AI is rapidly being adopted by service teams across industries to provide customers with more effective troubleshooting. This article will cover the different ways it’s utilized as well as the advantages and pitfalls of using it for your company.

Comprehensive customer service is a core component of long-term business retention across industries, and early adopters of AI are distinguishing themselves from their competitors. This is due to AI solutions providing customers with quicker, more effective, and more accessible service. 

This implementation of AI in customer service is beneficial for business owners as well, since they save on costs for service agents and can focus energy on more complicated efforts. However, there is a need to be strategic in how you implement customer-facing AI. 

How Customer Service Teams Make Use of AI

Right now, AI is in a versatile enough place to be utilized by your customer service team in whatever manner fits your vision. Companies are choosing, mixing and matching, or making use of all three of the following options:

AI Service Desks

AI can be utilized to answer emails, resolve tickets, and direct users towards resolving their own issues without having to rely on customer service agent feedback. In addition to quickly resolving customer issues, AI service desks allow your customer service agents to focus their efforts on issues that require a more specialized touch.

75% of Customer Experience leaders are expecting 80% of customer interactions to be resolved without human intervention in the next few years.

Chat Agents

AI Chatbots are being used in chat, email, and even slack to create instantaneous responses to common customer queries. AI agents can ensure that your customers’ more standard concerns are addressed with a quick turnaround. 

The fact that AI Chat Agents can answer queries 24/7 is a big benefit, since 40% of shoppers have no preference between AI or human agents so long as their question is answered.

DISCOVER IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE →

Customer Service Agents with AI Assistance 

Customer service agents can be empowered with AI to improve how they address customer concerns. AI assistants can quickly scour knowledge bases to provide insights, suggest replies, and simplify customer interactions to ensure satisfaction.

HubSpot’s 2024 State of Service report found that 92% of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leaders said that AI improved their customer service response times. Additionally, 86% of them said it positively impacted their target customer satisfaction levels.

The Benefits of Using AI in Customer Support

• Utilizing AI in customer support enables business owners to provide faster, more effective solutions to customer concerns. Additionally, it can create a standardization of experience, improving the baseline of what customers expect from your business.
• AI tools both reduce overall support costs and provide scalability to grow your business operations.
• Time spent on addressing smaller concerns can be minimized, allowing for greater optimization of customer service agent time for more complex issues.
• AI tools help catalog common customer concerns to deepen your business’s understanding of how customers are using your service – and what issues they are bumping into.

Salesforce found that 90% of service professionals reported that AI helped them deliver a faster and more efficient customer experience. The biggest thing that holds service teams back from adopting AI usage is a fear of being able to utilize it effectively or responsibly.

DISCOVER IMPLICIT SUPPORT →

Potential Pitfalls

• The biggest mistake a business owner could make is downsizing their customer support team prematurely in the belief that AI alone can resolve all customer issues. A survey by Katana found that 49% of respondents preferred speaking to a real human for their customer service issues. 
• Even the demographic most comfortable with AI usage (high-income earners!) still preferred the human touch. 38% of responders wanted live humans, 33% said it depended on the complexity of their issue, and only 15% outright said they preferred the convenience and efficiency of chatbots. 
• In the case of customer service agents making use of AI to assist in customer queries, 56% of Salesforce’s responders said that human oversight is critical to their success.

As we’ve covered in a previous blog post, GenAI tools often contain hallucinations, if they come back complete at all. Large Language Models (LLMs) are hamstrung by their very design, preventing them from delivering a specialist's concise, effective solution to resolve a personal service issue. 

Will AI Replace Human Customer Support Entirely?

It is unlikely that AI will outright replace the need for live humans in customer support entirely, unless consumer attitudes significantly change. There will always be an audience that will prefer the comfort of a real human being addressing their issues. If they can’t find that with one company, they’ll switch to another.

That said, the savvy business owners aren’t outright replacing their customer service agents with AI. Instead, they’re augmenting their existing team by utilizing AI to provide more effective service to customers. This marriage of AI with human touches is the synthesis that will enable a business to scale while improving and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

‍