Tag: AI Best Practices

10 Ways Customer Service Automation Works Today (Updated June 2022)

Written by Emily Peck  on   Jun 29, 2022

AI is transforming customer service, making it more convenient and personal by automating high-quality resolutions on consumers’ terms and empowering human agents to work smarter. The use cases for automated customer service seem endless, so we’ve pulled together the best opportunities for leveraging the power of helpdesk AI in customer service that we see today.

How are our customers using automated support to rethink retail customer service?
Learn how Nespresso, Tommy Hilfiger, and Westjet have turned support into a difference maker.

Here are the Best Automated Customer Service Use Cases

Use Cases for Customer Support on Autopilot

  1. Constant, Direct Attention to Customers

    2. AI can respond instantly to customers, faster than any human. This instant response is available all the time, making time zones irrelevant in the first few interactions with customer service. Human attention isn’t required for every scenario, and chatbot statistics show that a chatbot operating 24 hours a day can make an enormous impact on those tenuous first steps.

  2. Automated Customer Service Responses to FAQs

    3. Use AI to respond to the repeatable, and costly, issues that consumers ask about frequently such as return/exchange policies and processes. AI can also educate customers about complex services or products, like applying for a mortgage or comparing credit cards. We worked with Aflac to create an AI Agent to help educate people during the health insurance open-enrollment season, offering support through an insurance chatbot.

  3. Facilitate Routine Actions

    4. AI can help facilitate routine actions like checking in for a WestJet flight, ordering your favorite Starbucks coffee or a Domino’s pizza. Bank of America is using AI to make everyday banking more pleasant: instead of a website search and navigation to various Web pages, a customer can check their balance, confirm due dates and pay bills via a natural language conversation with virtual assistant Erica, a banking chatbot. Customer service software and artificial intelligence can also help answer customer questions about the shipping status of their eCommerce order.

  4. Payments

    5. Sometimes a customer service human being is more than you need, and that is no more often the case than in simple transactional exchanges, like a customer paying for a product or service that your company offers. That’s where AI for customer experience comes in. Those self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores are popular for a specific subset of customers for a reason: for a fast, no-frills payment process, nothing beats DIY with AI. Chatbots can serve the same function in an e-tail setting, acting as automated cash registers when a human is best utilized elsewhere.

    Bonus: Three More Simple Use Cases for Automated Customer Support

  5. Intent Discovery

    6. The customer might not always be right, but they are rarely shy about telling you how they feel. Gauging a user’s mood, and finding out what kind of help they need, is all part of discovering customer intent. Are they mad? Probably best to get a human on the line ASAP. Are they sick of trying to get a hold of a human at other places and hope they don’t have the same issue with your company? Also, probably a good time for a human to hop on the line. Either way, it makes a lot more sense for AI to ask the question “what can I do for you?” before any valuable human time is spent doing what a machine can do.

  6. Account Information

    7. Nobody likes to put the same information repeatedly into web forms, then give that information again to customer service, and then again every time they’re routed to a new customer service agent. This is especially true when the information they’re looking for is simple customer information, like how long until their subscription ends or whether the address on file is current. Customer service chatbots are perfect for this kind of application, where the task is no more complicated than updating a database or reporting on its contents.

  7. Troubleshooting

    8. If your company offers products or services that need troubleshooting, say a TV or refrigerator, you could use AI to help customers first identify the problem and offer the steps to remedy the issue. Depending on the deployment channel, a knowledge base article, or rich video and images could be shared at optimal times to help customers more effectively help themselves. AI can also be used to proactively offer care advice. For instance, Nespresso uses AI to help customers descale their coffee machines using step-by-step tips delivered naturally via conversation.

    Our webinar with Freshworks, Practical AI to Transform Customer Service, is a great intro to learn how AI can work inside your existing CX.

    Automated Customer Service Use Cases for Service Ops

  8. Tag-team AI / Human Support

    9. AI-powered automation tools can gather key important information from a customer before bringing in human service agents, such as account number, current needs or details around the issue they are facing. AI can also be used for account verification, like confirming security questions or matching account numbers to birthdays. This will optimize the agent’s time, ultimately getting a customer’s issue resolved quicker.

