How generative AI is transforming customer service

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In the rapidly evolving customer service landscape, Generative AI has emerged as a game-changer. At indigo.ai, we're at the forefront of this transformative wave, and in this article, we'll explore how Generative AI is reshaping the customer service industry. From understanding its fundamentals to highlighting real-world examples and showcasing how indigo.ai can revolutionize your customer service, we've covered everything.

Generative Artificial Intelligence and Customer Service - An Introduction

To embark on this journey, let's start with the basics. Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence. It’s a technology that excels at creating human-like text and conversations with the potential to revolutionize customer service. Imagine an AI that understands, engages, and interacts with customers like a human agent. This is what Generative AI brings to the table.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI encompasses deep-learning models that possess the ability to process raw data, such as extensive sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, or the complete works of an artist like Van Gogh, and through a learning process, generate outputs that are statistically likely when given a prompt. At a fundamental level, generative models encode a simplified representation of their training data and use this encoding to create new content that shares similarities with the original data but is not identical. For a long time, generative models were employed in statistical analysis for numerical data. However, with the advent of deep learning, they have been extended to handle more complex data types like images, speech, and others.

The integration of generative AI in customer service and customer support has become essential for companies aiming to provide a successful customer experience. However, how can one approach generative AI technology effectively?

The answer lies in adopting a human perspective: treating AI like a new team member. Preparing and training AI comprehensively from the outset will significantly influence its behavior and capabilities, ensuring seamless integration into your customer service ecosystem.

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How Generative Artificial Intelligence will transform customer service

So, how exactly will Generative AI transform customer service? Let's delve into the ways this technology is reshaping the industry:

Personalized conversations

One of the most significant ways Generative AI is transforming customer service is by enabling highly personalized conversations. Traditional customer service chatbots and Conversational Interfaces often follow a rigid script. This can be frustratingly unhelpful when customers have unique or complex inquiries. Generative AI can understand the nuances of customer requests and generate responses that are tailored to the specific context.

Generative AI tailors responses and recommendations to individual preferences by analyzing customer data. This personal touch fosters more profound customer connections, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. It can consider a customer's purchase history, preferences, and even tone of voice, creating a more human-like and engaging conversation. This level of personalization can significantly improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.

24/7 availability

Another significant advantage of Generative Artificial Intelligence in customer service is its ability to provide continuous support 24/7. Customers today expect instant answers, and waiting until business hours to get assistance is no longer acceptable. Virtual assistants powered by Generative Artificial Intelligence can be available 24/7, ensuring that customers can get help when they need it.

This continuous availability and the ability to handle a large volume of requests simultaneously improve customer satisfaction and allow companies to operate more efficiently. They can handle large volumes of customer requests at any time, allowing companies to easily expand their customer service operations.

Handling complex inquiries

Traditional customer service and customer support agents often need help with complex technical inquiries that require in-depth knowledge. Generative AI can be trained on vast amounts of information and quickly generate accurate and detailed responses to even the most challenging questions.

This capability is precious for healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and tech support industries, where customers often have intricate queries. Generative AI can provide quick answers, reducing customer frustration and improving the overall quality of service. It ensures coherent responses to frequently asked questions. Service quality remains consistent whether a customer interacts with a human agent or an AI-driven system.

Multilingual support and continuous learning

In an increasingly globalized world, businesses often interact with customers of different languages. Generative AI can provide seamless multilingual & conversational support, breaking down language barriers and expanding a company's reach to a global audience. This opens up new markets and demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and accessibility.

Moreover, generative AI is not static; but it's constantly learning and improving. These virtual assistants can analyze customer interactions and feedback through machine learning algorithms to enhance their responses over time. This means that as they accumulate more data and experience, by becoming even more proficient at providing excellent customer service. Adding to this, data collected by AI can be used by the company for strategic actions in customer experience, marketing, and sales.

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How you can use indigo.ai to reshape your customer service

At indigo.ai, we've been utilizing Generative AI models since 2019, fully understanding their potential and limitations. Power must come with control. Generative AI must be used effectively and be inserted into the business context strategically according to the type of company and its business strategies. Companies cannot afford to make poor decisions.

