4 new ways to leverage AI for customer service

Businesses aim for more than just customers—they want loyal customers who keep coming back. Great customer service is key to this goal, as 61% of consumers have switched brands because of poor service.

Prioritizing customer service makes a real difference. Companies that excel in customer experience (CX) achieve twice the revenue growth compared to those that don’t.

Many organizations are now adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to improve CX in their contact center environments and elevate their overall service quality.

When deployed correctly, AI can enhance nearly every aspect of customer service. For instance, intelligent self-service virtual agents can empower customers to answer their own questions and resolve issues independently. AI-driven tools also offer critical insights and customer experience analytics, helping to improve future agent performance and overall customer interactions.

How does AI improve customer service?

AI comes in many forms and can help solve many customer service problems. However, for most companies interested in trying AI, these four uses are a good starting point, as they solve straightforward issues while making an outsized impact on customer experience.

1. AI helps customers solve their own problems.

Often, customers seek assistance from a contact center for common problems with simple fixes. However, they may wait a long time for a straightforward solution. While FAQ pages and knowledge base access are a good starting place for customers looking to solve their own problems, AI-driven tools take self-service solutions to another level.

For example, some solutions will rely on AI to power context-driven interactive voice response (IVR) systems capable of offering customers advice and routing them to live agents when necessary. Or digital bots might chat with customers, prompting them to describe their situation and providing relevant responses. These solutions can operate 24/7/365, ensuring that customers receive human-like customer support when they need it.

This can reduce queue times and improve resolution rates across the contact center, as agents will have more time to concentrate on more complex customer issues. Additionally, self-service solutions can lower operational costs in the long run, reduce call abandonment rates, result in happier agents, and improve the overall customer experience.

2. AI makes every agent the best agent.

AI can offer agents live support, serving as a companion as they interact with and assist customers. For example, AI can gather valuable customer information and present it to the agent quickly, helping provide relevant and up-to-date context to a customer’s situation. This enables agents to personalize their interactions, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

AI can also monitor chats, calls, and other interactions between customers and agents, automatically passing along information whenever customers are transferred to a new agent or are using a new communication channel. This saves them the trouble of repeating information and allows agents to offer a smooth, consistent experience.

AI can help contact center agents improve by tracking their performance and comparing it with others. AI tools can provide easy coaching tools, leaderboards, and gamification to keep agents motivated and engaged, helping managers support their teams and boost customer satisfaction.

3. AI provides full visibility into real-time customer experience analytics.

Using AI for customer service applications can offer decision-makers a high level of visibility into customer experience analytics. Having real-time contact center dashboards enables businesses to monitor and manage their service operations dynamically so they can adapt on the fly to provide the best possible customer service experience.

Having access to real-time customer service analytics through comprehensive, easy-to-understand contact center dashboards makes staying on top of service levels much easier. Managers can continuously monitor key performance indicators, including call resolution rate, average response time, and customer satisfaction scores, meaning they can step in before issues escalate and service level agreements are violated.

Real-time customer service analytics can help contact centers optimize staffing. Decision-makers will have a clear view of current call volumes and agent availability at their fingertips. They can adjust resource deployment accordingly to ensure the contact center is appropriately staffed during peak and non-peak times, enabling better resource utilization and increased cost efficiency.

Real-time data can also help managers proactively detect and address emerging issues before they spiral out of control and become major disruptions. For example, if there is a sudden spike in call or message volume, they can investigate and resolve the underlying causes promptly. Suppose the data shows a trend of increasing dissatisfaction in customer feedback. In that case, managers can identify and address the root cause, whether it’s a gap in service knowledge among agents or a recurring problem with a product or service.

4. AI intelligently routes customers to the most appropriate agent.

AI-powered routing can help contact centers ensure that customers are in the right hands from the start, reducing the need for multiple transfers and follow-up interactions. This can improve first contact resolution rates and decrease customer waiting periods, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and higher customer retention rates.

AI can even analyze the tone and urgency of the customer’s voice to prioritize the issue, routing them to a senior specialist or even initiating a proactive diagnostic. This isn’t just keyword matching—AI understands the context and can escalate based on the customer’s emotion and problem severity.

Similarly, for region-specific calls, AI doesn’t just connect to a local agent; it leverages regional data to provide a more informed and contextually relevant response, ensuring quicker resolutions and better customer satisfaction.

Discover more AI customer service benefits.

AI can help contact centers reach new heights by providing service that can be faster, more seamless, and more personalized than ever. AI can help customer service agents save time and provide them with vital information, enabling them to offer truly personalized experiences to customers.

Ready to experience AI customer service benefits for yourself? Explore the Talkdesk powerful AI contact center platform today.