  9. Ticket Routing

    10. Based on a customer’s interactions, need, profile, and loyalty status (via integration with a CRM), machine learning can route the ticket to the right agent based on their:

    • areas of expertise
    • real-time availability
    • the number of other open tickets they are currently managing

    British supermarket Ocado, for example, uses support automation AI to intelligently route its 10,000+ daily emails to the right agent taking into account the topic, sentiment and the priority needed for a response. This makes sure the frustrated customer who had an issue with their online order is treated differently than someone who is providing positive feedback on the website.

  10. AI Recommended Replies to Agents

    11. Once the ticket is in the right human hands, automated customer service can still help get tickets resolved quicker. AI can suggest replies or actions based on various contextual factors, the customer’s profile, information the AI gleaned from an earlier exchange to enable the human agent to easily select the best response or update the response if needed. Sprint, for instance, is launching AI in its call center to analyze a topic and recommend real-time solutions to agents in real-time.

Conclusion on AI and Customer Service Automation

AI is now a member of the workforce, enabling companies to create customer satisfaction for high-quality, fast support. Working in tandem with human agents to deliver exceptional customer experience. AI today is best used in highly repeatable, simple scenarios like live chat, but in the future, AI will be able to manage more complex situations, playing an even greater role within an organization’s support team.

Find out what your ROI will be if you automate customer support with an AI chatbot platform. Try our free chatbot ROI calculator today.

For more information on AI and customer service, visit:

Can Telecom Customer Service Be Turned Around By AI?

Written by Dylan Max  on   Oct 8, 2019

A Look At The Opportunity For Customer Service Automation In Telecom

Customer service in telecom remains one of the worst in any industry. Can it be helped by better leveraging customer service automation?

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Survey, customer satisfaction with subscription television service peaked in 2013 at a score of 68 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s 100-point scale. Since then, it has wavered. The industry is now stagnant at an ACSI score of 62, tied with internet service providers for the last place among all industries tracked by the ACSI.”1

This boils down to a high volume of incidences, inconsistency across channels and issues, and long resolution times. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the best and most scalable means for telecom companies to provide the support that customers demand today. 

The Telecom Customer Support Landscape 

Every month, I get an automated alert from my phone carrier letting me know my credit card is being charged. If I respond to the text message with a related question – say why it’s higher this month than last –  crickets. I never get a response. 

And it’s not something specific to me. While telecom companies are trying to provide good customer experiences and have put it at the top of their strategies, customers like me still feel frustrated. The sheer thought of having to call my phone carrier with a billing question or my broadband provider when I have a connectivity issue makes me want to shudder.  

So why is it so hard for telecom companies to provide a positive customer experience? 

Volume and Reach 

If you look at the top ten searches related to customer service on Google, five are telecom companies.

Telecom companies represent 78% of the top 5 searches by volume in the United States over the last 12 months. Search results provided by Google’s Keyword Planner in September 2019.

You did not read this wrong. 919,000 people try to understand what’s wrong with their Verizon service every month in the US. 

Telecom customer service queries make up over 78% of the top five customer service queries and 63% of the top 10. 

Whether it’s issues related to billing, being charged for a service a customer never signed up for, service issues, installation requests, or collecting personal information, telecom companies are inundated with customer needs. What’s more, support is now expected on an increasing number of channels. Customer service chatbots are now expected to work over email support, social, chat, and voice. 

Fragmentation is Frustrating

Great segmentation within the business also leads to poor customer service. Customers interact with different business groups. This leads to inconsistency, fragmentation, and frustration. For instance, a person is often asked to provide contact information multiple times as they get passed around to the right department. Also, the tone of employees that your customers interact with varies greatly. In contrast, the sales process is enjoyable and fast. When a customer wants to cancel their contract or make changes to an account, it’s slow and frustrating. 

Providing a seamless, consistent experience is fundamental to high customer satisfaction (CSAT).

