Customer Experience 
Artificial intelligence in customer service isn’t a luxury item that only large enterprises offer. It’s now an industry standard, accessible to businesses of all sizes, helping them meet and exceed customer expectations with every interaction across the customer journey. Our guide details how to use AI for customer service, provides various examples, and discusses the benefits and considerations of implementing AI customer service software.
What Is AI Customer Service?
AI customer service refers to using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate tasks, assist human agents, and provide intelligent support that improves the customer experience (CX).
What Are the Benefits of AI in Customer Service?
Businesses are continuously finding new benefits of using AI for customer service. Here are a few advantages of customer service AI:
💲 Lowers operational costs: AI maximizes your resources by streamlining workflows and automating repetitive tasks, allowing support teams to handle more customer inquiries without adding headcount.
😊 Improves customer satisfaction and retention: AI reduces wait times by providing 24/7 support, offering self-service options, and executing seamless handoffs to human agents, creating satisfying experiences and boosting customer retention.
🤝 Helps provide personalized support: With conversational AI chatbots and virtual assistants, you can quickly understand customer intent and sentiment to deliver fast, personalized responses and solutions on the customer’s preferred communication channels.
📈 Boosts productivity and efficiency: Using AI in customer service intelligently routes tickets, deflects calls, and handles routine tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues.
🔥 Reduces employee burnout: Because AI helps reduce employee workload, your workforce may experience improved morale, reduced burnout, and less employee turnover.
12 Ways To Use AI for Customer Service
As the bar for customer expectations rises, delivering fast, efficient, and personalized service with every interaction is important. AI in customer service helps businesses deliver better customer experiences across the board. Let’s explore how to use AI in customer service so you can level up your customer service game.
1. Improve customer service quality
Consistent, quality customer service can set your business apart from the competition, and AI-powered tools help make that a reality. AI-powered quality assurance tools automate the QA process, allowing you to analyze more customer interactions. Key benefits include:
- Automates QA to analyze more customer interactions
- Provides valuable insights for pinpointing areas of improvement
- Helps make data-driven decisions to improve service quality
| How to use this AI in customer service: Call center quality assurance tools with AI-powered speech analytics can flag important calls based on keywords, sentiment, and metrics like silence duration. |
2. Workflow automation
AI systems automate workflows through intelligent routing, making processes faster and more efficient. With workflow automation you can:
- Tag, categorize, and prioritize tickets automatically
- Match tickets with the most suitable agent based on expertise, workload, and past interactions
- Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech analytics to understand customer intent and sentiment
| How to use this AI in customer service: An advanced IVR with conversational AI can understand natural language and use context to route customers to the most appropriate resources. It can understand the urgency in a customer’s voice, prioritize their call, and route it to the agent best suited to handle the issue. |
3. Use AI agents
AI helps customer service representatives by taking care of repetitive tasks so they can focus on issues that require specific expertise or a human touch. AI chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) provide 24/7 omnichannel support, handling common inquiries and tasks, and freeing human agents for more complex issues. AI agents answer FAQs and handle repetitive tasks, deflecting tickets and providing immediate assistance.
| How to use this AI in customer service: IVAs are AI agents that go beyond basic chatbots. They use conversational AI to reply with human-like responses to customer questions and handle tasks like checking order statuses, resetting passwords, or issuing initiating replacements for damaged products without involving a human agent. |
4. Assist agents in real time
AI empowers customer service agents by providing real-time guidance, like surfacing relevant knowledge base articles relevant to the customer’s inquiry, troubleshooting issues, and providing intelligent suggestions of the best course of action for the agent to take to reach a satisfactory resolution. You can also use AI for customer support to streamline call management tasks like logging, data entry, and ticket classification.
| How to use this AI in customer service: Agent assist tools found in AI contact centers can summarize tickets in real time, helping agents get up to speed faster. It can also use generative AI to reduce wrap times by analyzing interactions and generating call summaries in the call notes. |
5. Accelerate agent onboarding and training
Businesses use AI in customer service to accelerate onboarding and training for new customer service agents, ensuring they can handle customer inquiries from day one. Agent augmentation:
- Provides AI-driven insights and recommendations during live interactions
- Suggests relevant resources and best practices to help them navigate the call successfully
| How to use this AI in customer service: Contact center AI provides AI transcriptions and intuitive coaching tools that enable supervisors to step in to help an agent during a live interaction. |
6. Optimize scheduling and staffing needs
AI-powered workforce management tools can significantly improve and optimize business operations through intelligent scheduling and staffing. These WFM tools use predictive forecasting, which analyzes historical data on call volume, agent performance, availability, skills, and the predicted workload. Then, machine learning algorithms can predict future staffing needs and optimize schedules based on these patterns.
| How to use this AI in customer service: AI-powered WFM tools optimize resource allocation and automatically adjust schedules in response to unexpected changes in call volume or agent availability. |
7. Provide proactive customer support
AI-powered customer support tools like Nextiva and Kustomer anticipate problems and try to fix them before they happen. Using predictive analytics, AI-powered customer service software can:
- Anticipate potential problems and suggest proactive solutions
- Analyze real-time customer sentiment during interactions to prompt agents to offer proactive customer service
At the same time, automated reminders and notifications keep customers informed about service interruptions or personalized recommendations based on their history.
| How to use this AI in customer service: Connecting AI with your CRM uses data, such as previous interactions, customer behaviors, and browsing or purchase history, to tailor messaging that increases upsells and cross-sells during support interactions, increasing customer lifetime value. |
8. Personalize interactions
In addition to recommending products, AI simply improves customer interactions by personalizing conversations. This means tailoring greetings, referencing past interactions, or using real-time language detection and translation to communicate with customers in their native language instantly.
