has been helping companies improve customer service, improve customer loyalty, brand representation, and even enable employees to focus on higher value tasks, which can provide greater returns. As AI is being adopted at a quick rate, the potential impact on customer service shows great results - with many tech companies contributing towards making the technical change for other businesses and their customer service.
What is a chatbot & why are they used?
AI chatbots understand language from outside of pre-programmed commands. They have the ability to learn from a mass amount of data, apply algorithms and then use the result to create a response. The more interactions the chatbot receives, the more data it has to develop from.
Chatbots have brought businesses many positives when dealing with customer service, but why do we necessarily need them? It's simple, chatbots are programmed to be able to retain data, which can provide customers with quick and simple answers within seconds.
With companies acquiring AI chatbots, they have the ability to reduce a lot of operational costs, improve sales, while also encouraging seamless interactions with consumers. This results in chatbots improving response rates, improving customer's overall experiences and providing better communication.
The Benefits.
Introducing technology into your business will always bring benefits, and chatbots seem to bring many advantages to the customer service field. Here are some examples:
24/7 Customer Support - A lot of the time, customers simply want a quick fix of any issues/questions that they have - not having this can result in your customers going elsewhere for essentially, quicker customer service. Having chatbots that are available 24/7, are capable of the quick responses that consumers are looking for, especially when your team are unavailable, whatever the circumstance.
Analysis Of Customer Data - With the help of chatbot analytics, businesses can analyse how well the bot performs in terms of successful business outcomes and sales generated and detailed insights on how consumers engage with the business.
Chatbots are flexible in their approach and allow these businesses to serve their customers on pretty much every platform. Since they're extremely easy to use, it makes it even easier to integrate them into the existing IT infrastructure.
Optimising Costs - Implementing a functioning chatbot may be a long term investment, but it works out to be cheaper and faster than creating a cross platform app or hiring employees for each task. Businesses have ready-made softwares developed by Facebook, Microsoft and other big tech companies that you can choose from - by "hiring" chatbots that can work alongside of human support, you will be able to save employee costs.
It's very clear to see that artificial intelligence can really improve your customer service experience for your customers and even your team. Whilst looking into the benefits of this, we came across some of our favourite companies that help support businesses making the technical change, so here's what we found.
Intercom is a business messaging platform, founded back in 2011 by Ciaran Lee, David Barrett and Des Traynor, that helps you build relationships with current and future customers through conversational experiences across the entire customer journey.
Intercom refer to themselves as a Conversational Relationship Platform, that provides insights into who is using your products or visiting your website. By learning more about your customers and how to communicate with them, you can then create message-based conversations that feel a lot more personal, friendly and convenient at anytime.
Intercom works with plenty of big companies, with the likes of Moneybox, Spendesk and even Yahoo!
PolyAI is a conversational artificial intelligence platform founded back in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšic, Eddy Su, and Shawn Wen, that aims to revolutionise human-machine communication by teaching machines to understand natural language and hold human-level conversations. They help businesses transform their customer experience, create revenue, improve operational efficiency and also prove ROI quickly and efficiently.
From the very start, they've focused on creating voice self-service experiences in any language and they even differentiate between different accents or slang. Their goal is to deliver enterprise-ready voice assistants, which match and excel household names.
Aivo is a voice artificial intelligence company for customer service, founded back in 2012 by Martin SebastÃan Frascaroli, thats helps enterprises solve their challenges in customer service and even sales growth with omni-channel solutions thats powered by artificial intelligence.
AgentBot is Aivo's main product, which is an automated omni-channel customer service platform that uses AI to automatically interact with customers across all channels. It also helps companies to improve their customer experience by learning from it's users.
"Our mission is to make sales and customer service processes easier and faster for everyone involved with innovative, evolving technology." - Martin SebastÃan Frascaroli.
Artificial intelligence is definitely changing the way we live and work, as discussed in one of our previous blogs, which you can read here. There's definitely many benefits when it comes to integrating AI chatbots, whether that's for a better customer experience, longer customer support or even eliminating language barriers - however it does come along with some downfalls and one of the biggest concerns is job-loss.
It's definitely something to consider and here at Talented Recruitment Group, we're looking forward to seeing the development of the technology and the companies that use it in the near future. But what does the future hold for customer service as we know it?