The Risk Of Poor Telecom Customer Service Has Never Been Higher 

Providing a positive customer experience is tied directly to customer retention.  A McKinsey + Company’s Report found that satisfied customers are 80% more likely than unsatisfied customers to renew their policies 2. 

Consumers overwhelmingly don’t have an emotional connection to telecom companies. To your customer, there’s little differentiation in service, quality or price. 

The cost to switch to another provider is lower than ever, and there are more competition and choice today. Just consider the rise of cord-cutting, as cable providers lose a staggering 14,000 customers per day 3. WeChat and others are also emerging as competitive alternatives to SMS customer service. Customers are not afraid to look for alternatives.

Customer Service is the Key 

With this convergence of factors, customer service excellence is what can get someone to stick around. According to PWC, “even when people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience4.” 

If getting in touch with a company is frustrating or if customers are not treated nicely, they will churn. A competitively-priced alternative is a click away. 

How Automation in Telecom Can Drive Higher CSAT

The average wait time to reach a call center agent for a telecom company is 5 minutes. Only 44% of operators offer web chat as a support option. When you hear stats like these, it makes sense that telecom is failing at customer service 5. Our society expects effortless, on-demand, and personalized experiences. 

Incorporating AI for customer experience into the workforce can help resolve over 50% of customer service issues instantly. Think about high-volume, mundane and repetitive queries. These can be eliminated from your human agent’s workflow so they can resolve high-touch and complex issues faster. Examples of Telecom workflows that can be delegated to AI include:  

  • Top-up or recharge: Enable customers to replenish mobile account data instantly. 
  • Modify plans: Whether it’s adding a line, changing plans or adding roaming for an upcoming international trip, AI connects in real-time to back-end systems to close tickets. 
  • Incentives to churning customers: Only 28% of telecom companies offer an incentive to avoid churning 5. An AI Agent identifies which churning customers are high-value and worth the cost of an incentive. The AI Agent offers a promotion at the initial termination request. 
  • Account termination: A customer terminates a contract, AI easily communicates with the customer and makes updates on the back-end. There’s no delay in completing a request. The relationship ends on a positive note. 
  • Billing questions: A customer has a question on a new charge or why the amount changed from month-to-month. An AI Agent either responds immediately or gathers necessary data before elevating to human agents. 
  • Network issues: An AI Agent reactively gives updates to a customer about an issue or proactively lets someone know about planned service and outages. 
  • Delivery fulfillment: Conversational AI agents keep customers updated on the status of new hardware or parts. 
  • Product / Service research: For prospective customers, an AI Agent guides a customer through the discovery and research process. It helps people compare plans. A Virtual agent drives profitability through up-selling. 
  • Reduce truck roll: AI Agents help customers help themselves. They can help troubleshoot issues, activate a SIM card or reconfigure equipment.

We Are Data Addicts

Whether we’re streaming TV or reading the news on the go, we’re consuming data 24/7. Telecom companies provide services that are fundamental to our lives. We expect swift resolutions when there’s an issue. Negative customer experiences boost churn and can cause brand degradation over time. Positive customer experiences can keep customers around. 

Customer service automation empowers telecom companies to put the experience of their consumers first. Let us show you how quickly we can launch a powerful support organization run by human and machine intelligence. Schedule a demo with Netomi’s chatbot platform.

References 

  1. American Customer Satisfaction Index: https://www.theacsi.org/news-and-resources/customer-satisfaction-reports/reports-2019/acsi-telecommunications-report-2018-2019/acsi-telecommunications-report-2018-2019-download 
  2. McKinsey & Company: Customer Experience – New Capabilities, New audiences, New Opportunities https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/Customer%20Experience/CX%20Compendium%202017/Customer-experience-compendium-July-2017.ashx
  3. BGR: Cord Cutting Statistics 2019 https://bgr.com/2019/05/09/cord-cutting-statistics-2019/
  4. PWC: Experience is everything. Get it right. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html?
  5. KPMG: Still Searching for a Better Customer Experience https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2017/07/searching-for-a-better-customer-web.pdf//

How to Improve the Customer Experience with AI

Written by Emily Peck  on   Sep 25, 2018

Customer service today is broken, marred by inefficiency that leaves customers frustrated and support employees disenchanted.

