Using Artificial Intelligence for Customer Support

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Customer support is an essential part of every business, as consumers often reach out to companies to make inquiries or lodge complaints. If they cannot contact a business they use regularly, they may opt for their competition. Most businesses know this and strive to be accessible to their customers. However, this can be challenging, since it is costly to hire numerous customer support staff to be available around the clock. Artificial intelligence has emerged as a solution to this problem. Companies can now use artificial intelligence tools to augment their existing customer support team. The two most common customer support tools are chatbots and conversational AI.

Using artificial intelligence for customer support highlights the trend of companies in all sectors embracing AI and using it to improve efficiency and productivity. However, it comes with some security risks, which is why they should implement AI security posture management.

Cybercriminals always look for vulnerabilities in organizations’ IT infrastructure. Since the widespread use of AI is still a recent occurrence, some companies do not yet have adequate safeguards for their AI tools. AI security posture management will ensure that companies use AI safely and can ward off cyber attacks.

Reasons to Use AI for Customer Support

Companies that use AI for customer support will gain the following benefits:

• Reduced labor cost

Recruiting customer support staff costs money. Businesses that use AI for customer support can save labor costs since they can deploy AI tools to take customer calls and respond to the messages sent to the chatbot.

• Increased efficiency

Since chatbots and conversational AI tools can respond to many messages and calls simultaneously, people will spend less time waiting to get answers to their complaints and inquiries.

• Improved user experience

Customer support AI tools are trained to understand the way the company that uses them operates, so they can give clear and concise answers to the complaints and inquiries they receive. Machines do not have emotions, so they will communicate in a calm and steady manner regardless of the emotions expressed by customers.

• Easy onboarding

Every time a company recruits a human customer service agent, they have to train them to understand how their business works and how to communicate with their customers. This can be time-consuming and repetitive. It is easier to integrate AI into a business. They only need to be trained once and they learn new things in every customer interaction, which further improves them.

• Round-the-clock availability

Since artificial intelligence tools do not get tired, they are active in responding to customers around the clock. Companies that use them will have a competitive advantage in attending to their customers outside of regular working hours.

Challenges Faced When Using AI for Customer Support

Although using artificial intelligence tools for customer support has numerous advantages as mentioned above, it also has the following challenges:

• Little to no empathy

Regardless of how well artificial intelligence tools imitate human characteristics, they cannot feel empathy for an aggrieved customer. As a result, they will respond to complaints and inquiries based on their programming and the dataset they have been trained on without genuinely feeling the pain points of the customer they are communicating with.

This can be aggravating for customers, as they may want a customer service agent to understand their circumstances and pacify them. This is almost impossible for AI tools to do, since they are not human.

• Inability to understand complex queries

Customers often ask complex questions when speaking to customer support representatives. Humans are often able to break down these questions and queries and give said customers the answers they seek. This may be challenging for AI customer support tools; if a customer asks questions outside their trained dataset, they will be unable to provide helpful information.

This inability to understand also applies to situations where a consumer cannot speak a language clearly or has an accent that the AI tool cannot easily hear. Overall, this ruins the customer experience and can turn people away from a business.

• Excessive reliance on automation

As a company begins to experience the benefits of AI customer support tools and automation, they may over-rely on it which may alienate consumers who prefer to talk to humans. Companies should have an option that allows people in this category to connect with human representatives. This will allow them to benefit from AI while retaining as many consumers as possible.

• High cost of implementation

The cost of implementing artificial intelligence in customer support may be too high for some businesses. This will make them unable to implement it and lose the competitive edge, even though it will cost more in the long run to hire strictly humans.

• Inconsistent customer experience

Businesses that use AI as part of their multichannel customer support will offer consumers an inconsistent experience. This is because people who reach out to them via email, social media, and some other platforms will receive responses from a human while those who call or use the chat option on their website will talk to a bot.

• Incompatibility with certain consumers

Not everyone is tech-savvy or used to talking to an AI tool, and some people may have a hard time effectively communicating with them. This is because the bot might not perceive changes in tone, understand cultural references, and disregard biases that may have been trained on. These reasons and more can cause numerous communication issues.

Endnote

Artificial intelligence tools are useful for providing customer support. They can effectively communicate with people and provide answers relevant to their inquiries and complaints. They do this at less cost than hiring humans and are available 24/7. This makes them essential for every company that wants to be competitive.

However, implementing AI in customer support can come with several challenges ranging from cybersecurity (underscoring the need for AI security posture management) to the cost of implementing it. Regardless, the benefits outweigh the potential downsides but it will be wise for business owners to do a cost-benefit analysis before investing in it.