Our 'no-code' SaaS platform empowers brands to create their Conversational Artificial Intelligence effortlessly. Whether chatbots or voicebots, our platform adapts complex Generative AI models to specific business contexts and needs to expedite the most crucial business metrics. We approach the integration of generative AI into corporate customer service by treating it as if it were a newly hired employee.

Hence, we've delineated three steps to seamlessly integrate it into business operations:

Step 1: Allow generative AI to read company documents

To unlock the full potential of generative AI, the initial step involves providing it with access to the company's knowledge and documents. These resources become the source of “truth”, the knowledge base that fuels AI accuracy. Hence, it is crucial to ensure accessibility to all pertinent materials within the organization, encompassing product or service documents, chat transcripts, FAQs, and any other elements that faithfully reflect the company and customer support operations.

Despite the impressive capabilities of Generative AI models, relying on something other than them is essential to represent your company, as they may not have the most accurate or real-time information. Moreover, training a language model from scratch can be costly, requiring time, effort, and significant computational resources. Even adapting an existing model to your domain-specific data is a more cost-effective solution, but it still takes time and may not be practical to wait every time you want to update content.

To avoid these issues, the practical solution is to maintain your knowledge base as the source of truth and allow Generative AI to refer to it. To do that, we have developed the function of uploading company documents to our platform, creating a knowledge base that allows the Generative AI to adapt seamlessly to the company's specific needs.

Combining generative AI tools with company information lets you get the best of both worlds: rapid and convenient content generation based on the most up-to-date reference materials.

Step 2: Train generative AI to perform contextual actions

The second crucial step to maximize the use of Generative AI is to teach it to perform contextual actions. To enable AI to automatically address customer requests and provide an excellent customer service experience, you must provide AI access to company APIs. Otherwise, AI may be limited to providing only primary responses instead of performing complex actions like processing a payment refund, updating an account, or personalizing the experience so customers feel attention and commitment.

It is important to note that current language models predict the next word. While they do this very effectively, they are incapable of taking action on behalf of the customer. However, they can identify when to connect the customer to third-party software that can perform the requested action.

The decision to provide the virtual assistant with the ability to use company APIs requires collaboration between different teams within the company.

Our platform, through its "API Block" and "Condition Block" functions, allows integration of the virtual assistant with any company system and performs actions based on real-time customer data. This enables the creation of an interactive and contextual experience for your customers, allowing them to perform specific actions and receive personalized assistance efficiently and accurately.

Step 3: Introduce generative AI to colleagues

The third fundamental step in using Generative AI for successful Customer Service is integrating it within the organization as if it were a new employee. Training Generative AI in institutional knowledge and the expertise of experts within the company is essential for the optimal use of this technology. To do this, you need to:

Identify resources within the company that will be involved in managing the Chatbot.
Prepare the virtual assistant to transfer requests to competent individuals.
Provide the necessary tools to enable these individuals to offer their expertise and train AI.

Our platform is built to be managed by the customer service team independently, without requiring continuous support from the technical team.

With AI automatically handling many customer requests, there is an opportunity to direct truly unique demands to the customer service team members who are best equipped to manage them. To truly optimize the customer experience, AI must facilitate the transfer of expertise to the right people. The "Human Takeover" function of our platform allows customer assistance to intervene directly in live chat conversations or through other communication channels the company chooses. Additionally, the platform redirects customer requests to the appropriate individuals for more structured customer service operations, ensuring a complete and personalized customer service experience.

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Examples of companies using generative AI for customer service in a transformative way

To truly appreciate the power of Generative Artificial Intelligence, let's explore some real examples of companies using this technology for exceptional customer service:

Lavazza: reduction in dropout rates

Lavazza, a leading presence in the global coffee industry, has embraced our state-of-the-art generative AI-powered solution to enhance customer service during its online subscription service enrollment.

The core objective was to leverage the capabilities of generative AI to effectively reduce abandonment rates by Intelligently Addressing User Requests. The results have been remarkable, with an astounding 85% of users reporting their deep satisfaction with the bot-driven experience.

