Please see that there are numerous online shopping websites available but why only a few stand out? – it's not just because of their quality products and better pricing strategies but for their exceptional customer service which allows customers to do repeated shopping and spread their experience through word of mouth.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) an overview:
Most of us know that AI is already helping online companies to use predictive analytics for their customers to have a better online experience – Like the ads showing up based on your search preferences and tailoring products and brands through intelligent prediction. More the data better is the performance of AI; hence these methodologies gather information from the consumers through different channels and in turn provide better customer services by analysis and interpretation.
The other great advantage of AI in customer experience is that it can help companies to make data-driven decision-making based on their customer behaviour. Some of the examples are to find out products or services that are frequently purchased in order to produce more of those and analyze customer feedback to improve consumer churn rate. Though these are considered as some of the most influential implications that AI can bring to the table, further this article will be focusing on two other factors which are painstaking for companies to stress upon.
Other AI-based approaches to have Key differentiators:
Companies choose to go for crowdsourcing under the following three circumstances:
- Tackling Customer feedbacks
- AI-Powered Customer support.
Tackling Customer Feedbacks:
The greatest challenge for companies is to manage customer feedbacks without affecting the reputation of the company. Numerous ratings and review-based companies have popped up in the recent past to make things worse. After the advent of smart devices and social media, customer services have become an omnichannel approach – people expect customer service anytime anywhere, and provide feedback in the same manner.
The biggest challenge for companies is to handle negative feedback and guard them in a way it doesn’t affect their reputation. This is where Artificial Intelligence can play an effective role - it can identify negative comments and feedback through Natural Language Processing and alert companies to take immediate action. By this approach, companies would not only safeguard their reputation but also can reduce the cost of not keeping additional resources for moderation activities. This will also allow organizations to retain positive feedbacks which in turn will create a good reputation and moderate/delete negative comments to avoid spreading negativity about their products and services.
Below are the types of negativity that can be tackled by Artificial Intelligence methodologies:
Companies face different types of spamming, depending upon the type of products and services offered by the company, some of which are offensive language, images, or videos – spammers use dirty language or nudity images to spoil the brand reputation, hence moderators use relevant tools and technologies to filter those words and remove instantaneously, also human intervention is necessary to remove images and video links which might be tricky for tools or technologies to capture. These kinds of spamming not only affect the brand image but leave a big question on security concerns.
The second major threat is trolls and spammers who leave disregarding comments about your company’s product or service with the only purpose to spoil the brand image, among other users or customers. There are various reasons for people to troll or spam, some do to just earn publicity which leaves a damaged legacy for the companies and other reasons could be due to rivalry – competitors engage people to troll and spam a company’s social media platform to spoil the brand image.
- Bulk Messaging: We as a company receive requests from newly formed forums, stating that their pages and posts are fresh during the day and over the night it has been flooded with comments and asking for a permanent solution. This is a major problem faced by many new startups which don’t have a proper moderating system, either by human interference or tool-based technologies.
- Malicious Links: This is another nuisance for companies as spammers spread an interesting image or comment with a link and when clicked, it triggers an activity such as downloads, malware, or stealing information.
- Fake Reviews: Since social media platforms and forums can be accessed by anyone who has a user id, it becomes easy for people to write fake reviews to degrade a company’s product or service. Due to the highly competitive nature of today’s market scene, few companies employ these unethical ways to spoil the brand image, hence moderation becomes crucial here.
- Like Jackers and Click Baiters: There are few spammers who post hot news or sensational headlines to attract attention which will then navigate to their social media pages and take an automatic like or subscription, this is another trick employed by competitors to steal your customers. Most users are not aware of these kinds of tricks and become a victim of such spam.
- Spamming bots: There are few bots that automatically surf sites using certain keywords and post negative comments and reviews, these bots are built by Robotic process automation (RPA) to disrupt the brand image and security of a company.
AI-Powered Customer Support:
The second-best utilization of Artificial Intelligence in customer support is AI chatbots. Chat support has become an inevitable part of customer engagement activities and whoever does it better will have a competitive advantage. AI-Powered Chatbots can help companies to provide instant customer support around the clock. Though there are various modes of customer support platforms available, the inception of chatbots has certainly revolutionized customer relationship management.
When a single customer service agent/executive can respond to a single inbound request or query, bots can handle multiple customers at the same time with much less operational cost. Hence, it is not only speeding up the process but also generates a direct impact on the bottom line of the business. Customer Service is no longer viewed as a cost center, rather when treated properly will generate revenue in many ways and that is the underlying benefit for companies to have a competitive advantage. iOPEX employs AI/ML predictive analytics to analyze and continuously assess the engaging customers and equip support staff for improved customer services, retention, and satisfaction.
Benefits of AI Chatbots to Companies:
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: All the points mentioned above will improve customer satisfaction which in turn will increase the retention rate of customers.
- Cost-Effective: One customer representative can only handle one customer at a time, whereas a bot can handle multiple customers at a given time, hence it is a huge cost saving for a company.
- Cost Optimization: Most companies will focus on reducing the cost and lose on the quality of the service, hence if a company is willing to invest a little more in developing a comprehensive chatbot that can bring:
- Provide measurement with chat concurrency (multiple computations are happening at the same time)
- Automate end-to-end business process
- Enable new customer service models.
- Improved Accuracy: Bots built with machine learning can learn from customer queries and address customer queries in a much better way in the future. Hence, companies willing to strategize their AI chatbot implementation considering these learning curves are certain to deliver more accurate responses.
- Faster Turnaround Time: A quicker response is valuable, but providing an accelerated resolution is gold. With the current process where a customer service rep is involved, the queries are heard, and passed to a technical or solving team which will then provide a solution and addressed back to the customer again via the customer service rep. Whereas with bots, these can happen in real-time where bots collect all the information of a customer and send it ahead of time. For example: When a waiter takes an order using a bot, it sends information to the chef, intimates once the order is ready, and served faster than before.
- Faster Onboarding: This is one of the important benefits for a company in order to create optimized customer service management. The time and cost involved to hire employees, training, and onboarding them are much higher when compared to creating a bot and feeding the necessary information. Also, when an employee leaves the company, there is an extra burden for companies to replace and train again.
- Automation: Humans generally get bored and become less productive when doing the same task repeatedly. Chatbots can be automated to perform these repetitive tasks which in turn allows the employee to focus on more productive jobs. For example: When new items are purchased from your e-commerce site or a bug is reported then it sends a short summary slack to the corresponding team.
- AI Chatbots are flexible: Once the chatbot is developed based on your company’s product or service, it is very easy to make changes in the future if needed, since not much time and cost is involved to develop and change the platform.
