How to Use AI in Customer Service [Tips for Small Businesses]

70% of customer experience leaders think that generative AI makes customer interaction more efficient. So, businesses are adapting AI in customer support and small businesses should adapt it more efficiently to improve their business performance. Because solving queries manually takes up valuable time and energy, which could be better spent on innovation, improving your offerings, or managing inventory.

For this reason, this blog will explore everything about how to use AI for customer service and how small businesses can take the leverage out of it. 

AI in Customer Service: What It Is & Why It Matters?

AI or Artificial Intelligence in customer service means integrating the technology to improve customer interactions and engagement on a website. This interaction can happen through a chatbot, virtual assistant, analytics tool etc. Manual processing when interacting with customers can be time-consuming and expensive, but AI can significantly reduce both. 

Suppose you have launched a crafting eCommerce website, where customers have a lot of queries, such as shipping time, order processing system, discount offers, loyalty programs, etc. Customers can ask for help from a customer service representative to learn in detail about these. Now, manual processing and human interaction may take time if there are a lot of queries. But with AI and ready-made answers, customers can get their answers promptly. Using this, new or small businesses can reduce their customer representative costs, hiring costs and grow their business. 

Why Should Small Businesses Use AI-Powered Customer Support?

AI can serve multiple purposes for any type of business. But small businesses can take most of the opportunity out of it. Small businesses that are trying to grow in a competitive market need to save time and money for better productivity and efficiency. For this, AI can be useful. Sp, why use AI for customer service? Here are some reasons why small businesses should consider incorporating AI in their customer service. 

Increase Productivity

Using AI in customer service can increase productivity for a business. Because this automated process helps to take care of all customer queries, and thus, other team members can focus on some important tasks. 

For example, a small business owner might not afford to hire a dedicated person for customer service. So, he has to reply to all the customer queries. Now, if they use AI to solve the queries and focus more on improving their products or services, then they can grow their business more by prioritizing innovation.

Faster Response Time

Manual process in solving customers’ problems can take a lot of time. Sometimes your representative might not be available to take a break. This might slow down response time. Again, schedule-based customer service representatives might increase the hiring cost. Here, AI is the most useful solution. Through AI, businesses can ensure faster response times and increase customer satisfaction by providing quick responses to any solutions they need.

Cost Efficiency

Small businesses start with few resources and a budget. So, they have to be cost-efficient in doing their business. Here, using AI for customer service can help. AI can reduce the cost of hiring as well as provide 24/7 services without any overtime pay. This also lowers the training costs for the representatives. This has become a useful solution for small businesses and can reduce costs in so many areas. 

Ways to Use AI in Customer Support

Small businesses can utilize AI in many different ways. AI can help with marketing automation to project management. In customer service, AI can also be used in many ways. Here are some of the ways you can utilize AI for customer support. 

Chatbot

One of the common ways small businesses can use is an AI-powered chatbot for customer support. Usually, in social media platforms like Facebook, users use this feature to bring customer service efficiently. With AI-powered customer service, bots are intelligently trained to understand and respond to customer queries instantly, significantly reducing wait times and delivering quick, accurate solutions. 

For instance, if you have a business on a social media platform, you can set up messenger bots. There, you can add some common queries and train the bot with the answers. Next time, when a customer asks a query in Messenger, they can ask it and the training bot will reply with that answer.

AI-based Knowledge Bases

An AI-based knowledge base is mostly used in small businesses to enhance and make your knowledge base super smart. In a traditional knowledge base, information is created, updated, and organized by maintaining a manual process. However, a knowledge base is maintained in an AI-based knowledge base, with the combination of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning). 

NLP is one of the branches of AI that enables computers to understand human language. On the other hand, ML is a type of algorithm that learn from different data inputs and identifies patterns based on personalized interactions. In an AI-based knowledge base, a combination of NLP and ML improves knowledge bases, based on search queries, customer behavior and common queries. Based on that, they update and provide accurate information to the users over time.

Speech Analysis

Identifying customer sentiment through speech recognition is now one of the most popular features. The global market for speech and voice recognition is projected to reach $31.82 billion by 2025, with a significant portion driven by advancements in AI-powered speech generation. So, small businesses can utilize this opportunity. 

Here, small businesses usually take customer queries via telephone. There, they can train up AI tools to understand customers’ speech and their sentiment, and by analyzing that, the AI can give a prompt solution to the queries. This helps businesses reduce the cost of call center representatives and reduce the waiting time. 

