Everything You Need to Know About AI in Customer Service

If you asked any customer service professional to describe how the last few years have been, they’d probably say “intense.” With budgets in flux and customers expecting more, service teams are constantly figuring out how to answer an important question: how do you actually do more with less? The answer is AI in customer service.

Since the pandemic, customer service has been a rollercoaster ride. Customer expectations are higher than ever — 72% of consumers say they will remain loyal to companies that provide faster service. And 78% of service agents say it’s difficult to balance speed and quality, up from 63% since 2020. All of these pressures have led to a turnover rate of 19% in service organizations.

While predictive AI is not new to customer service, generative AI has stepped into the spotlight just a year ago. With the powerful potential of this new technology, business leaders need a generative AI strategy, while remaining mindful of budgets. And service professionals and customers alike are curious how AI-powered customer service will impact their experience. Let's dive into AI's benefits for customer service and how you can get started in your organization.

What are the benefits of AI in customer service?

Let’s look at 6 ways AI in customer service can help your team, especially if you’re interested in getting started with generative AI:

1. Higher productivity: An AI tool like Einstein Copilot can empower service teams to get work done faster — for example, AI can act as an assistant built directly in an agent’s flow of work. In fact, recent research shows that 84% of IT leaders believe AI will help their organization better serve customers. Case in point: AI-based conversational assistants can increase productivity by 14% for support agents.
2. Better efficiency: Manual processes can be a heavy lift for service agents. This includes tasks like swiveling back and forth between systems and screens to view customer history, searching for knowledge articles, routing field workers to service locations, and manually typing responses — all of which tend to be error-prone when done by a human. AI in customer service can give customer service workers intelligent recommendations across knowledge bases, conversational insights, and customer data. Our recent research found that 63% of service professionals say AI will help them serve their customers faster.
3. A more personalized service interaction: For AI to be useful, it needs to understand your customer, which means it needs access to your company’s data. When a customer initiates a conversation with a chatbot, AI can populate important information — such as the customer’s name, location, account type, and preferred language in real time. If the request requires a field service technician, AI can send all of the important information to the field worker so they can provide personalized service the moment they walk in the door.

Read the full article for benefits 4-6 .

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