Your Industry Is Using AI To Improve Customer Service — Are You?

Across all industries, AI in customer service improves how businesses interact with their customers. Let’s have a look at some real-world examples, and the AI tools you need to adopt for your own organisation.

We’ve all been there with a simple issue that takes ages to resolve. Energy bills? Wi-Fi account? Lost parcel? You’re talking to customer services, and it feels never-ending. You find yourself increasingly frustrated with how many times you’ve repeated yourself. The third time you’ve given your account details. The third time you’ve explained the issue. The third time you’ve questioned if there’s a better way to do this.

And the answer is, yes, there is. With AI. AI comes to the rescue, helping service agents understand your needs and resolve issues swiftly and quickly. Job done.

Today, AI in customer service is defining the future of customer experiences. Its use has grown exponentially in recent years. The number of service decision-makers using AI has increased by 88% since 2020. Across all industries, AI provides the tools to improve customer experiences at every touchpoint. Interactions become personalised, useful, and effective. With ‌support from AI, your team works smarter, not harder.

If you want to know the benefits of AI in customer service, how it’s being used across different industries, and which tools are needed, read on. 

AI for better customer experience

Using digital tools for better customer experiences has come a long way. The early days of interactive voice response systems used pre-recorded audio prompts and keypress menus to let us interact with automated phone systems … and the results were hit and miss.

Now, when it comes to customer expectations, they expect you to know who they are and what they want, on whichever channel they choose to contact you on. They don’t want to repeat themselves. And they definitely don’t want to wait. Our research found that globally, 72% of consumers will remain loyal to companies that provide fast service and 65% to those who offer a personalised experience.

But how do you move towards a personalised and fast customer experience? AI.

AI can help give you a 360-customer view. You can use it to track interactions across every touchpoint and resolve incidents quickly, powering chatbots, advanced knowledge management software, and ticketing tools. The result? You deliver personalised, effective support, building loyalty at every touchpoint.

AI transforming customer service across industries

AI is working wonders across multiple industries. The examples below show use cases applied in different sectors, but in general, most of AI’s advantages are industry-agnostic and can be applied to almost all businesses.

Healthcare

When you get ill, you rely on your doctor to help you get better. As do thousands of other patients. The sheer volume of patients means processes can be slow and difficult to manage. But imagine if you could speed up diagnoses by comparing your symptoms with millions of others in a streamlined system. 

This is what AI does. By analysing vast amounts of healthcare data, and spotting patterns and anomalies across thousands of cases, AI enables doctors to accelerate diagnosis. Case management systems and automated processes mean they can accelerate treatment and resolution, too.

Finance

The financial industry is fast-paced. Keeping ahead of market fluctuations and demand can be highly valuable, especially when managing customers’ wealth. Using machine-learning algorithms, AI analyses patterns in market behaviour to enhance your forecasting accuracy, gain an edge over competitors, and get bigger returns for your clients.

Retail and e-commerce

As a modern-day shopper, you might use multiple channels to buy a product. Whether you see an ad on TikTok or Instagram and buy it on the website or in-store, your journey switches between many touchpoints. And we expect this journey to be a seamless one. This is where AI helps.

Retail and e-commerce omnichannel routing systems ensure this is a seamless experience across all touchpoints (email, chat, phone, social media). Couple this with AI-powered service replies (chatbots, virtual assistants, 24/7 support) and you maximise your use of AI in customer service to provide consistent and cohesive support, regardless of the platform chosen by the customer. You can automate routine tasks to provide instant responses to customer enquiries, which resolves issues quickly and ensures a consistently high quality of service.

Manufacturing and logistics

The manufacturing and logistics industries include the planning of vast amounts of data across many different channels. The work you carry out is often spread across locations and requires an immense amount of coordination. With AI, you can optimise route planning, inventory management, and demand prediction through realistic simulations and synthetic datasets — to adapt to fluctuating market conditions and your customers’ needs more easily.

Also, with AI-powered mobile workforce solutions, you ensure your employees can access relevant information and tools while in the field, on the go. This not only improves responsiveness and agility but keeps your team safe — especially in scenarios and locations where quick resolutions are needed.

Enhancing customer experience with AI-driven tools

With AI grounded in CRM data, customer experiences are powered to new heights. Responses are enriched with dynamic, personalised information. So, what do you need to get started? The following are some of the primary AI tools that improve customer experience.

1. Service Replies: With AI-generated service replies, you can automate responses to common enquiries, providing instant solutions without the need for manual intervention. This not only reduces agent handle time but also ensures consistency in replies. For example, Einstein Copilot taps into the power of generative AI to deliver trusted responses grounded in your company’s data.
2. Search for Knowledge: AI-powered search engines make your information easy to find. And over time, they learn what industries, geographies, and other factors matter to each user, and personalise search results based on that information.
3. Chatbots: Modern chatbots are equipped with advanced natural language processing capabilities that enable them to engage in meaningful conversations with customers. Salesforce’s Einstein Bots use Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding to decode customer questions, written colloquially, across multiple languages. By understanding this context, intent, and sentiment, they can provide tailored responses and fast resolution.