11 AI Usecases in Customer Service in 2021: In-depth Guide

AI applications have became widespread in customer services with the goals of improving customer experience and reducing reliance on humans to provide a consistently good customer service. According to studies,

• 8 out of 10 businesses have already implemented or are planning to adopt AI as a customer service solution by 2020 (Oracle)
• AI bots will power 85% of customer service interactions by 2020  (Gartner)

We have identified about a dozen of customer service artificial intelligence use cases and structured these use cases around typical customer service activities as listed below:

Identify customer issues with social listening and ticketing solutions

Identifying issues wherever they rise is the first step to resolving them. Social listening (also referred to as social media monitoring) and ticketing vendors help you to leverage Natural Language Processing and machine vision to identify customers to contact and respond to them automatically or assign them to relevant agents increasing customer satisfaction. Social listening can

• increase average spending per customer, according to a study by Bain & Co., customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20% to 40% more money with those companies than other customers
• reduce the cost per contact, McKinsey & Co. estimates that shifting to social media customer service can reduce cost per contact by as much as 83%

Authenticate customers with biometrics

Voice biometric solutions translate words into a voice print that is unique to a person which can help you securely authenticate your customers. This enables customers authentication without passwords leveraging biometry to improve customer satisfaction and reduce issues related to forgotten passwords.

Assign agents to customers

Ensure that the agent you assign to a customer has the expertise and style which matches the needs of that customer.

Call classification

Call classification systems leverage Natural Language Processing to understand what customer is trying to achieve enabling your agents to focus on higher value added activities and enable you to better match agents and customers

Intelligent call routing

Intelligent call routing systems route calls to most capable agent available. Intelligent routing systems incorporate data from all customer interactions optimizing customer satisfaction

Automate agent activity

Save agents time while increasing customer satisfaction

Call intent discovery

Leverage Natural Langugage Processing and machine learning to estimate and manage customer’s intent (e.g. churn). Intent prediction enables customer service to give customers the assistance they need in the way they want which helps improve customer satisfaction and business metrics.

To further improve customer experience, emotion AI solutions can estimate customer emotions by analyzing visual, textual, and auditory customer signals. This allows customer service reps to be more conscious of customer emotions and for example pay special attention to angry customers with the intent to churn.

Customer service response suggestions

Bots will listen in on agents’ calls suggesting best practice answers to improve customer satisfaction and standardize customer experience. Digital genius nicely explains this with an example:

Customer service chatbots

According to studies, 20% of businesses that use chatbots deployed a bot to support the customer service department and it is the third-most business chatbot application area following  IT department (53%) and administrative department (23%). The hype around customer service chatbots is not a surprise, considering 75% of customers believe that it takes too long to reach a human agent.

Providing an AI-powered 24×7 customer service chat can help handle most queries and transfer customers to live agents when needed. This helps reduce customer service costs and increase customer satisfaction. Dom the pizza bot of Dominos is an outspoken example:

Chatbot testing

Not paying attention to your users’ experience with chatbots can have screenshot worthy results like this one. Testing and analytics solutions enable you to continously improve your bot.

For more on chatbot testing, check out our related articles:

• Comprehensive guide on chatbot testing
• Chatbot testing frameworks and techniques

Customer service analytics

Analyze all customer service activities so you know how to save costs and improve service quality

Chatbot analytics

As GE’s Peter Drucker is quoted saying “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It”. It is certainly true for chatbots that produce rich conversational data.

We have a detailed guide covering top chatbot metrics if you want to know more.

Call analytics

Advanced analytics on call data to uncover insights to improve customer satisfaction and increase efficiency.

Survey&review analytics

Leverage Natural Langugage Processing to analyze text fields in surveys and reviews to uncover insights to improve customer satisfaction and increase efficiency.

Now that you know about AI applications in customer service, you could examine AI applications marketing, sales, , IT, data or analytics. And if you have a business problem that can be solved with AI: