Customer service and AI can fit together seamlessly to the mutual benefit of businesses and their customers. In fact, many organizations are already leveraging the potentially transformative power of artificial intelligence customer support.
If you want to join them, read on to learn more about how artificial intelligence in customer support works, different ways you can leverage customer service AI in your business, and more.
AI customer care: Key takeaways
- Businesses are utilizing AI for customer care in a variety of ways, including leveraging conversational AI chatbots, process automation, AI-driven analytics, and more.
- Improving productivity, offering faster and more personalized customer experiences, and cutting costs are among the main benefits of artificial intelligence in customer support.
- When implementing AI in customer service you need to be clear on your business goals, recognize and combat potential resistance from staff and customers, and prioritize security and privacy.
- AI customer service technology continues to develop apace. In the coming years, the capacity of AI for personalization and analytics, in particular, look set to increase significantly.
What is AI in customer service?
AI in customer service is any artificial intelligence-based technology or tool used within a customer service space.
One main way AI assists customer service is through the automation of manual processes; this includes advanced call routing, chatbots, and other forms of self-service. These automations free up your agents to work on more complex tasks which demand a human touch.
Conversational AI, meanwhile, allows customers to interact with chatbots the way they would with a live service agent. Using machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU), AI-enabled bots can serve as full omnichannel virtual agents.
Conversation intelligence is another area where AI and customer service go hand in hand. It’s the use of AI technology to analyze conversations for emotion/sentiment, topics, accents, and more. All of which helps you better understand your customers.
Given all those applications of AI in customer support, it’s little surprise that the technology is having a profound impact that’s set to continue. Gartner predicts, for example, that by 2026 conversational customer service AI alone will reduce contact agent labor and support center costs by $80 billion.
AI customer care vs AI customer support vs AI customer service
Before we get into the exciting potential applications of AI in the field of customer experience, let’s clarify some terminology. Customer care, customer support, and customer service are three terms often used interchangeably.
In general, they’re all about the experiences businesses provide to their customers, but there are some small technical differences:
- Customer service typically refers to problem-solving. It’s the name given to interactions between customers and businesses, where the former get in touch for answers, information, or solutions.
- Customer support is very similar to customer service and, in fact, is often used synonymously. However, in some cases, it’s used to more specifically refer to the provision of technical support to customers. For instance, that usage is more common in the software and IT industries.
- Customer care, finally, is a more holistic term referring to every interaction between a customer and a company, encompassing more than just customer service conversations.
Add AI to any of the above terms, and you’re talking about the ways in which artificial intelligence technology can help businesses in the relevant areas.
10 Examples of AI customer service solutions and applications
That’s clarified what customer service AI software is, but what can it really do for your business? The good news is that AI applications in customer service are broad and diverse. In a lot of ways, all that limits you is your imagination.
To spur that imagination into life, here are 10 suggestions for how your business could benefit from AI customer support tools and solutions:
1. Implementing an AI chatbot for customer service around-the-clock
Customer expectations have risen dramatically in recent years and the rules for customer engagement have changed. Conversational AI, especially leveraged via the best AI customer service chatbots, can help address these changes in several ways:
- Improves brand loyalty: 86% of consumers said they would dump a brand they trusted after just two poor experiences. An AI customer service bot can ensure fast, consistent, and smart self-service in the customer’s channel and language of choice.
- Provides smart self-serve options: The more sophisticated customer service AI tools know what they don’t know and can cleverly route the interaction to the right agent with complete custom context, including sentiment when needed.
- Offers an “always-on” service: A reactive, company-centric model with service during “normal business hours” no longer cuts it. Customers demand 24/7/365, smart service that is proactive and customer-centric. A customer service AI chatbot is a way to provide this more cost-effectively than by staffing a contact center around-the-clock.
Happy customers stick around, and they tell their friends about positive experiences they’ve had with your company. Adding an AI customer support chatbot to your customer service plan can have a real, positive impact on customer retention in an era when customers have more choice than ever.
2. Further leveraging conversational AI for customer service to alleviate wait times
AI customer support chatbots aren’t only about offering out-of-hours support. They can also act as an AI customer service agent in their own right for simpler queries, to keep human agents free for more complex interactions.