| How to use this AI in customer service: AI-powered multilingual chatbots and IVAs can understand the nuances of human language — including intent, sentiment, and context — and even cultural nuances — for respectful and effective communication. |
9. Gather customer insights and feedback
AI can take large amounts of data and customer feedback and turn it into actionable insights to improve the customer experience. Some things AI can do:
- Understand customer sentiment and feedback by analyzing text from different channels, like call recordings, live chat transcripts, and social media comments
- Identify emotional tones and find trends and patterns in customer feedback by using sentiment analysis, helping businesses address common pain points
| How to use this AI in customer service: AI-powered sentiment analysis systems can recognize and respond to emotional cues, providing agents with suggestions on how to approach the interaction with empathy. |
10. Enhance self-service options
Businesses use AI to improve self-service resources, such as online portals, help centers, and knowledge base content to help customers help themselves. This keeps ticketing and call queues more manageable while reducing wait times. A few ways AI can improve self-service include:
- Identifying content gaps through conversation analysis and searches.
- Streamlining content creation with AI-powered tools that suggest relevant articles.
- Tailoring the experience based on past interactions and browsing history, offering personalized articles.
| How to use this AI in customer service: Generative AI tools can help scale your knowledge base and improve customer service by embedding knowledge links directly in chat interfaces, providing instant access to information for both customers and agents. |
5 Things To Consider When Implementing AI in Customer Service
Adding AI to customer service is a big decision — but a necessary one to stay competitive. Here are a few things to consider when choosing the right AI customer service platform for your business.
Data security
Customers want to know how you use their personal and sensitive data, especially when AI is involved. Since AI technology relies heavily on data, looking for a solution prioritizes data security and transparency is important.
Make sure the AI customer service solution you pick maintains compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA to help businesses avoid legal penalties while adhering to industry standards. To enhance data security, businesses should look for AI tools with features like data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits, ensuring responsible AI use while minimizing risks.
Impact on employees
While AI is designed to make work easier, employees may feel hesitant about embracing it. One concern is fear of being replaced, as AI can automate customer service tasks, potentially causing some roles to evolve or reduced positions. Businesses need to assess how AI will impact job security and communicate its benefits clearly.
Show how AI can boost efficiency and allow employees to focus on more meaningful tasks. By addressing these concerns and training employees to use AI effectively, you can implement AI in customer service in a way that benefits both the business and its employees.
Integration with existing systems
When integrating AI into your customer service operations, consider how well it will integrate with your current systems. You’ll want AI software that easily connects with tools like your CRM, ticketing platforms, and communication channels to keep everything running smoothly.
A fast implementation is key, so you can start seeing the benefits of AI without long delays. It’s also a good idea to choose AI solutions that don’t require a lot of technical know-how, making deployment simpler and reducing the need for IT resources.
Data quality and accuracy
AI models learn from the data they’re trained on, making data quality and accuracy an important consideration. If AI is trained on low-quality, biased, or inaccurate data, this can result in errors and can cause the system to make mistakes. Accurate data is also key to offering personalized recommendations and making informed decisions, while inaccurate data can damage a brand’s reputation.
The Future of Customer Service AI Starts with Nextiva
From self-service options to intelligent agent assist, AI has already transformed the face of customer service. With Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center, you get all the bells and whistles to enhance the customer experience. From fast, AI-generated call summaries to AI-powered quality assurance tools, Nextiva has everything you need to deliver exceptional customer experiences. The future is now. Try Nextiva today. 👇
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AI Customer Service FAQS
Do you still have questions about AI-powered customer service? Our FAQ can fill in the blanks so you have all the information you need about how AI is being used in customer service.
Still have questions? Our FAQ can fill in the blanks so you have all the info you need about how AI is being used in customer service.
How does AI in customer service work? AI customer support consist of various moving parts that come together to understand, respond to, and assist customers and human agents. Here’s an overview of three key components and their impact on customer service and business operations.
Contextual understanding: AI uses sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context of conversations. Sentiment analysis helps AI detect how customers feel, while NLP enables AI to understand customer intent, creating faster, more accurate responses.
Business relationship: Customer data integration allows AI to provide decision-makers and support teams valuable customer insights into their relationship with the business. This enables agents to prioritize high-value customers and deliver personalized experiences tailored to each customer’s needs and preferences.
Outcomes: Using AI for customer service can help meet business and customer expectations, reduce churn, and drive revenue. For example, AI customer service tools boost efficiency, allowing customer service teams to achieve goals such as first-contact resolution and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
While AI excels at handling routine tasks and customer engagement through natural, human-like conversations, navigating complex and emotional situations is still better suited for human agents. AI can identify customer sentiment and ensure a seamless handoff between AI and agents when needed. AI learns with each interaction, continuously improving the ability to understand natural language and human emotions.
No, AI is not here to replace human agents. AI is a powerful tool used to enhance the skills of human agents, handle routine tasks, and provide real-time support. AI empowers agents to focus on complex issues and build stronger customer relationships, resulting in better customer service experiences, increased agent productivity and efficiency, and happier agents.
AI has been adopted across various industries, including retail and e-commerce, healthcare, call centers, and banking and finance.
Basically, any industry that provides customer support can implement AI to enhance experiences, increase operational efficiency, and reduce costs. As AI customer support tools continue to evolve, businesses will certainly discover even more use cases to improve customer service.
AI-based call centers leverage intelligent tools to meet customer needs in several ways. For example, AI-powered chatbots can answer basic questions and deflect calls, while advanced IVR systems use large language models (LLM) to understand speech patterns and route customers to the most appropriate agent. This improves response times and enhances customer service interactions. AI can also assist support agents during calls with real-time guidance, insights, and generative AI tools for faster, more efficient service.
