Using AI in customer service

Author: Rosemin Anderson

Subject Matter Expert: James Skay

How is AI used for customer service?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in several ways in your customer service processes to improve customer experiences and expand business capabilities. For example, you can use AI to create always-on, human-like responses to customer questions and streamline your employee workflows for maximum efficiency.

Using AI in customer service allows support agents to make smarter decisions faster, and meet customers needs more effectively. You can easily provide a more personalized service at scale, in a much more efficient way. This leads to better business outcomes and delivers strong ROI.

But why are we seeing a revolution driven by AI in customer service, and how can you leverage AI for better customer experiences? Read on to find out how.

Free eBook: 4 ways AI will transform agent productivity

How does AI customer service work?

AI technology understands customer sentiment and emotion to trigger actions such as responding or initiating business processes. This allows for the automation of standard customer service processes, such as answering queries, sending confirmations, and handling repetitive tasks like post-interaction surveys.

It can also help to augment your customer service tools to assist your team in customer interactions, offering insights into customer behavior, motivation and requirements in real time.

This automation is enabled by machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) which can recognize customer queries, formulate human-like responses, and take action automatically.

What is natural language processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models human language to allow computers to “understand” text and speech in a human-like way. It uses rules, statistics, and machine learning to comprehend what customers need, including nuance and context, and formulate the right response. It’s also referred to as natural language understanding (NLU).

What are the benefits of AI in customer service?

AI in customer service provides a multitude of benefits, from employee, business and customer perspectives. Here are a few of the key reasons to invest in this technology:

Increased efficiency for your customer service teams

Using AI customer service technology, your team can become more efficient and spend their time more effectively. For example, you could use chatbots to enable better self service for customers and drive call volumes down, and interactive voice response (IVR) to triage the most important customer calls. You could also use AI to handle repetitive tasks such as post-call summaries or issue logging.

This frees up your customer teams to handle the most important or difficult customer inquiries and prevents them from getting stuck in administrative tasks. With AI helping to handle the lower-risk customer questions and their workload being better spent on higher impact tasks, your team will be more efficient and feel more fulfilled.

Personalization at scale

Providing your customers with an online customer experience that feels personal to them can seem difficult at scale, but with the right AI tools, you can provide seamless, exceptional customer experiences that are personal to each customer. When your AI is able to understand what customers are saying, wherever they’re saying it, and how they’re saying it, you’re able to better tailor your responses to meet their particular needs.

For example, if a customer is frustrated about how hard it has been to resolve a problem, rather than applying a stock response, your support team can offer an appropriate mitigating response. If your AI tool is responding, they can offer an apology first, as it can detect frustration and anger in the sentiment analysis of the customer messages. It can even divert more negative queries to a human for response, saving time and streamlining the workflow process for better customer satisfaction.

Easier quality control and evaluation

Though AI in customer service does help increase productivity and empower the frontline significantly, it also benefits your company’s management behind the scenes. AI powers efficient, intelligent quality evaluation of all interactions, removing the need to do quality control reviews on small samples of interactions.

With automatic quality management, every call, mention, post, chat, text, or any other interaction is automatically analyzed and scored using AI and NLP. With script adherence, empathy tracking, and sentiment analysis, your management can focus on providing more targeted, impactful coaching for better employee and customer experiences.

Improved customer satisfaction

When customers can quickly get the information or response they need – particularly when it feels like it’s tailored to their specific situation – it’s highly likely that customer satisfaction will increase.

When consumers enjoy their customer service experience, even initially negative sentiment can be turned around. About three-quarters of consumers who give a company a “very good” customer experience review are likely to forgive a company for a bad experience, with only 15% giving a “very poor” customer experience rating say the same. Supported by AI in customer service, your team can improve the chances of customer interactions meeting and even exceeding expectations.

Examples of AI in customer service

Here are some examples of leveraging AI to improve your customer service operations:

Automated call summaries

Rather than requiring customer service teams to complete time-consuming and tedious administrative tasks, simply automate them using real-time analysis and transcription that accurately collects and records all relevant information into your system. After a call ends, there’s no need for support agents to list customer details, customer effort, next steps, etc. Instead a call summary is automatically generated so team members can quickly see all the details at a glance, confirm, and move onto the next call. This allows your team to better provide great customer service, as they’re able to focus on deepening customer relationships, instead of the administration of each interaction.

Real-time agent assist on customer queries

With real-time agent assist in AI-powered customer service, support agents are automatically delivered coaching and resources as calls are happening, allowing them to not only see the big picture but get ideas on how to resolve customer queries. Agents can see relevant customer context at the same time as customer conversations are occurring, and are served with suggested next best actions and relevant knowledge base articles to resolve issues and improve customer satisfaction.

As part of this, they can also access automatic evaluation of customer intent, emotion, sentiment and effort through NLP analysis.

Automated quality management

As mentioned above, automated quality management technology uses AI and NLP to automatically evaluate all interactions. Not only does this save time, but it also mitigates compliance risk.  The technology flags issues such as non-compliance with scripts, allowing teams to catch and address the issue quickly.