Santander Consumer Bank: virtual assistant

Banks and financial institutions use Generative AI-powered virtual assistants Rationalize customer requests. These assistants handle tasks like checking balances, facilitating transfers, and delivering information promptly, enhancing overall service efficiency.

Santander Consumer Bank partnered with us to apply AI algorithms, automating these processes and optimizing user interactions. More than 80% of users found the content they were searching for. Moreover, each new input helps the virtual assistant learn and improve language skills, strengthening classification and expanding the knowledge base with new FAQs.

Just Eat: WhatsApp chatbot for restaurateurs

Just Eat has chosen our solution to integrate a WhatsApp chatbot, simplifying the ticketing process for restaurateurs and reducing common data entry errors.

The primary goal was to Provide a more efficient and direct solution for restaurateurs who frequently update their menus and service offerings. The company opted for our solution to enhance this workflow, developing a chatbot integrated with WhatsApp, a critical communication channel for its business operations. The Chatbot handled 86% of restaurateurs' requests autonomously.

Will customer service be redesigned by Generative AI?

A question often arises in discussions about whether AI in customer service will replace human jobs. While AI can handle many tasks efficiently, human empathy, creativity, and problem-solving abilities remain essential in complex and emotionally charged customer interactions.

The key to understanding the future of customer service jobs in the age of AI is recognizing that AI is an enabler rather than a replacement. Instead of displacing human agents, AI empowers them to excel in their roles, freeing up their time for more complex and meaningful interactions, offering personalized assistance, or helping them stay up-to-date with evolving customer needs and preferences.

The future of customer service jobs is not a zero-sum game with AI as the sole winner. Instead, it's a collaborative effort where AI and humans complement each other. As AI advances, customer service agents will increasingly become "superagents" who leverage AI to provide exceptional service.

These superagents will focus on relationship-building, problem-solving, and creative thinking, leaving the routine tasks to AI. They will serve as brand ambassadors, embodying the company's values and ensuring that every customer interaction is positive.

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Generative AI is revolutionizing customer service in numerous ways. It enables personalized conversations, ensures 24/7 availability, handles complex inquiries, provides multilingual support, and continuously learns and improves. Companies like Lavazza, Santander Consumer Bank, and Just Eat are successfully leveraging Generative AI to enhance their customer service offerings.

indigo.ai's approach to integrating Generative AI into customer service emphasizes treating it as a valuable team member, and their platform simplifies the implementation process. Businesses can optimize their customer service operations by allowing Generative AI access to company documents, training it to perform contextual actions, and integrating it within the organization.

Regarding the future of customer service jobs, AI is not here to replace human agents but to empower them. AI-driven tools like Generative AI enable human agents to focus on complex and meaningful interactions, ultimately improving the overall customer experience.

In conclusion, Generative AI is transforming customer service and has the potential to reshape the industry by enhancing efficiency, personalization, and customer satisfaction.

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FAQs

How does Generative Artificial Intelligence affect the customer experience?

Generative AI can enhance customer service and support through various approaches, including personalized conversations, round-the-clock availability, addressing complex inquiries, offering multilingual support, and continuous learning.

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What is an example of customer service based on Generative Artificial Intelligence?

Generative AI can be applied to enhance customer service in various ways. For instance, Lavazza has harnessed generative AI to reduce abandonment rates during online subscription service enrollment by addressing user inquiries effectively. Santander Consumer Bank employs a virtual assistant to streamline customer inquiries and assist users in finding information efficiently. Similarly, Just Eat utilizes a WhatsApp chatbot for restaurateurs, simplifying processes and autonomously managing a significant portion of requests. These success stories demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of generative AI across different industries.

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How can Generative Artificial Intelligence be used to improve customer service?

Generative AI can enhance customer service by providing instant responses to common inquiries, reducing wait times, and improving efficiency. It can generate personalized recommendations and solutions based on customer data, enhancing the overall customer experience. Chatbots powered by generative AI can handle routine queries, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. Additionally, it can analyze customer feedback and sentiment to identify areas for improvement in products and services, ultimately leading to better customer satisfaction and loyalty. Generative AI streamlines support processes, making them more effective and customer-centric.