Real Time Data Analytics

A significant part of customer service is data analysis. This analysis includes – 

• How many queries are coming each day?
• For which type of problems are customers asking for solutions to most?
• From which area are customers asking for queries? 
• What are the demographics of customers?

And many more. This type of data helps small businesses to know their audience better and make improvements in their products or services. Now, analyzing this huge amount of data can be a difficult and time-consuming task. But if there is an AI tool, it will maintain customer queries as well as identify and refine the data, then it easier for small businesses to analyze it. 

Steps to Implement AI in Customer Service

Now that you have identified different ways that you can implement AI for customer service in small businesses, let’s have a look at the key steps to implement AI in customer service. These steps will help you create a well-structured and planned customer service process.

Imagine you have an online jewellery shop, where you want to implement AI-powered customer service. Now, in this section, you will explore how your shop can maintain a step-by-step process to implement AI in their customer service.

Step 1: Identify Business Needs

Small businesses have limited resources. So it is essential to identify first where it is important to implement AI in the specific part of customer service. Your jewelry shop is getting repeated queries about delivery time, customization, etc. Now, replying to these repeated customer queries hampers the innovation process in product and inventory. So, here now you have identified your specific needs. 

Business Needs: Automating repeated customer queries

Identifying this need helps you to decide which tools to use, what will be the ROI and how you can train AI to solve the problem. This will be discussed in the next step.

Step 2: Set Clear Goals & Objectives

Now, since your jewelry shop understands the needs, you need to identify what the clear goal is or what you want to achieve by implementing it in customer service. Here, for this shop, let us make a SMART goal to implement this in customer service.

Goal: Automate 80% of repetitive customer queries via AI chatbot

Now, this goal will help to identify the right tool that can align with the goal and get a clear idea about the improvement criteria for investing in the tool.

Step 3: Choose the Right Tool

After identifying the business needs and setting up the goal, you got a clear idea of what to do, now it is time to identify how to do it.

To choose the right tool, you now need to understand which tool will fulfill the business needs and help to achieve the goal. If you are planning for a social media platform like Facebook, then you can use a messenger bot. 

If you are planning to create a website knowledge base or FAQs that cover all common customer queries, then you can use tools like BetterDocs or Hubspot. Also, you need to keep in mind the budget to choose the right tool, which will be affordable for them. 

Do not panic! For you, we have listed down some essential AI tools that will help you in your business’s customer service. Stay tuned!

Step 4: Train Employees

Now, the jewelry shop has completed all the steps and let us assume you have identified the right tool. But you also have to understand how to use this tool and what to do if some technical difficulties arise. 

To do this, the next step is to train your employees about the tools, how to properly use them, and what the ins and outs are. Also, which employee will be responsible for maintaining the tool and based on that, proper training is needed for any unexpected problems.

Step 5: Monitor and Analyze

Finally, you need to monitor and analyze what is the current status of their customer service implementation. How many queries have you received? What is the current status, what is the satisfaction rate, etc. 

Also, after a few months, you need to know if the tool has completed the goal of reducing 80% of repetitive customer queries. If the goal is matched, then the jewellery shop successfully implemented AI in its customer service.

Like this hypothetical example, these steps are crucial for any small business. These steps will help your business implement AI successfully.

10 AI Customer Service Tips Every Small Business Should Follow

Now, identifying the objective and steps, we have listed some essential tips that you can follow for an efficient AI-powered customer support. These tips will help you improve your customer service experience for your users and make the overall process smoother. Let us look at some of these tips: 

1. Train AI-Powered Chatbot for Customer Support: Try to train your AI chatbots with real customer conversations to make personalized responses. So, when the next customer is asking for a follow-up query, your AI can answer promptly. Also, your customers must have the feeling that, their talking with a real person, not with a chatbot. So, small businesses should train AI in that way, so it builds authenticity.

2. Use Chatbot to Handle FAQs: As our previous example of a Jewellery shop, AI can be super helpful to handle common queries. Solving repetitive queries can be time-consuming and divert focus from some essential tasks. Using AI to solve these queries can help small businesses focus more on product improvement and innovation. 

3. Provide 24/7 Customer Support: While you are training up your AI, make sure it provides 24/7 customer support. There are some tools where you can set up a specific time limit to solve customer queries. But it is better not to limit, because some customers are from different time zones. So, to ensure consistent support, try to provide 24/7 customer support with AI for a better experience.

