AI is taking the world by storm and promises to continuously impact different aspects of our lives. In customer service, it has already proven itself in several categories, but with the newest generation of automation, its potential grows exponentially.
Not all tickets are the same
Picture this. John, a loyal customer, gets in touch asking for a return label. Abby, who’s new to the brand, sends an email detailing how she went to a store and had a bad experience with a member of staff. These two hypothetical scenarios represent fairly common situations in the world of customer service queries. Nonetheless, they are clearly very different from one another.
Whilst the first situation only requires a quick answer and can be resolved with a simple action - sending the customer a shipping label -, the second scenario is a bit more tricky as it would require a human touch. The agent would contact the store and talk to the manager or member of staff directly to understand the situation before replying to the customer. The email sent to Abby would be unique and relevant to her situation only.
One could say that there are two categories of customer queries: simple transactional tickets, and more complex “experience-led” ones that require deeper thought and sensitivity. Automation has already established that it can easily take on the first category, freeing up agents to spend time on the latter. This is when the agent can really excel, providing personalised recommendations or just going the extra mile for someone. But, does it end here for AI?
Adding another layer
“As a music researcher, I think of generative AI the same way one might think of the arrival of the drum machine decades ago. The drum machine generated a rhythm that was different from what human drummers sounded like, and that fuelled entirely new genres of music. The drum machine didn’t replace drummers, it just added another layer ”, says Douglas Eck, a senior research director at Google.
Google’s Bard, the ever so popular ChatGPT and lesser known options like AlphaCode and Claude are all generative AI tools. What exactly does that mean? As Douglas Eck explains, “a generative model can take what it has learned from the examples it’s been shown and create something entirely new based on that information. Hence the word ‘generative!’ Large language models (LLMs) are one type of generative AI since they generate novel combinations of text in the form of natural-sounding language”.
Applied to customer service, generative AI has immense power. Let’s have a look at some of its applications in detail.
Your brand’s tone of voice
Personalised experiences can be more about HOW you do something than just WHAT you do. One of the big irks customers have with chatbots is the robotic monotone used to answer their questions. Bad chatbots will try to overcome this by disguising themselves with a name and sometimes even a photo of a person, but how they come across is still pretty revealing.
Using generative AI, DigitalGenius has created Nora. It’s able to quickly resolve straightforward issues, like sending a new return label to a customer, but takes this task to the next level of customer satisfaction by considering your brand’s tone of voice. It’s not pretending to be a human, but it does not sound robotic either.
Instead of being restricted to a set of limited answers, with new generative AI tools like ChatGPT, the AI chatbot learns from existing human content and thus can generate a limitless number of options for messages giving interactions a personal feel.
Integration is key
When AI is integrated with your existing platforms, its abilities go much further than just sending off shipping labels. Pulling the relevant data from other sources, the AI chatbot can find your order number through your email address, locate it, provide an estimated delivery timeline and even issue refunds or replacement orders when suitable.
This means a customer can cancel an order at any time of the day, even when no agents are online. That’s money saved in delivering something that would only be returned a few weeks later and a more convenient experience for the customer.
Ultimately, AI will be as good as the data it is given so integrating automation with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, your Order Management System (OMS), your Ecommerce tools and even carrier will all contribute towards a more successful automation experience.
Check the full list of integration options for DigitalGenius AI here.
Thinking FAQs
Taking personalisation one step further, a well integrated generative AI system can breathe life into your FAQ section by using that information to provide personalised answers to customer queries.
Michael Podolsky, cofounder and CEO of PissedConsumer, an online reviews and complaints platform, says generative AI is like a “thinking FAQ”. Podolsky wrote in Forbes that generative AI “pushes the abilities of an AI chatbot to intelligently match existing answers and solutions to a customer request by vastly broadening the pool of responses (a much complained-about limitation of chatbots) and reducing the number of times a customer faces a dead end that needs human involvement to progress”.
If your FAQ section is updated, clear and informative, the AI will be able to pull from that information to reply to customers in real time.
The result is that the interaction feels more like an actual conversation as the possible answers the chatbot relays widens and deepens in content.
Using personalised recommendations to upsell
With generative AI the chatbot becomes more than a simple problem-solver, it uses the information in the product description, the options available at that time for the customer’s region pulled from the OMS system, as well as considering the customer’s purchase history from the CRM platform to recommend products.
Using plugins like the ChatGPT interface, automation goes beyond suggesting products to the customer and can actually show pictures of the product it's recommending.
It’s does more than your classic customer service tasks and becomes part of your sales team as well.
Get in touch with our team to learn how DigitalGenius can revolutionise your customer service with Generative AI for ecommerce.
