Response times can make or break your ecommerce business as today’s consumers are more connected than ever and expect lightning-fast responses to their queries and complaints. In fact, according to Forrester data, poor customer service prompts people to abandon intended purchases to the tune of $62 billion in lost sales in the US. eCommerce retailers are increasingly turning to AI customer service tools to address this.
As an online seller, chances are you don’t have time to type out personalized replies to every single customer query – particularly if you tend to get asked the same question over and over.
That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) customer support can free you from the burden of sorting your inbox and having to think about and write a response to every single query.
AI in customer service is the future of customer support. Where in the past, email transformed customer support, today AI is the driving force behind making customer support more efficient and effective, resulting in many more satisfied customers.
Let’s look at how it works.
AI customer service software
AI-powered customer service software is a game-changer for companies wanting to improve response times and streamline customer service best practices. There are different ways in which AI can be applied to make customer service more efficient and productive.
A great example of using AI for customer service, eDesk’s Smart Inbox can leverage rich order data to automatically group and prioritize all incoming tickets, so your customer service team needn’t worry about setup, tags or filters. Completely hands-off, the inbox does the heavy lifting for you!
eDesk’s Smart Inbox also uses predictive algorithms to scan the contents of your customer support tickets to detect the prevailing sentiment in them and suggest the best response for each one, saving you time. Its ability to process sentiment analysis means that it can identify different types of queries, such as shipping inquiries, refund requests and returns and offer suggested responses based on its analysis. This allows your team to move through tickets even quicker.
This is an example of AI in customer service. Applying AI for customer support in this way allows you to turn your focus to growing your sales.
Now, let’s look at three concrete ways that leveraging AI in customer support can boost your bottom line and transform the buying experience without monopolizing you or your support agents’ time.
1. Faster response times
Average first response time is a crucial Al and customer service metric. It tells you how long a customer has to wait before being helped – and what’s considered acceptable is shrinking as consumers get more accustomed to instant gratification!
A Google Consumer Survey discovered that a majority of people expect an email response to their query between one hour (37%) and 24 hours (80%).
Similarly, for queries sent via social media, nearly half (49.8%) of consumers want a response within one hour, highlighting increased expectations for more immediate service.
Whether you’re selling on one marketplace or across multiple channels, customers want to be able to reach you in a multitude of ways:
- Facebook Business Page
- Facebook Messenger
- Live chat
An ecommerce help desk can pull tickets from all your channels into one shared dashboard and prioritize them by urgency to ensure you never leave a customer hanging – particularly if you have a lean support team.
AI-powered customer support can take that up a notch, scanning every incoming query and suggesting what it believes to be the best response.
For instance, because order details are attached to all tickets, when a customer sends a delivery status query, an AI-enabled help desk can auto-generate an appropriate response that includes the tracking code. All you have to do is decide if the proposed answer suits the question, adjust if necessary and hit “send.”
2. Automate repetitive tasks
Repetitive queries are a common problem for customer support teams and anyone asked the same question over and over will eventually respond impatiently – or not at all.
Based on our internal data, the most common support tickets online sellers receive are:
- product or delivery queries
- return or refund requests
- notes about items not arriving
Armed with that information, AI customer support can help automate answers. For instance, when a support agent needs to respond to a ticket, AI will provide a possible answer which that agent can then accept, reject or personalize.
Over time, the system will become ‘smarter’ by learning what works and the answers it generates will become more accurate. This means that more support tickets will be resolved in a shorter period of time and online sellers can quickly scale their customer service while responding to a growing volume of queries.
Better yet, it means that first response time isn’t restricted by time zones or public holidays — something that’s increasingly necessary for cross-border ecommerce. Moreover, instead of seeing commonly asked questions as a repetitive waste of time, AI customer support can remove the hindrance of having to type out the same thing a hundred times a day, so you can focus on resolving more critical customer interactions.
3. Reduce customer service costs
According to IBM research, it costs businesses a massive $1.3 trillion to service the 265 billion customer support queries they receive each year.
In addition to freeing up your employees for more complex tasks, AI in customer support can also reduce the headcount needed on your customer support team.
Think about it: providing around-the-clock support for one sales channel and in one language can be expensive, but it’s nothing compared to what it could cost you to scale your ecommerce business across multiple channels and languages.
That’s where AI can offer huge cost savings, removing the need for tier-1 agents so that your support team can focus on resolving more complex issues. In addition, auto-translation combined with AI-powered customer support can give your agents the polyglot superpowers they need to provide multilingual customer support at scale without having to hire a whole bunch of agents who speak the native language of every country you sell in.
Final thoughts
In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of ecommerce, only the most agile businesses will survive. As tech-savvy consumers become increasingly impatient, the ability to automate responses to repetitive issues will not only boost profitability, it will also go a long way toward future-proofing your online store.
AI customer service software is the future of customer support. It helps your business stay competitive by using smart AI technology to run your customer service program smoothly, keeping your customers satisfied.
See how eDesk’s Smart Inbox can transform your business with AI for customer service.
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