4. Use AI to Detect Human Emotions:  If your AI can detect human emotions, then it can act accordingly with the customer, and this will also feel personalized to the customers. For example, let us say your customer is angry with queries. If your AI behaves similarly, this dissatisfaction will worsen. Rather, you have to train the AI in that way; if the customer is angry, even then, behave politely and solve the problem with a calm tone, then it will help defuse the tension and make the customer feel heard and respected.

5. Analyze Customer Feedback: Analyze each customer feedback. If you see that the customer dissatisfaction rate is high, then you might need to check your AI tool to see if it is working properly or not. If the satisfaction rate is high, then try to improve it further and train AI to solve more complex problems. 

6. Personalize Responses Based on Query History: Train AI to analyze the customers’ query history. So that when the customer is following up, AI can reply in such a way that it remembers the queries and helps accordingly. This personalization will make customers feel valued and make them feel good about the product or service.

7. AI Translation for Multilingual Support: If your small business has a diverse set of audiences, then multilingual support can give a personalized feeling to your customers. If your AI is well-trained in different languages, it can detect problems in different languages and help them to solve their queries.

8. Integrate with CRM Platform: If your business has an internal Customer Relationship Management platform, then it is a best practice to integrate your customer support system with it. Because through this, your AI tool or bot can fetch the data of your customers and thus solve different queries based on their purchasing behavior.

9. Prioritize Support Tickets: By analyzing customers’ behavior with AI, it is best practice to prioritize support tickets. That means solving the problems based on the most frequent customer queries. In this way, this support system process can be faster and smoother. 

10. Continuously Update AI with Customer Data: Customers might update their information from time to time. For example, some customers might have changed their email or home address. In that case, training up AI with the latest customer data can help it to better understand the customers’ behavior and communicate accordingly. 

Tools for Small Businesses for AI-Powered Customer Support

Small businesses need an affordable solution for their AI-based customer service. Now, in this section, we will talk about some of the most essential tools that small business owners can use for their business. 

BetterDocs

BetterDocs is a knowledge-base solution for WordPress users. This plugin allows you to create internal or multiple knowledge bases. Its latest AI feature makes the customer experience more efficient and solves any business problems promptly. 

This WordPress knowledge base plugin, BetterDocs, chatbot feature with an AI-powered chatbot addon, allowing customers will get instant answers, analyze and process the data from your entire website. 

Also, you can make your knowledge base with AI by writing a prompt. After that, AI will automatically generate the content for your knowledge base and it will help you make your knowledge base faster. 

Pricing: BetterDocs starts with $55 for one site, with ready documentation templates, written with AI, and an AI chatbot add-on feature. Also, this affordable pricing unlocks almost all the features of the plugin. To try out, you can start with the FREE plan. For more pricing details, check the pricing plan here 

Hubspot

Hubspot is a CRM platform that helps in marketing and customer service. It also has AI-driven solutions such as AI-featured content creation, to manage email and workflows, deduplication, and AI AI-powered companion, Breeze. This AI customer service helps to give quick customer support and solutions. 

Pricing:

Hubspot’s CRM is mostly free. Their premium plan starts at $50 per month. Their subscription base depends on the team size.

Zendesk AI

To improve their service, Zendesk has introduced generative AI. Its AI agent is capable of solving complex problems. You can train the AI with its knowledge base problems and provide instant solutions to customers’ queries. It also generates insights into customer service with AI and provides a detailed solution. 

Pricing:

Its pricing starts with £20 per agent per month. Also, it has different upgraded plans with different upgraded features. But for small businesses, it is better to start with a plan.

Cognigy

With the vision to remove poor customer service, Cognigy makes AI-powered customer service solutions for customers. Personalized customer experience, Voice and chat-ready services, and humanlike dialogues help businesses to grow big and automate the entire process.

Pricing:

This tool’s pricing depends on the company size and how many agents you want to integrate. To know the details about the pricing, you have to give the information to them and get the quotes based on their representatives. 

Aivo

To give a comprehensive experience with customer service, Aivo provides generative AI solutions. They offer unique auto-generated responses, complementing confidential and transactional responses to create the best customer experience. 

Pricing:

Aivo follows a quotation-based pricing model. They do not have a free trial plan available. You can book a demo call and ask for quotations from their team based on your team size and query requirements. 

Enhance Your Customer Journey with Efficient AI-Powered Customer Support 

The world is changing with AI. Small businesses that are planning to grow for a longer period should leverage this opportunity to achieve faster growth and bring innovation. With the efficient process, within AI, they can make a smarter and better customer experience. So, make this process smooth and efficient with AI and thrive in business faster. 

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