From foraging for food using weaponry made out of stones & sticks to ordering it from a distant outlet, we’ve come a long way. Even now, we’re constantly aiming for betterment with technology as our biggest ally in this journey. The most recent and probably the biggest contribution technology has given is the invention of AI. AI & its development has bought perks like automation, optimization and even execution in some cases with itself. Presently, AI is assisting us with a variety of tasks using the perks mentioned before. In this article, we’ll learn more about AI & its overall impact, especially on the field of customer support. There are countless AI Chatbots out there, heavily impacting the field of customer support. Is it bad? Is it good? How much is the scale of the impact? We’ll tackle all of it here. Let’s learn more about AI Chatbots’ impact on Customer Support.
Customer Support: Where Does AI Chatbot Lie In This Field?
All of us are familiar with customer support. We’ve all been at a point in our lives where we dealt with customer support. Whether it’s our ISP, online shopping platforms, food delivery, automotive industry or something else, customer support is a common field. We reach out to customer support in case we run into trouble related to their products/services. We convey our problems to them, and they provide us with solutions. It is a pretty simple exchange of information in a way.
Now one may ask, where does AI come in all of this? As mentioned before, AI is developed to automate and simplify tasks usually requiring human intelligence. The entire field of customer support falls under the category of such tasks. AI is evolving quite rapidly & soon enough it might grow capable enough to completely replace humans in this field. That is not an exaggeration. It has already started. A simple Google search will lead you to hundreds of AI Chatbots developed for customer support. These chatbots are capable of holding conversations with users and even helping them with their problems to an extent. AI chatbots don’t get exhausted from working, are trained to identify certain keywords, generate appropriate responses and stay deployed 24×7. This is where we start to see the actual value of an AI powered chatbot.
AI Chatbots bring great value to the table in terms of overall functionality. Businesses & startups have started to rely on these AI powered chatbots to manage and improve their customer support. The AI Chatbots presently available for us to use & the ones currently in development, both share similar objectives. Automating repetitive elements and saving time by streamlining customer support chat are some fundamental features of an AI Chatbot.
These AI Chatbots have the potential to take over and replace human employees in the field of customer support. They’re capable of providing personalized & quick assistance to both customers and business owners. Let’s discuss it in more depth.
Impact Of AI Chatbots On Customer Support: An Overview
So far we’ve discussed how & where opportunities/roles for AI are created in the field of customer support. Developed for the purpose of streamlining customer support via chat, there are some AI tools with great overall viability. Customer support is a field where people need to maintain a constant state of concentration. This allows them to deal with their customers and their respective problems efficiently. However, it is a draining task that often isn’t very rewarding for human employees as well. When people started learning about AI’s capabilities, the idea of leaving certain tasks of a job to it made sense. It was like a naturally occurring phenomena where people realized the true essence of AI.
The development of AI and AI tools brought about a lot of changes. People started learning about them and their capability to automate, simplify, rectify and optimize. Presently, there are hundreds of AI powered tools developed for providing assistance with customer support out there. These AI tools for Customer Service provide great value by saving precious time and dealing with customers on their own. The question, ‘how do they manage to do that’ gains relevance here. AI & AI tools have been trained for various things, and this is just a small part of their entire functionality.
Artificial intelligence can be trained to predict, calculate and generate. The same concept is applied when we’re talking about Customer Service. AI powered chatbots have the ability to identify keywords from a customer’s message. They use the keyword to understand the issue at hand & generate responses suited best to their understanding of the problem. Some AI tools like ChatGPT are also capable of holding contextual conversations. Hence, even if a customer approaches with something other than a traditional complaint/query, some AI tools can manage it. AI is capable of handling customers’ issues by generating personalized responses well. We also can’t overlook the fact that there’s a massive difference in response speeds between an AI and a human.
Impact of AI Chatbots on Customer Service: Good or Bad?
Although it is quite important, it is very hard to simply draw a conclusion and label AI’s impact on customer service good or bad. AI is still under development, and is guaranteed to improve marginally in the near future. Let’s discuss both the good and the bad based on what we’ve learnt so far.
AI is more efficient than humans. In case of customer service, it is able to generate responses within seconds and save lots of precious time. It also maintains more consistency in conversations. AI is capable of generating personalized responses, and it is also able to improvise instantly. Furthermore, AI has almost immeasurable room for improvement/upgrades, promising us even more feature packed & awesome AI tools in future.
On the other hand, although human customer service teams may be slower and less efficient, they are more reliable. They are capable of understanding fluctuating elements of a conversation. Only a human mind can comprehend and tackle tones, emotions, mood and intent underlying a customer’s message.
Final Thoughts
Although it’s clear how AI is a superior option for handling customer support, it still has ways to go. It is also quite evident that it can’t entirely replace humans and take on full time customer support jobs. We discussed the concept of AI powered Chatbots, their impact on customer support, and their pros & cons. We find the verdict to be quite clear. AI powered Chatbots are developed with the purpose of assisting us with customer support, not take over for us. It makes total sense to use the aid of AI whenever needed while still filling in the gaps where a human touch is needed. We hope that this article was of help to you, and now we’ll be signing off.