Imagine you need to buy a gift for your niece or nephew and you are not sure what to get them. You head over to a toy store and are welcomed by a friendly shop assistant who helps you easily pick the ideal gift according to the child’s age, gender, or preferences.
Now imagine having this type of shopping experience online as well – that’s right being greeted immediately in a more natural way. Sure, the service is AI technology, but chatbots are continuously evolving and are now sufficiently advanced to offer a more human service to all customers.
AI Assistants vs Traditional Customer Service Channels
Essentially, an AI assistant is an innovative tool that integrates different communication channels and human interaction – to provide an automated service to customers that visit your website.
Consider the traditional methods of customer service – such as email, live chat, phone, or contact forms. Behind these channels, there’s a team of customer service representatives in a call centre that are answering each query personally.
What the AI assistant does is improve this service and help customers address routine enquiries – such as checking the status of their orders. Simply put, the AI assistant will understand the customer inquiry using NLP and then transfer them to a real customer service representative.
But the entire experience isn’t like speaking to a robot. In fact most customers feel as if they are talking to real people. In this way, using an AI assistant it’s possible to answer 500 people at the same time and process eg. 80% of their enquiries.
However, while many employees may be skeptical of AI technologies – fear that they’ll replace them with the human workforce, it’s important to point out that this solution can in fact benefit employees – giving them more opportunity to do more complex, meaningful tasks.
How Do AI Customer & Buying Assistants Add Value to e-Commerce Websites?
Incorporating AI assistants into your e-commerce website can only simplify and automate the process of interacting with your customers.
It’s all about implementing a more efficient customer service strategy. Here are some of the main benefits of implementing AI assistants on your website.
Automated process call centers + chatbots Chatbots allow you to achieve a higher response rate to your customers and resolve all enquiries easily and more efficiently – getting a better balance between automation and interaction. Your customers only receive human assistance when necessary.
Better customer service Not only will the customers receive a better service, but they won’t even notice the difference between the AI assistants and humans in the chat conversations.
Integrating different channels All customers have different preferences when it comes to communication. Some prefer calling on the phone, others prefer email, messaging apps, or even contact forms. An AI assistant can integrate all communication channels and – using Natural Language Processing – understands the enquiry and deals with it appropriately.
Lower costs for 24/7 customer service Using an AI assistant will allow you to be available 24/7 to your customers – without an additional cost. During out-of-office hours, all visitors to your website can be served by a virtual assistant – seamlessly, any time of day or night.
All things considered, as shoppers, we all get frustrated when we have to contact the customer service team – facing the prospect of being left on hold for hours – if, indeed we can even find the correct number to call! But all of these woes might soon be a thing of that past, thanks to increasingly sophisticated AI tools.
Think you could tell the difference? For more information about AI customer service and buying assistants, contact the Cursum team today.