What is AI Customer Service? Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Service: Everything You Need to Know

文章摘要：Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer service refers to the use of intelligent technologies to create fast, efficient, and personalized support experiences. AI-driven customer service tools enable enterprises to automate experiences, optimize workflows, and assist customer service agents, ultimately saving time and costs. At its core, AI in customer service leverages intelligent technologies to deliver fast, personalized, and seamless support experiences. When implemented effectively, AI can foster genuine human-centric customer connections: According to Udesk’s 2024 Customer Experience Trends Report, more than two-thirds of customer experience (CX)-focused enterprises believe that AI helps businesses deliver warm and familiar human-like service interactions, thereby building customer loyalty. Udesk states: "With AI specifically built for customer service scenarios, you can resolve more issues through automation, boost the productivity of your customer service team, and provide support with confidence. These advantages together create an exceptional service experience, delivering more accurate, personalized, and human-centric service to every customer you engage with." Read our AI customer service guide to learn how it creates value for your business, customers, service agents, and managers.

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer service refers to the use of intelligent technologies to create fast, efficient, and personalized support experiences. AI-driven customer service tools enable enterprises to automate experiences, optimize workflows, and assist customer service agents, ultimately saving time and costs.

At its core, AI in customer service leverages intelligent technologies to deliver fast, personalized, and seamless support experiences. When implemented effectively, AI can foster genuine human-centric customer connections: According to Udesk’s 2024 Customer Experience Trends Report, more than two-thirds of customer experience (CX)-focused enterprises believe that AI helps businesses deliver warm and familiar human-like service interactions, thereby building customer loyalty.

Udesk states: "With AI specifically built for customer service scenarios, you can resolve more issues through automation, boost the productivity of your customer service team, and provide support with confidence. These advantages together create an exceptional service experience, delivering more accurate, personalized, and human-centric service to every customer you engage with."

Read our AI customer service guide to learn how it creates value for your business, customers, service agents, and managers.

This guide also includes the following sections:

1. Core advantages of AI in customer service
2. 9 application cases of AI in customer service
3. Key considerations for implementing AI-driven customer service
4. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
5. Access a complete customer experience solution for the AI era

Core Advantages of AI in Customer Service

As AI optimizes customer experiences, it also delivers significant business value to enterprises. Below are the key advantages of integrating AI into customer service:

Cost Reduction

By automating routine tasks and inquiries, AI lowers customer service costs and enables support teams to resolve more issues with fewer resources. Additionally, it optimizes resource allocation, allowing teams to focus on high-value work.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Fast and convenient service is crucial for winning customer loyalty. AI-powered chatbots or virtual agents provide 24/7 uninterrupted support, reducing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction.

Enhanced Agent Productivity

AI takes over tedious tasks, lightening the workload of customer service teams. Agents can use the time saved to handle more meaningful work, boosting their sense of professional fulfillment.

Increased Productivity and Efficiency

AI customer service provides instant support without human intervention. When escalation to a human agent is necessary, AI equips frontline agents with insights and recommended actions, accelerating issue resolution.

Optimized Operational Processes

AI can identify which service inquiries are suitable for automation and optimize workflows, helping support teams streamline operations.

Personalized Experiences

AI shares customer insights with agents, providing the information needed to tailor solutions to each customer’s unique needs.

Handling High Support Demand

AI customer service can process various customer requests across multiple channels, helping teams effectively manage large volumes of inquiries during peak periods.

As AI in customer service continues to evolve, we expect all service interactions to incorporate AI technology in some form. These advantages also explain why intelligent technologies have become the industry norm.

9 Applications of AI in Customer Service

While AI is not new to customer service, many enterprises are still exploring how to leverage it. Below are specific examples of how businesses use AI in customer service:

Deploying AI-Powered Customer Service Agents

AI customer service agents are next-generation AI-driven bots pre-trained on real customer service interaction data, avoiding being stumped by vague or complex questions. With conversational AI, they can understand and accurately resolve even the most complex customer issues, handling requests independently from start to finish. For instance, Udesk’s AI customer service can automate up to 80% of customer interactions, freeing human agents to focus on high-value work.

