How AI Can Become Your Biggest Customer Service Tool

As AI becomes more refined, we are finding more and more ways to use it in everyday life. For solopreneurs, AI in customer service is a logical next step because it can help make their business more robust. Read on to learn more about ways small business owners can use AI to connect with their customers.

About AI in Customer Service

Customer service can make or break a business. And for solopreneurs or small business owners who do not have enough resources, artificial intelligence (AI) can fill an important gap and lead to more positive customer experiences. For example, AI chatbots can interact with clients at all hours — something customer service agents might not be able to do. Or natural language processing (NLP) can interpret a person’s questions and provide answers.

5 Benefits of Using AI in Customer Service

AI can strengthen your efforts and make for happy customers. Here are a few ways that you and your customers will benefit:

1. Real-time responses: AI does not have the same limitations as human agents — namely, needing downtime. So while you might be an excellent customer service team of one or a few, you cannot be available 24/7. An AI-powered chatbot, on the other hand, can provide real-time responses to customer issues no matter the time.
2. A better understanding of customers: AI can collect data and help you analyze it. Whether through predictive analytics or sentiment analysis, AI can gain a better understanding of your clients by considering their tone of voice and common questions. It can even break down and understand customer feedback. All of these valuable insights can better inform you on different customer journeys to help you build more personalized experiences.
3. Improved workflows: AI can improve your workflows at any part of the customer service process; AI can serve as the first customer touchpoint via chat, automatically offer discounts to clients that meet a certain threshold or reach out to remind them to finish an order.
4. Increased customer support: As a solopreneur, you are a team of one, but it doesn’t mean you have to get everything done on your own. Using AI means you are making your team bigger because now you are not alone when answering customer questions.
5. Less human error: Repetitive tasks can come with errors. For example, if you want to reach out to customers by email after they sign up for a certain feature, you would have a much harder time doing it one by one. However, if you automatically let AI deal with this, you’ll cover more people. Also, AI learns more and more each time from each customer interaction, which can help reduce errors.

4 Ways to Use AI for Stronger Customer Relationships

Start putting AI to use if you want to strengthen your interactions with customers. Here are a few tools to try:

1. Customer portals: You can use AI to help you build customer self-service portals, full of useful articles that answer common issues.
2. Customer support chatbots: Customer service chatbots can answer routine questions and customer requests, and even link clients to knowledge articles where they can find more information. They can serve as a virtual assistant for customer support representatives, or they can handle the majority of customer interactions. Since a chatbot can be available at any time of the day, it can bring faster service to your customers. Noodle has a chatbot that does just that. It interacts with your customers and helps point them in the right direction until you can fill in.
3. Enhanced support in different languages: Not all your customers will speak English, so if you have a multilingual clientele, you might want to consider a tool to communicate with people in their preferred language.
4. Email sorting: AI can automatically respond to customers’ messages and let them know when to expect an email response. You can also use AI to help sort messages by priority level.