Poor customer support significantly reduces businesses’ revenue, falling between $75B and $1.6T, as stated by Midlands Technical College.
According to Zendesk, 73% of customers expect businesses to provide omnichannel support without restarting the communication channel to streamline purchasing due to their fast life rhythms. Meanwhile, the Zendesk report also proved that stagnated customer service affects customer retention, with 61% of users switching brands after undergoing frustrating experiences.
Various businesses have implemented generative AI in customer service to improve ROI and customer loyalty. GenAI solutions have revolutionized businesses’ approaches at every customer touch point by serving more customers daily and creating significant time savings.
Markets and Markets proved that the high demand for using generative AI as a strategic tool to satisfy customer experience has expanded the conversational AI market, projected to reach $49.9B from $13.2B in 2024. However, GenAI customer service applications should be attentive to customers’ emotional aspects to ensure the best effectiveness without eliminating the human role.
In this article, we’ll discuss practical benefits, use cases, effective implementing practices, and challenges of using generative AI in customer service.
Key Takeaways:
- Generative AI supports customer service agents in generating automated responses, supporting the global market with multilingual features, and identifying valuable insights to improve internal operations.
- Applying Generative AI in customer service should be people-prioritized to ensure the AI system matches the existing workflow and core team’s skills.
- Various healthcare, e-commerce, hospitality, and financial services businesses have implemented AI to satisfy customers’ experiences throughout the buying journey.
7 Use Cases for Generative AI in Customer Service
Generative AI supports businesses in improving customer service operations quality by automating responses to customers, reducing customer wait time, and navigating them to find relevant information quickly.
According to the Forbes Advisor survey, 56% of businesses have adopted AI technology for exceptional customer service. This survey also shows businesses’ efforts to elevate the customer service experience by using AI chatbots for instant messaging (73%), email optimization (61%), personalized text messages, and phone call handling (36%).
1. Interact with Customers Through AI Chatbots
Intelligent chatbots process customer queries based on customer profiles and knowledge bases to accurately generate relevant responses. The chatbot application mitigates agents’ workload of replying to customers’ requests, reduces wait times, and enables businesses to focus on more complex human-centered tasks.
However, the chatbot implementation process should emphasize the human role in controlling the accuracy of AI-driven customer responses, effectively enhancing their experience.
According to Market US, 47% of organizations intend to integrate AI chatbots into their customer care platforms. By 2024, businesses expect to reduce customer support costs while automating responses to 75-90% of queries.
2. Personalize Customer Experience
Generative AI tools do a good job of increasing customer satisfaction with personalized content creation. They help create creative content, images, videos, and customized digital experiences. Besides, these personalized features enable customers to discover items faster on digital platforms with relevant search results throughout the browsing experience.
A better understanding of customers’ preferences throughout their lifecycle suggests business strategies to optimize marketing campaigns and boost revenue. Companies will be able to tailor their offerings, personalize customer interactions, and predict future trends, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Reduce ACW Time with Automatic Conversation Summary
Generative AI solutions reduce after-contact work time by automatically noting topics and uploading contact summaries to the CRM system. As a result, a customer service agent can provide relevant follow-up information for the same customer.
Meanwhile, the summarized conversation format is standardized to help future agents effortlessly understand the context of the previous call, ultimately increasing agent productivity and boosting overall customer satisfaction.
4. Automate Tasks and Workflows
Businesses highly prefer AI virtual agents to eliminate more manual interventions. They are employed to input customer data and create support tickets to smoothen workflows with less human error. The automating process allows businesses to identify the complexity and modify customer service logistics. By streamlining these repetitive tasks, AI agents free up humans to focus on complex customer inquiries and build stronger customer relationships.
5. Identify Customer Insights with Sentiment Analysis
Generative AI has created a revolution in customer service with customer sentiment analysis capability. In other words, AI tools will analyze data and recognize patterns to provide businesses with variables affecting the customer experiences most.
By organizing and analyzing different types of customer feedback, business owners can learn how customers think and feel about the brand, what they want, and how to make changes to improve their experience.
6. Navigate Customers with Conversational Knowledge Bases
It’s worth noticing the conversational knowledge bases of generative AI platforms in enhancing customer experiences. They’re capable of providing instant, personalized, and accurate information to streamline interactions and boost the customer satisfaction score. To achieve that, they employ natural language processing and large language models to understand customer queries, access relevant information from a comprehensive knowledge base, and then deliver tailored responses.
