Almost 40% of all major companies have already implemented artificial intelligence for customer service and slightly more than 40% are going to implement artificial intelligence for customer service by 2020 (Zhou, 2017).
Currently, there are two distinct ways in which artificial intelligence can be used in customer service. The first is by using artificial intelligence for computer programs to communicate directly with customers, without having humans intervene. Basically, this means that artificial intelligence is used to train the computer program in order to have them successfully answer questions, mostly just simple to answer questions (Zhou, 2017; Francis, 2017). An obvious advantage of this is that the company is able to save costs, for example for training customer service employees, since the computer program only has to be trained a singly time (Schneider, 2017). These types of programs also provide advantages for customers. The first advantage is that customers don’t have to wait for the program to respond, since the program can respond to every customer immediately. The second advantage is that these types of programs are available during the entire day (Hyken, 2017).
The other way artificial intelligence can be used for customer service is by supporting regular customer service representatives with their technology. This for example means that a customer service representative is given possible ways to respond to the problem of the customer, which the artificial intelligence can do since it has already tried interpreting the customer’s question. This obviously saves time for the employee, meaning that the same amount of employees can serve a larger amount of customers, saving costs (Zhou, 2017).
Obviously there are still some challenges and AI is still limited in some ways. For example, from a survey in America it became clear that 86% of customers expect to be able to be transferred to a live person (Francis, 2017). Similarly, AI bots still can’t answer a lot of questions of employees by themselves and therefore customers still need to be able to contact human employees in a lot of cases (Francis, 2017). But over time artificial intelligence will improve more and more and that clearly signals how important AI will become in the customer service industry.
Francis, N. (2017). The Truth About AI in Customer Service. Retrieved 17 October 2017 from https://www.helpscout.net/blog/ai-customer-service/
Hyken, S. (2017). AI And Chatbots Are Transforming The Customer Experience. Retrieved 17 October 2017 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2017/07/15/ai-and-chatbots-are-transforming-the-customer-experience/#550ed641f7bd
Schneider, C. (2017). 10 reasons why AI-powered, automated customer service is the future. Retrieved 17 October 2017 from https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/04/10-reasons-ai-powered-automated-customer-service-future/
Zhou, A. (2017). How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Enterprise Customer Service. Retrieved 17 October 2017 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/adelynzhou/2017/02/27/how-artificial-intelligence-is-transforming-enterprise-customer-service/#6eb5db401483
