The Future of AI Self-Service: Customer Experience Insights
Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way businesses interact with their customers. One of the most significant developments in this area is the rise of AI self-service.
81% of customers prefer using a self-service option before contacting a customer service representative
AI self-service empowers customers to find answers to their questions, resolve issues, and complete tasks without the need for human intervention.
As a result, AI self-service has the potential to transform customer support, offering benefits such as improved customer experience, reduced costs, and increased efficiency.
In this article, we will explore the concept of AI self-service, its advantages, challenges, and best practices. We'll also provide real-world examples of how businesses are successfully leveraging this technology.
What is AI self-service?
Self-service was once synonymous with waiting over the call for IVR options and punching numbers until you got redirected to support. But with conversational AI, self-service has gained a completely new identity.
AI self-serve is using generative AI to create applications for customers so they can clear their own queries without any human intervention. AI self-serve allows customers to be self-sufficient and access the information they need swiftly and conveniently, 24/7.
AI self-service can be implemented across various channels, including chatbots, virtual assistants, knowledge bases, and FAQs. It can play a vital role in enhancing customer experience and reducing support costs for businesses.
The rise of AI self-service
Customer service has undergone a major transformation in recent years with the emergence of AI self-service. AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and knowledge bases have become integral to how businesses interact with customers.
Firstly, 81% of customers prefer using a self-service option before contacting a customer service representative. This demonstrates customers prefer trying to solve queries themselves before talking to support. Such self-reliance has led to an increase in AI self-serve usage across platforms.
Secondly, 50% of customers expect AI to save them from having to repeat themselves when interacting with customer service. This leads to less frustration during interactions, and it shows up in results. 80% of customers who interact with an AI chatbot have a positive experience, and it can increase customer satisfaction scores by 12% on average. Because customers like talking to it and it leads to positive results, businesses would implement it too.
But what about costs and ROI?
AI self-serve assistants can save up to 2.5 billion hours of work for customer service representatives per year. This translates into cost savings and therefore, positive ROI.
Implementing self-serve AI assistants can make customers happy and benefit businesses in terms of cost savings and ROI. It's a win-win for both the teams!
How does AI self-serve help customer support?
Self-serve AI assistants offer many benefits to businesses, including improved customer experience, reduced support costs, and the ability to provide 24/7 support. Here are some specific ways that AI self-service can help customer support teams:
Ticket deflection:
Self-serve AI assistants can handle routine, repetitive queries and provide instant answers to frequently-asked questions. This frees up human agents to focus on more complex and challenging customer interactions. This can significantly reduce the number of support tickets that need to be manually processed by human agents, resulting in faster resolution times and improved customer satisfaction.
24/7 support:
AI self-service can provide 24/7 support. This ensures customers can get the help they need whenever they need it, regardless of the time of day or night. This can be particularly beneficial for businesses that operate in multiple time zones or have customers in different parts of the world.
Cost reduction:
AI self-service can help businesses reduce support costs by automating routine tasks and reducing the need for human agents. It is estimated that AI can automate up to 95% of routine customer service tasks, resulting in significant cost savings for businesses.
Sentiment analysis:
AI assistants can analyze customer interactions and detect customer emotions and sentiments, allowing businesses to better understand and address customer concerns. This can help businesses improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring that customers feel heard and understood.
In addition to these benefits, AI self-service can also help businesses gain valuable insights into customer behavior.
Benefits of AI self-service for businesses
AI self-service offers a number of advantages for businesses, including improved customer satisfaction, cost-effectiveness, and 24/7 accessibility. Let's take a look at some benefits of using self-serve AI assistants for customer support.
- Instant and efficient support, AI self-service reduces the burden on human customer support agents, allowing them to focus on more complex customer interactions.
- 24/7 availability self-service AI assistants are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring that customers can get the help they need whenever they need it.
- Competitive advantage 90% of companies see AI as a source of their competitive advantage over rivals. With self-serve AI platforms, customers are happier and therefore willing to spend more.
- Cost Savings Self-service AI assistants can help businesses save up to $50k/month in customer support costs.
- Customer insights - self-service AI can help businesses understand their customers better and identify areas where improvements can be made. This information can be used to drive business growth.
Challenges of implementing AI self-service
Implementing AI self-service is not without its challenges.
One significant hurdle is ensuring data quality and accuracy. AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on, so it's crucial to have high-quality, accurate data to ensure reliable and effective AI self-service. Collecting and maintaining such data can be a complex and time-consuming process, requiring careful data management and cleaning procedures.
Another challenge lies in addressing security and privacy concerns. Enterprise AI platforms often handle sensitive customer information. It is imperative to implement robust security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, breaches, or leaks. Establishing clear data privacy policies and adhering to industry regulations is essential to maintaining customer trust and confidence.
Additionally, AI self-service systems should not entirely replace human agents. While AI can handle routine tasks efficiently, there will always be situations that require human intervention. Complex customer queries, emotional conversations, or cases requiring empathy and judgment are best handled by experienced human agents. Finding the right balance between AI automation and human oversight is crucial to delivering an optimal customer experience.