Consumers experience long hold times or are an unwitting participant in the virtual game of pinball, getting knocked from one agent to the other until you may get your need resolved. Or there’s the hours-long wait many consumers experience to hear back on a customer support email or social message (the average wait time on social media is an astonishing nine hours). Customers expect businesses to respond to their emails within an hour, and most companies don’t come close to delivering on this today.

The stakes for good customer service are higher than ever: 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service. On the bright side, taking a customer-centric approach to support pays off: 7 out of 10 U.S. consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service.

Without using AI, it’s almost impossible, and very expensive, to meet consumer demands for fast, high-quality resolutions at scale. Let’s take a look at 6 different ways customer service can be elevated through intelligent support automation.

6 ways AI-powered customer service improves the customer experience

  • Always convenient for your customers

AI connects to all of your business systems in order to surface the right information to personalize the exchange and drive in-the-moment relevance. Companies can treat every customer differently on-demand. AI also enables an omnichannel experience deployed across all channels where customers are. A single AI can exist on social, mobile, chat and email. AI Agents are available 24/7, whenever your customers need them.

  • The instantaneous, accurate response to repeatable issues

Over 50% of the tickets your company receives span repeatable, simple questions and scenarios. AI can be used to increase your brand’s responsiveness and customer satisfaction via quick high-quality resolutions to these queries as soon as your customers reach out.

  • Better, faster service from human agents

AI-centric customer service is not about replacing human agents; it’s about uplifting humans to work smarter and faster, and allowing them to focus on high-value work and things that require uniquely human characteristics like complex problem solving and having empathy. AI can empower agents to respond quickly with recommended replies and actions, and surface the critical information that will help your agent serve better. The customer experience is enhanced as human agents are focusing solely on enabling better assistance to fewer tickets.

Improve your customer satisfaction. Discover the best help desk software solutions today.

  • Support becomes proactive and predictive

AI enables a fundamental shift away from solely reactive service to preemptive service. First, we will see a wave of proactive service capabilities where companies anticipate issues based on changes to things like delivery or order status and alert customers before they have a chance to reach out to the brand. Within the next few years, we will also see support become predictive, where companies will anticipate issues based on contextual signals. For instance, a person who is stuck in traffic on their way to the airport and has missed their flight will be preemptively rebooked on the next flight. They will get a message from an airline’s AI agent with new ticketing information.

  • Disseminate the right information at the right time

AI-enabled support enables companies to educate and intervene at the exact moment it can lead to overall higher customer satisfaction (and also drive a sale).

    • Pre-sale:  More than half of Americans have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service, according to the American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer. An AI agent can act on signals like time spent on a page, clicks or mouse movement to identify customers who are not yet ready to make a purchase or are on the fence. The AI can provide information relevant to their exact behavior, offer to answer questions or even recommend questions other customers have had at that point in the purchase journey. A more informed purchase leads to fewer buyers remorse and returns, and a happier customer.
    • Post-sale: Companies can automate recommendations and instructions for service or care. For instance, 1 year after a coffee maker was purchased, based on the usual wear and tear, we’d recommend you do this service or cleaning to keep the device working best. AI can also help with feature discovery, alerting customers to new and different ways to enjoy a product.
  • Personalized engagement

AI customer support can enable resolutions to be more personal to the customer. Based on machine learning and understanding the variations amongst audience segments and how contextual factors influence whether an action resolves –  or fails to effectively resolve – specific issues, companies can provide more relevant personalized customer service to the individual.

A moderate increase in Customer Experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues, according to the Temkin Group. Even if your revenue is nowhere near this, providing friendly, convenient, high-quality support at scale can have an enormous impact on your consumer experience and your company’s bottom line.

To learn more about AI-enabled customer service and how Netomi can transform your customer support, schedule a demo today.

For more information on improving the customer experience, visit:

Would You Trust an AI With Your Wallet?

Written by Puneet Mehta  on   Aug 23, 2018

Trust is having a moment. And for good reason.

