21st August, 2024
Generative AI has taken the world by storm, bringing plenty of opportunities in its wake.
From ChatGPT to Google Bard, Generative AI is currently causing excitement and controversy in equal measure.
Very quickly, businesses all over the world have realised that generative AI is incredibly good at making life simpler and easier for human agents.
Artificial intelligence is efficient, tireless, reliable, and surprisingly intuitive. In a customer service context, it’s capable of empowering both customers and human agents in powerful ways.
Today, we’re going to take a look at how generative AI can help transform customer service for SMEs.
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that draws on language models, machine learning algorithms, and the data available to them to create (or ‘generate’) new content.
Typically, they do this in response to prompts. Here, for example, is an AI-generated response to a query about how AI can help with ecommerce:
Generative AI has a huge number of potential applications, especially when it comes to customer service. SME customer service teams can use generative AI to support human customer service agents and empower customers in various vital ways.
How? Let’s take a look.
When used right, generative AI can boost customer satisfaction and help human agents deliver a truly exemplary customer service experience. Here’s how.
Conversational AI has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. When combined with generative AI, it can listen to customer queries and provide them with intelligent answers.
Natural language processing (NLP) allows virtual agents to parse even difficult or obscure speech to quickly direct customers to web pages, knowledge articles, products, or customer support teams.
What’s more, AIs are capable of understanding tone of voice and adjusting their approach accordingly.
For example, if someone phones your customer service desk sounding angry, the AI can direct their call to someone skilled at handling angry customers and pre-warn the agent that the customer may need to be dealt with sensitively.
Whether you use your AI in your call centre, your website, or in your ERP, it can gather a wealth of data and feed that data back into valuable insights.
For example, if your generative AI monitors customer conversations, it will gather an incredible amount of data on everything from customer intent trends to tone of voice, commonly used words and phrases, the topics that cause changes in mood, conversational tactics that produce positive results, and so on.
This data is processed and stored in a secure data center, ensuring swift and safe data handling that enhances the system’s efficiency and reliability.
You can use these insights to improve your customer service operations.
Additionally, implementing a 360 degree feedback system powered by generative AI can enhance the evaluation process, allowing for a holistic view of employee performance and customer satisfaction, facilitating continuous improvement across all service touchpoints.
Similarly, generative AI can look over your content and tell you where it can be improved.
For example, if customer feedback data shows that customers want simpler articles in your knowledge base, your AI will tell you.
You can then modify your content guidelines to reflect this. Similarly, AI can quickly inform you of SEO trends, making AI an increasingly useful tool for any enterprise SEO strategy.
Automation has been revolutionising customer services for a while. Generative AI takes automation a step further by adding creative capacity to automation.
SaaS marketing, for example, requires a huge amount of customer nurturing. In order for each customer to renew their subscription each month, the brand needs to be on top of things like sending regular reminders and incentives.
With generative AI, brands can use an advanced email builder to automatically compose, personalise, and send many of these nurturing emails.
Integrating a sophisticated transactional email service with generative AI allows for the automated management of customer communication, ensuring timely and personalised email campaigns that drive subscription renewals and enhance overall engagement.
This provides great customer service without overburdening human marketers. It’s also a lot easier on the SaaS marketing budget than creating hundreds of email and notification templates manually.
Modern customers love being able to solve their own problems.
Worldwide, Millennials and Gen Z would much rather click their way through an automated self-service menu than (*shudder*) talk to another human.
Generative AI makes self-service both simpler to use and more sophisticated in outcome.
AI-powered chatbots can understand even complex customer queries and give relevant responses without the need for the customer to bother the human customer service team unless they really need to.
That’s not to say that you should totally replace your human team with AI.
Remember, a lot of people love the human touch that only another person can provide.
A hybrid solution often works well, in which AI ‘triages’ incoming customer calls and quickly directs them to the right person, and those who want to deal with their own problems through your chatbots and knowledge base articles can easily do so.
To take your customer service to new levels, you need a next-generation CRM solution.
The customer and contact management tools let you share and manage your customers’ information literally at the touch of a button via a personalised and unified client management system.
On-the-fly, lightning-fast access to all your customers’ interactions — and the ability to categorise emails, phone calls, and more against your contact records — helps you supercharge your customer service levels.
The result? Happy customers who keep coming back time and again.
From providing actionable insights to smoothly answering customer queries and supporting your human employees against burnout, generative AI has huge potential for SME customer experience services.
If your customer experience services need some sprucing up, check out the AI options available.
You’ll be surprised at just how much AI is capable of and how cost-effective it can be.
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.
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