To effectively implement a conversational knowledge base, your organization must establish clear goals, build robust knowledge management, continuously refine the system, and provide adequate staff training. Following these best practices will help businesses harness this technology’s full potential to create a more customer-centric and efficient support ecosystem.
7. Enable Multilingual Support
Generative AI also impresses marketing and sales leaders by eliminating the language barrier through multilingual support. To explain how these platforms work, they provide real-time translation and content creation in multiple languages, allowing companies to connect with diverse audiences on a deeper level. This capability is crucial for expanding market reach, tailoring messaging to specific cultures, and building strong customer relationships across borders.
Additionally, AI-driven multilingual support can optimize global marketing campaigns, ensuring consistent branding and messaging worldwide. Ultimately, this technology enhances a business’s ability to compete in the global marketplace and achieve sustainable growth.
Customer Service Generative in Industries
GenAI enables cost-effective 24/7 support to satisfy customer experience with instant and accurate responses. Additionally, it can help the contact center handle significant traffic interactions during peak times with quality performance.
Banking and Finance Customer Service
Nvidia reported that 46% of financial institutions have improved customer experience by implementing artificial intelligence technology in:
- Enabling personalized experience: analyze customer data to provide financial advice and customized recommendations.
- Promoting proactive customer engagement: remind customers about important information such as unusual activities, low balances, and upcoming payments.
- Accelerating document-related process: verify documents, streamline customer onboarding, and expedite other services’ approvals.
Retail and eCommerce Customer Service
GenAI benefits retail and e-commerce businesses with various applications that increase efficiency in customer interaction. Indeed, it enables retailers to address users’ concerns and enhance satisfaction by:
- Providing personalized shopping experience: analyze historical purchasing data to identify individual behaviors and preferences and suggest relevant products to enhance customers’ shopping journey.
- Streamlining contact centers’ 24/7 operations: process orders and returns quickly, handle multiple customer queries, and resolve their issues promptly.
- Improve the service quality: Gather customer feedback and identify the staggering points in the operation system to improve customer service overall.
Hospitality and Transportation Customer Service
The National Research Group revealed the forward tendency to use GenAI for traveling, with 61% of travelers experiencing its positive impacts on mapping the travel plan. AI-driven hospitality platforms enable customers to manage travel plans flexibly, from essential to complex tasks, specifically:
- Support simple tasks: request a wake-up call and get WiFi passwords.
- Support complex tasks: recommend noteworthy places and activities in the area, manage reservations, and improve booking and stay experiences.
Healthcare Customer Service
GenAI-driven applications in the healthcare sector enable patients to schedule and change appointments and receive personalized medical treatment and advice.
Moreover, the AI-driven features can assist with accurate diagnosis and tailored treatment options after analyzing related variables and gathering information from the medical knowledge database.
Other benefits of GenAI applications in healthcare customer service include:
- Keep track of health indicators: AI-driven wearable devices enable healthcare providers to gain insights into patients’ health conditions, such as blood glucose levels, heart rate variability, or blood oxygen saturation levels.
- Allow public health support: GenAI technologies can support generating new pandemic models and conduct preventive measures for public health.
Manufacturing and Utilities Service
IBM research revealed that 74% of businesses in the manufacturing and utility industries intend to use GenAI to improve customer experience. GenAI technology has elevated the clients’ experience by:
- Streamline the supply chain logistics: provide technical product information for customers and manage order status or location.
- Reduce the need for on-site visits: troubleshoot the system issues without human intervention.
Best Practices to Implement Generative AI in Customer Service
A Generative AI implementation framework allows businesses to build a structured system tailoring to specific objectives. Indeed, adopting GenAI technology starts with identifying operational gaps, preparing and processing data, and monitoring performance to maximize contact centers’ accuracy and efficiency.
Regarding deploying GenAI to improve customer conversations, businesses can reference the following practices to maximize the value of this technology:
- Generating answers for most common FAQs: Businesses can implement AI to provide automated responses to customers’ queries regarding order status, troubleshooting guides, or website’s specific information. AI tools can crawl the support document to generate relevant answers without human effort in manually typing them. However, contact center agents must choose appropriate AI-powered platforms to avoid creating harmful and irrelevant responses.