Quality management powered by AI also benefits your agents by ensuring transparent, credible evaluation of their work. With personalized quality dashboards for agents and managers, AI-powered and tailored coaching recommendations surface the traits and behaviors behind your best agents, so you can raise everyone’s game. Agents can track their own performance and flag evaluations they don’t think are fair, helping to foster a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.

Omnichannel analysis and insight for business-wide innovation and improvement

AI in customer service allows you to build an extremely comprehensive view of your operational data and customer information for better business processes. Rather than working with data siloed across different teams and departments, automated workflows and insights are delivered from your frontline to your backend development, making improvements company-wide.

AI agents can be everywhere 24/7

Customer service chatbots are able to provide human-like conversations at scale, offering your customers self service options whenever and wherever they are interacting with your business.

Offering a consistent service 24/7 across the multiple channels that businesses often operate can be difficult when relying solely on human support teams. AI-powered chatbots are able to answer queries and give relevant responses whenever and wherever your customers reach out, guiding your customers to the information they need without having to involve your customer service team.

Of course, some issues may require human interaction – but with this option, you’re able to provide immediate responses to common issues and then route more urgent or complex tasks to human agents.

Intelligent routing and workforce optimization

Handling customer needs and optimizing your contact centers can be a difficult balance to strike, but with modern technology such as AI, you can easily implement workforce optimization measures that make a tangible difference. By tasking AI tools with the analysis of historical operational data, you can predict staffing needs and distribute tasks appropriately. Team scheduling and shift management are automated, saving managers and agents from wasting their time.

In a similar vein, intelligent routing can match agent assistance to customer needs automatically, allowing you to provide a better service with less effort. This is just one aspect of providing personalized support that AI can easily help with – rather than just sending customers to whoever’s available, their specific issue can be addressed by the team member with the right experience.

Cross-selling and upselling

Either through prompts to your team or through direct recommendations in conversations, AI can flag relevant cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Basing insights on the purchase history of that specific customer, AI-based tools can suggest products and services that that customer is likely to respond favorably to.

This helps to turn your contact center into more than just a place to resolve customer issues – it turns it into a revenue driver.

AI customer service automation best practice

AI in customer service does require forethought and planning to implement. It’s not just a case of one size fits all – your team will need the right tools at their disposal, integrated into your systems to provide effortless help, rather than another system to learn or work around.

Make AI work with your customer service teams, not against them

Your AI in customer service automation should be designed to work alongside your support agents, rather than against them, or worse, replace them. Some customers will always prefer to speak to a human agent, particularly for more complex issues or specific tasks. For example, those aged 55 or over might prefer to talk to someone on the phone or meet with someone in person to resolve billing issues, buy a new television, or other common interactions.

Ideally, your AI in customer service usage should make the support team experience easier, streamlining processes, handling repetitive tasks, and providing better customer data to your team to help with supporting customers. That way, customers that still prefer a human agent to speak to won’t feel negatively about their experience, but customer issues that can be handled faster via AI tools can be taken out of your team’s workload.

Artificial intelligence is best used on tasks that a human agent could perform, but that takes up valuable time and energy. For example, using AI tools such as a virtual assistant to answer frequently asked questions, offer multilingual support or give updates on an order status can really improve customer opinions. However, for more complex issues, it’s best to still retain a human touch.

Deliver AI insights across your business

AI in customer service isn’t just for the benefit of frontline or management teams, it’s also beneficial for product developers, marketing teams, and more. Your AI powered solutions can deliver insights on product functionality, marketing strategies and more, based on customer data gleaned from customer service interactions. Predictive analytics can also help plan ahead for potential ebbs and flows in business, or changes in public opinion.

Integrate your AI tools into your existing tech stack

For the best results, integrate AI technology into your existing tools to create a cohesive ecosystem that supports the best outcomes. Rather than keeping customer support technology separate to the tools your teams already use, make sure you’re leveraging AI alongside software your teams are already familiar. Your internal systems don’t have to change – they just need to be better integrated for maximum efficiency.

Ensure that your data and AI can be trusted

When you leverage AI in customer service, there needs to be an awareness that sensitive, personal data is being used. Data needs to be up to date, and kept securely to ensure that your AI usage is both effective and ethical.

Informing your customers of the potential to encounter AI in your customer experiences allows them to choose how they want to interact with your brand, and offers a transparent view of your customer service. If their personal preferences are to interact with a non-AI agent or tool, ensuring that they have that option available will help maintain trust in your brand.

Improve your customer service interactions using AI with Qualtrics

Your AI in customer service strategy should always put your customers and your support agents first. That’s why Qualtrics® Frontline Care™ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize workflows and employees’ time while creating memorable, personalized customer experiences.

Read our eBook,, “4 ways AI will transform agent productivity”, to understand how to harness the power of AI in your contact center for better operational efficiency, competitiveness and higher performance from your frontline teams.