Unity, the world’s leading real-time 3D interactive content development platform, deployed AI customer service to help its support team manage ticket volumes more efficiently and provide instant answers to customers. By integrating with Unity’s knowledge base, the AI customer service diverted 8,000 tickets, resulting in cost savings of $1.3 million.

Proactively Assisting Customer Service Agents

AI-driven agent assist tools boost agent productivity and efficiency by providing customized response recommendations based on each customer’s unique needs, helping support teams resolve issues faster. This enables agents to handle various problems easily and confidently, which is particularly beneficial for onboarding new employees.

For example, Udesk’s Agent Collaboration Assistant guides agents through every interaction step-by-step. A customer service team manager commented: "With the support of Udesk’s AI Collaboration Assistant and its proactive guidance, every human agent knows exactly what to say and do at each stage of every personalized customer interaction."

Automating Workflows

AI in customer service can automate workflows, delivering faster support to customers while improving agent efficiency. Here are ways to optimize support workflows with AI:

• Intelligent Routing: Assign requests to the most suitable agents based on customer intent, sentiment, and language.
• Automated Recommendations: AI analyzes ticket context and suggests new pre-built responses for automated handling.
• Ticket Summarization: AI summarizes ticket content for agents, eliminating the need to spend hours reading lengthy conversation histories.

Everbright Bank, a leading fintech platform, expanded its support operations with automated workflows provided by Udesk. One of the bank’s initiatives is using AI to summarize ticket content for agents.

The Head of Customer Service at Everbright Bank stated: "Udesk’s AI streamlines and reduces the workload of our agents. The summarization feature has been incredibly helpful, especially for onboarding new employees. It saves us time and effort in going through entire conversation threads, allowing us to work more efficiently."

Optimizing Workforce Management (WFM)

AI-driven Workforce Management (WFM) is critical for efficiently managing support teams. By analyzing historical data, AI predicts staffing needs for specific days, months, or seasons, reducing overtime costs and shortening customer wait times. Additionally, it automatically schedules team shifts and customizes schedules for each team member, saving time for managers and agents.

Enhancing Service Quality

AI-powered Quality Assurance (QA) for customer service helps reduce customer churn by evaluating support conversations. AI can audit interactions across all agents, channels, languages, and Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs), accelerating the QA process. It then provides real-time insights into support performance, helping enterprises strengthen agent training and fill knowledge gaps.

For example, Rentman, an all-in-one event rental solution provider, uses QA tools to analyze all customer interactions and QA audit results, providing actionable feedback to its support team based on customer needs. Axel Keicher, Head of Customer Integration at Rentman, said: "With 360-degree feedback, you can coach agents in specific areas, such as teaching them how to provide better support or deepening their product knowledge. This feedback is based on peer reviews, with everyone participating, which helps boost agents’ motivation."

By introducing AI customer service, Rentman established an internal feedback loop, empowering agents to enhance their skills and emphasizing performance transparency across all interactions. With this quality-focused approach, the company’s Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score has consistently remained at around 93%, while initial response times are controlled between 60 and 70 minutes.

Optimizing Call Management

According to our Customer Experience Trends Report, most customers prefer phone communication when facing complex or sensitive issues. AI call center solutions automatically generate post-call summaries, reducing agents’ call wrap-up time, and transcribe voice interactions into text to support agent training. Voice QA software also uses AI to score phone interactions and identify customers at risk of churn.

In addition, AI customer service can provide support to customers through ongoing digital channels such as SMS, social messages, and email, reducing call volumes.

Improving Help Centers

AI in customer service can enhance help centers by analyzing the performance of knowledge base articles, flagging content that needs updating or archiving. Based on service data, AI also recommends new articles to fill content gaps and even assists with content creation. With AI writing tools, managers can easily expand the knowledge base by writing, adjusting tone, or simplifying articles.