Lastly, the transition to AI self-service may pose challenges related to employee acceptance and training. Some employees may resist the introduction of AI, fearing job displacement or feeling uncomfortable interacting with technology. Providing comprehensive training and support to employees is essential to ensure a smooth transition and gain their trust in the new system.
Best practices for successful AI self-service
To ensure a successful AI self-service implementation, businesses should:
Provide a clear and intuitive user interface: The user interface for AI self-service should be simple and easy to understand, with clear instructions and prompts guiding users through the process. The interface should also be visually appealing and consistent with the overall branding of the business.
Use natural language processing: AI self-service platforms should be able to understand and respond to user requests in natural language. Natural language processing also allows AI self-service applications to understand customer sentiment & provide answers accordingly.
Offer a variety of self-service options: Businesses should provide a range of AI self-service options to cater to different customer preferences and needs. This may include chatbots, virtual assistants, knowledge bases, and FAQs.
Personalize the experience: AI self-service applications should be able to adapt to the individual needs and preferences of each customer. This can be achieved by tracking customer interactions and preferences over time and using this data to provide tailored responses and recommendations.
Continuously monitor and improve the experience: Businesses should continuously monitor the performance of their AI self-service applications and collect feedback from users to identify areas for improvement. This will help ensure that the AI self-service experience is constantly evolving and improving to meet the needs of customers.
Examples of AI self-service in action
Conversational AI self-serve can make a huge difference in customer experience. You can train & implement conversational AI self-serve assistants on your company's help documents, tutorials, product documentation and more inside your customer-facing application. This will give your customers 3 ways to access help.
- Going through the help articles
- Chatting with the self-serve AI assistant
- Call customer support.
At Alltius, we've implemented many AI self-serve applications for brands in multiple industries like finance, banking, insurance, etc. So, let's take a look at one of the real-world case studies which shows the benefits of using AI self-serve for customer support.
Case in Point: AngelOne uses self-serve AI assistant for 65% ticket deflection
AngelOne is a listed stock and mutual funds brokerage house in India with 18 million users & average daily turnover of almost $400 billion.
With over 1,000 support agents, the contact center now handles more than 500,000 tickets per month, which led to high wait times. Users had to wait 30 minutes to a few hours to receive assistance & this led to bad customer experiences. Angelone used Alltius' self-serve AI assistants to deflect at least 20% of tickets. Additionally, they wanted to decrease the median customer query resolution time from 2-4 hours to just a few minutes.
Alltius' AI assistant was trained on over 20,000+ multilingual web pages, user account APIs, canned responses, Google Drive documents & other documents. In just a few months, Alltius has already powered over 1 million conversations and recorded over 100,000 sessions per week. It especially helped the company manage peak capacity up to 10 times the median hourly conversation volume during critical events such as market opening hours, IPOs, and buybacks. Thus, reducing adverse customer experience.
Customer Experience Impact: Median wait time for resolving issues is now slashed to a few seconds from a few hours earlier with AI self-serve options. This led to an increase in NPS scores.
Alltius: The best choice for implementing self-serve AI assistants
Chat-GPT wasn't made to improve customer experiences. Alltius is.
Alltius is a platform created as a result of decades of research at Carnegie Mellon and Wharton focused on one goal: Improve customer experience across all touchpoints.
Alltius is an all-in-one AI customer service platform for enterprises looking to deflect incoming tickets with self-serve AI options for customers & reduce customer wait times with AI assistants for agents.
Alltius' AI assistant is trained on your company documents like FAQs, product documentation, tutorial videos, previous customer tickets, customer information and more. It has the capabilities to perform multiple tasks like answering questions, debugging, and drafting responses. Performing actions like calculating account balance or taking action on behalf of customers, raising tickets, adding information into CRM or more. It is completely customizable as per your needs.
Think of it as an additional support employee who can be trained to do anything you'd want.
Conversational AI assistant for your customers
Self-Serve AI is a customer-facing AI assistant that can be deployed on a website, in the product, Slack, zendesk, or any other customer-facing channel. It can understand customer intent, instantly, acknowledge customer queries, identify customer needs and solve customer queries within seconds. This reduces customer wait times, increases ticket deflection and improves customer satisfaction.
Conversational AI assistant for your support agents
Support Assist AI is a support agent's AI assistant that curates information from multiple sources so the agent spends more time building relationships with customers. Support AI helps your customer support agent:
- Understand customer intent - like happy, angry, dissatisfied
- Solve customer query - with drafted responses
- Identify up-selling opportunities - with tailored pitches and best products to cross-sell
- Update customer information in CRMs - with easy integrations
With features like customizable CUIs, version control, and seamless ecosystem integration, Alltius enables businesses to fine-tune AI applications for maximum efficiency and innovation.
It has been used by major brands to revamp their customer service & reduce their customer support costs by $50k per month. In case you're interested in implementing conversational AI for customer support, experience Alltius in one of the 4 ways:
Read more:
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- How to build conversational AI?
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