- Inform users about the chatbot use in their support conversation: Aware users that they are talking with an AI chatbot and provide options to connect with a human representative.
- Combine GenAI solutions with humans to deal with high-impact customer inquiries: Indicate specific queries that need to be resolved by a human employee and inform customers about AI’s unauthorized rights to enter into and change any existing agreements as a company’s representative.
Generative AI in Customer Service Case Studies
E-commerce, hospitality, healthcare, finance, and various other sectors have witnessed successful real-world examples of businesses optimizing customer services with Generative AI.
The following companies have applied AI-driven features to solve customers’ demands at every touch point, elevating their satisfaction.
Travel and Hospitality Customer Service
Delta Airlines and Heathrow Airport satisfy passengers’ flight experience with detailed instructions and recommendations through a Generative AI chatbot. Meanwhile, Expedia integrates ChatGPT into its mobile application to simplify users’ trip planning.
- Delta Airlines: The Chatbot “Ask Delta” quickly responds to users’ queries with relevant information. Additionally, this chatbot can effortlessly instruct users to find flights, check-in, track bags, and perform other actions. Consequently, this airline brand has recorded a 20% reduction in contact center volumes.
- Heathrow Airport: The GenAI applications empower the operation systems when processing multiple variables in over 1300 flights daily. The technology reduces the contact center’s time and effort in replying to service queries and gathering feedback from automatically summarized cases to improve the system.
- Expedia: This top-rated brand’s AI-based capabilities enable users to combine trips, track prices, and compare hotels to generate ideas for travel trips.
Healthcare and Financial Services
SmileDirectClub integrates AI-driven virtual assistants to improve internal systems and patient care quality. Regarding financial services, GenAI applications allow Wealthsimple’s platform experts to focus on supporting advanced money-related issues while ensuring users comprehend basic economic terms.
- SmileDirectClub: This med-tech brand has innovated oral care with AI-based convenient and affordable solutions. SmileDirectClub enhances customer conversations with automatically summarized features to optimize the contact center scripts and reduce human agents’ workload.
- Wealthsimple: The Canadian fintech company integrates Generative AI into its money management products to simplify customer interactions with the platform. The AI-based features allow users to access their financial information, identify alerting problems, and receive relevant money management advice.
E-commerce Service
With AI-driven features, digital shopping platforms like H&M and Google elevate customers’ online purchasing experience. AI virtual agents allow users to search for information and order products quickly.
- H&M: Generative AI features allow users to search for desired clothes and accessories on the online store using flexible methods. Indeed, AI-powered voice assistants and intelligent chatbots navigate users to specific product and service pages and release workload for the customer support team.
- Google: AI-based features integrated into Google’s shopping platform allow users to try on clothes virtually before purchasing. The model’s illustration allows users to observe how the clothes fit with their body shape and skin tone.
Considerations When Implementing Generative AI in Customer Service
Adopting GenAI in customer service should establish measurable metrics with modernized approaches and focus on people to ensure a high-quality customer experience. Additionally, it should inspire organizational acceptance to promote human agent skills and achieve business objectives.
Considerations that businesses should focus on when implementing Generative AI customer service:
- Focus on the collaboration of AI and people for successful adoption: A people-first mindset will guide your businesses in designing comprehensive solutions for customer service issues. The AI implementation strategies should analyze the support team’s pain points to streamline the existing workflows. Additionally, businesses should invest more in customer support teams with training programs to upgrade their skills and knowledge about AI.
- Adapt to business objectives: AI implementation requires experimentation to determine which practices can help achieve business objectives. The proof of value and organizational acceptance show initial positive signs to choosing appropriate GenAI solutions that match the existing skills and working style.
- Establish a modernized measurement approach: AI implementation has changed some metrics, such as Time to Resolution, CSAT, First Response Time, and Average Handle Time. Therefore, businesses should notice and update with new metrics to measure performance correctly.
Future of Generative AI in Customer Service
The influence of Generative AI in customer service is projected to power 95% of customer interactions in the future. Because it impacts customers’ buying behaviors, businesses invest more in customer service to improve quality and earn more brand loyalty.
Chasing the competition in applying AI, enterprises should work with professional generative AI consulting services to ensure effective implementation. Neurond AI is confident in uncovering the full potential of business customer service with tactical AI-driven strategies.
Contact Neuround AI for detailed consultancies about the AI implementation roadmap to enhance customer satisfaction.