Furthermore, AI customer service can leverage content from the knowledge base to display relevant articles and answers to customers during interactions. For example, Virgin Pulse, the world’s largest health and wellness benefits solution provider, integrated its AI customer service with the knowledge base to improve support efficiency.

Ivana Suljetovic, Senior Frontline Manager of Member Services at Virgin Pulse, said: "We have invested heavily in self-service options, focusing primarily on writing articles suitable for AI customer service to machine learn from, enabling it to recognize context and content and better serve our members. Now that we have been using AI customer service for some time, it has become smarter at providing accurate content for specific queries."

Transforming Cost Centers into Revenue Generators

When AI integrates with back-end systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or e-commerce tools, service centers can drive upselling and cross-selling during support interactions. For example, AI customer service can recommend products based on a customer’s purchase history or current cart contents. Based on user behavior and past interactions, AI can also send proactive notifications with targeted messages to increase sales and conversion rates. The more data AI collects, the more accurately it can customize messages to generate revenue.

Gaining Insights for Continuous Improvement

AI analyzes customer conversations to identify trends and pinpoint areas where enterprises need to optimize support operations. By reviewing these interactions, AI can uncover patterns and common issues that human agents may not notice immediately.

In addition, insights from AI customer service provide managers with valuable references for areas to automate. This proactive approach allows enterprises to meet customer needs more efficiently and ensure continuous optimization of support operations.

Implementing AI-Driven Customer Service: Key Considerations

Not all AI customer service tools are created equal. Below are core considerations to guide your implementation strategy and ensure you select the right software solution.

Budget and Resources

Deploying and maintaining AI customer service can be costly, especially when it requires human training and specialized technical support. You can directly launch AI helpdesk software like Udesk without a large team of developers or IT budget. This cost-effective deployment method helps enterprises achieve a high Return on Investment (ROI) without sacrificing quality.

CX Expertise and Accuracy

One of the most significant advantages of AI customer service is its ability to accurately understand customer questions and needs. However, not all AI can achieve this efficiently. Choose an AI system trained on CX conversation data. Manual training not only leads to poor customer experiences but is also typically time-consuming and costly.

Udesk’s AI is built on billions of real-world customer service interaction data, pre-trained to analyze customer sentiment, identify intent, and understand industry-specific support issues. This ensures it can effectively meet customer needs from day one, delivering a seamless and efficient support experience.

Time to Value

Select AI customer service software that simplifies the implementation planning, testing, and optimization phases. A lengthy preparation cycle can leave enterprises stagnant for months, but efficient AI partners like Udesk can reduce the time to value from months to minutes. Our intuitive setup process requires no developers, data scientists, or significant IT investment, enabling teams to quickly deploy a comprehensive AI-driven customer service solution.

Security

As intelligent technologies evolve, concerns about customer data privacy have grown widespread. Prioritize AI customer service with transparent privacy and compliance standards to protect the data you collect and store. Udesk’s AI adheres to advanced data privacy and protection standards, ensuring your data security.

For More AI FAQs, Feel Free to Inquire

• Which industries benefit most from AI customer service?
• How is AI applied in customer service scenarios?
• Will AI replace customer service agents?
• How to use AI to improve customer engagement?
• What are the future development trends of AI customer service?
• How to ensure data security when using AI customer service?

Access a Complete Customer Experience Solution for the AI Era

While AI is reshaping the customer service landscape, your core priority remains unchanged: putting people first. Recognizing that there is a real person on the other end of every interaction allows you to leverage AI to deliver the most seamless experience possible.

Udesk’s AI is the world’s most complete customer service solution for the AI era, helping enterprises build more genuine human-centric customer relationships. It is ready to use out of the box, just like all our Udesk products, with no lengthy setup process or months of training required. Of course, it also features reliable security.

For more information and free trial, please visit https://www.udeskglobal.com/

The article is original by Udesk, and when reprinted, the source must be indicated：https://www.udeskglobal.com/blog/what-is-ai-customer-service-applications-of-artificial-intelligence-in-customer-service-everything-you-need-to-know.html