The backlash Facebook is facing boils down to breaking the trust of consumers in how they protect their data. To rebuild consumer confidence, Facebook is turning to AI to solve their problems.

As AI is used more by brands to improve operations and decision-making, and even more so to interact with consumers on a daily basis, it is now more critical than ever to build a strong foundation of trust. The potential for AI is huge; in the near future, brands and individuals will be represented by an AI on the internet, and the only way for brands to reach their consumers will be to go through their AI. As this new AI era approaches, the trust threshold will remain fragile.

In 2015, when Sony Pictures launched “Slappy,” a conversational chatbot in support of the Goosebumps Movie, they saw astronomical engagement on Facebook Messenger: an average of 10 minutes per conversation, with some conversations lasting up to 2 hours. But the conversational AI was so good that some people thought they’d made an actual new friend. One user even invited Slappy to her chemotherapy appointment the next day.

This raises some serious ethical questions about how brands present their AI to their customers. Should your bot be upfront about being a bot or try to pass off as a human agent? Is it the customer’s responsibility to approach chat, voice or email interactions with caution? [For the record, I would recommend owning the fact that an AI is an AI].

In addition to how an AI is presented, trust in an AI is built (and broken) in many ways. As AI permeates more parts of the customer journey across marketing, sales and service, consumers will need to be able to trust your AI. 

How to get consumers to trust your AI

Trust an AI with your refined intent

Does the AI actually understand what the person is asking or trying to accomplish? If the AI is constantly getting confused, the person will not trust the AI customer support to help accomplish the task at hand and stop engaging.  AIs need to be able to understand the majority of what a person is communicating, including today’s digital slang (emojis, stickers). AIs also need to be built on a deep learning platform so it is constantly expanding its knowledge base, increasing the frequency of classifying intent correctly.

Trust an AI with your identity (piecemeal or not)

A person should never have to reintroduce themselves to an AI and rather all of the information they have revealed to the AI over the course of the relationship should help to drive relevance in future conversations. The AI should also connect to a brand’s CRM in order to personalize the interactions based on cross-channel profiles. However, in order to retain trust, always enable a person to opt-in for data sharing and storing.

Exploring a new CRM solution? Learn more about two of the industry leaders in our Intercom vs. Zendesk review.

Trust an AI with your wallet

AI will soon be the single channel for all brand and consumer activity, including purchases. Being able to trust the AI to store payment information will help to create a completely seamless commerce experience, greatly enhancing the customer experience. If a person doesn’t trust the brand to keep payment information secure, though, the magic of a single channel touchpoint will be lost. Clearly communicate how payment information is secure or stored if held by the brand or connect to a third-party like PayPal or Apple Pay.

Trust an AI with your emotions

If a friend tells a joke when you’re discussing something serious, you would probably grow frustrated or upset. Similarly, an AI needs to be able to read and react to a person’s sentiment and tone.  Beyond the text or spoken word, how is the person feeling? An AI can tap into this by looking at the conversation in its entirety, assigning a sentiment grade to every interaction in order to say the proper thing or send appropriate content. If an AI is a repeat offender of not understanding a person’s emotions (particularly on the poles, really happy / excited or really sad / mad), they might get fed up with the relationship.

Trust an AI to transfer context across AIs

Brands may soon have various AIs at work simultaneously managing different parts of the customer experience. There might be customer support AIs answering questions, AIs supporting human agents to reply quicker and more accurately, AIs that focus on guided selling and personal shopping, etc. AIs will be specialists. If, for instance, someone needs to return something she has ordered (with the personal shopping AI), she might need to be “transferred” to the customer support AI, who can help to facilitate the return.  If this “hand-off” occurs, the necessary information (like items, loyalty status, etc.) needs to be passed along, so the conversation isn’t starting from square one.

Today’s consumers are more comfortable with, and sometimes prefer, interacting with AI. There is no better way for brands to reinforce that positivity than by building trust. If trust is broken, it will be very hard to convince a person to give it another chance.

For more information, check out: The 16 Best AI Chatbot Vendors With Reviews and Features.