Solve Customer Service Issues with AI 

Advances in artificial intelligence and big data have radically changed the marketing profession. By 2028, the market for AI in marketing is predicted to increase at a rate of over 31% each year. As more businesses discover new benefits, it is rising even quicker.

Unfortunately, businesses continue to commit many AI-driven marketing blunders. One of the most serious problems is a complete focus on outreach at the expense of customer service.

AI is assisting in the resolution of customer care issues. However, it is only beneficial to businesses who make effective use of it.

To understand the benefits of AI, you must first understand the most prevalent customer service issues. When customers have a negative customer service experience:

• Customers leave 91% of the time without notice.

• They swap brands 47% of the time.

• 40% of customers advise against doing business with the company.

The figures show that each consumer who has a negative customer service experience takes many steps to harm the company. Consider a time when you had a negative service experience with a company and the measures you did as a result. Understandably, you’d be hesitant to suggest the service to your family and friends. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help in resolving these difficulties.

Customer Service in a services business

Enterprises can be classified into two basic categories i.e product and service businesses. The product, price, promotion, and place are all part of the marketing mix for product enterprises. People, procedures, and physical evidence are additional factors. These three factors play a significant role in ensuring client happiness.

Customer service emphasizes all the aspects of a service business. It’s where a company’s people and processes turn into tangible evidence. As a result, customer service is the one area where a company and its customers have the most friction.

Services firms include all types of financial businesses. It could be a fintech company, a money management company, or a brokerage firm. All of them are service businesses. Also, the customer service phase is where the most friction between customers and financial organizations happens.

Why is customer service important?

To recoup the acquisition cost, a customer must do business with a services company for a long time. The Client Lifetime Value (CLV) for each customer is used to determine this. This is the profit that a company can make from a single consumer. Customer acquisition is expensive in most modern firms. Thus, the longer a customer does business with a company, the higher his CLV becomes.

When a customer has a negative experience, he’ll probably stop using the service. This lowers the CLV, and you’ll probably lose the money you spent on obtaining the consumer. There’s also the prospect of a broader public response. Customers can use modern social media sites to discuss their negative experiences with customer service and gain a lot of attention.

On the other hand, excellent customer service thrills customers. Thus, he will not consider alternatives. As a result, he will stay as a customer for longer, raising the CLV. A customer who has had a good experience with a financial service is also more inclined to tell their friends and family about it. This lowers the cost of acquiring new clients. In summary, how a company’s customer service operates can have a significant impact on its profitability. It can be either positive or poor.

AI & ML: Problem solver in customer service

Over time, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools have improved. They are capable of performing far more complicated functions than simple computer algorithms. It’s an ever-changing field. Not to mention that it’s making additional advancements every day. For example, one can use deep learning can to understand and respond to speech.

You can use AI and machine learning in customer service to solve a variety of problems on a wide scale. Also, it comes in great help because customer service departments deal with a great level of complication. The parts that follow go over some of the most frequent difficulties and how AI can help solve them.

#1. Information Gap

The information gap of the customer service executive is a huge difficulty in customer service. As a result, one misidentifies the problem and the solution is incomplete. One executive cannot be familiar with all a company’s systems and operations. It leaves customers dissatisfied due to a knowledge gap among customer service executives.

However, user forums are a common way to bridge the knowledge gap in the absence of AI solutions. Take the 17-year-old MQL5.community, formed by MetaQuotes, the MetaTrader 5 development company. The community itself recognizes the core cause of problems and works out a solution. Such cases need little help from the company. However, it is not relevant to all types of financial services organizations. Thus, in most cases, AI solutions will be more appropriate.

The AI Solution

Combining AI with the firm’s knowledge base can turn the information deficit experienced by the executive into information abundance. AI systems can pick the best answer from the knowledge base. Moreover, it can do so even without the need for the executive to look through the database. Natural language processing (NLP) search tools can deliver the proper solution with minimal query effort. Also, these AI tools can explore the knowledge library for previous similar inquiries. Additionally, they can find how they were addressed.

#2. Inconsistent customer service

There are many points of contact between customers and a financial services company. This can include everything from physical venues to a plethora of web connections. When customers move between touchpoints, they have a disconnected experience. Also, it makes customer service executives’ jobs more difficult. This is due to their ignorance of the customer journey. As a result, problem resolution is difficult. Hence, it results in a poor customer experience.

The AI solution

Applying AI to the firm’s systems and joining together relevant customer data. This makes it easier to connect a customer’s information from several touchpoints. This way, the whole customer path of each customer is available to the customer service representative with a single touch of a button. AI can also aid in highlighting relevant areas to the current inquiry. As a result, this centralized data enables speedier resolution. Thus, it makes the customer experience better.

#3. Personalization

To make things easier, customer service centers and other touchpoints have standardized processes. This is done in order to get the most out of your time. On the other hand, the most efficient systems are not customer-friendly. Every customer is unique in one way or another. Thus, standardized procedures are incapable of providing customized answers to various consumers. As a result, consumer happiness is unattainable in most customer service transactions with financial services organizations.

The AI solution

The scale of AI tools is enormous, and they can support a wide range of processes and procedures. It can provide each customer with a unique experience. They can give personalized experiences without sacrificing efficiency. Thus, AI can achieve the trifecta of scale, personalization, and efficiency at a modest cost.

#4. Customer service volume

When you need to serve a high number of clients, the infrastructure and human resources needed to support them grow in proportion. Increasing the number of physical facilities and customer support employees is expensive. This can make the company torn between two options. Increase infrastructure costs or use current infrastructure that provides poor customer service.

The AI solution

Without the need for extra infrastructure, AI technologies can simply scale to a huge number of users. You can also simply use AI to automate a variety of customer support jobs. By spinning up more cloud computing servers, you can supply more users. Compared to installing physical infrastructure and customer service executives, this has a relatively low operational cost. This allows for the same level of service without a significant investment in cash. Another benefit is that it is much easier to scale down operations. To scale down, the undesired server capacity must be turned off. Also, physical infrastructure reductions and employee cutbacks are not a problem.

Final Thoughts

Customer service is an important aspect of retaining customers. This is necessary for businesses to have a higher return on invested capital. However, with physical infrastructure and customer service professionals, providing an excellent customer service experience is challenging. Customer service representatives have constraints in what they can do. On the other hand, AI tools have the potential to revolutionize that. They can give size, personalization, quality, and a plethora of information. AI is capable of offering all these at a substantially cheaper cost. This ultimately results in consumer delight.