Conversational AI tools for customer service can serve as the first point of contact for customers who have an immediate need and reach out via your company’s website. These AI chatbots can also work proactively to take care of your customers’ needs or make a purchase without human agent interference.
Implementing conversational AI as the first point of contact for customers lets your agents focus on more complex customer questions and cases that can’t be resolved by self-service methods. Since routine tasks can be handled by virtual AI agents, complicated customer queries can get the dedicated attention they need from live support agents.
3. Using AI assistants in customer service to support your agents in real-time
So far, our examples of AI customer service software applications have focused on taking the burden off agents by having AI handle interactions instead. An AI customer support agent, however, can also assist your teams live with their own calls.
Real-time guidance tools can empower employees with instant knowledge and soft-skill assistance, making interactions far less stressful. Then, the same customer support AI agent can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as filling out forms. Thus, improving agent experience and productivity, and resulting in reduced churn and happier staff.
Employee retention is inextricably linked to employee happiness. Incorporating AI into workflows could be a way to reduce the burden and keep your best team members for longer.
4. Getting regulation-compliant scripts via generative AI in customer support
Regulations for contact centers continue to increase. Some of these requirements impact communication in any industry; others are industry-specific call standards. These regulations put more pressure on contact centers and service agents to ensure compliance.
Regulatory compliance isn’t just a legal issue; it is a customer service issue. Regulations protect consumers from unscrupulous practices. Compliance builds trust. Generative AI for customer support can help draft initial scripts efficiently. Conversational AI, meanwhile, dramatically improves your ability to minimize the risk of lawsuits and other penalties for non-compliance.
Conversational AI provides service reps with dynamic scripts that guide interactions while leaving room for flexibility. It also includes legal disclosure checklists, so agents know what to share with each customer on every call.
5. Improving resolution time with AI-powered customer routing
Using AI customer service tools and virtual agents as the first point of contact benefits customer service representatives just as much as customers.
Human agents are freed up to tackle more interesting, complex cases, and the repetitive tasks are taken off their workload.
If a customer can’t resolve their issue using self-service resources with a virtual agent, AI customer service solutions can deliver additional support to your contact center by intelligently routing the customer’s case to the best human agent for the task.
When customer interactions are routed to live agents, the best AI tools for customer support can equip the agents with:
- The customer’s name
- The customer’s profile
- The customer’s previous interaction history and messaging with your company
- A transcript of the conversation that just took place with the virtual agent—within the transcript, AI includes contextual information along with customer sentiment.
Once the customer interacts with a live agent, AI continues to assist by mining the conversation for keywords and phrases a customer speaks or types. AI customer service software then serves the agent relevant knowledge base articles and resources, providing real-time interaction guidance so your agent can best support your customer’s journey.
Conversational AI also boosts support teams’ productivity and efficiency by taking tasks off your customer service agents’ hands, leading to an enhanced employee experience. And when your agents are taken care of, they’ll take care of your customers in return.
6. Analyzing work volume for better scheduling
The next of our AI examples in customer service is the first that’s more to do with the back office than the frontline of customer interactions.
According to Gartner, labor can represent up to 95% of contact center costs. In the current economic climate, AI for customer services can help, as it:
- Reduces the need for hiring with easy scalability: Virtual agents can easily be deployed during peak seasons with high traffic to help resolve customer issues without adding new employees. This can significantly lower costs.
- Increases productivity: Allows live employees to focus on higher-value activities and improve overall organizational productivity.
- Lowers training costs: Ongoing live guidance and customized behavioral coaching lowers coaching and training costs.
Hiring agents is a costly endeavor. According to Colin Taylor of The Taylor Reach Group, Inc., the average cost of hiring a new contact center agent is around $30,751 per employee.
However, each contact center operates differently, so this cost isn’t set in stone. To get an idea of what it may cost your support center, consider these expenses tied to hiring a new agent:
- Advertising and marketing for the position
- Screening and background checks
- Onboarding
- Training
- The time it takes for an agent to become proficient
- Hardware and call center software
- Physical office space (if applicable)
- Salary and benefits
The Gartner projection further explains how AI is changing customer service: “One in 10 agent interactions will be automated by 2026,” which is an increase from an estimated 1.6% of AI-based customer service interactions in 2022.
7. Generating automated meeting and training summaries for agents
There is often so much ground to cover in meetings and training sessions with agents that it’s virtually impossible for reps to retain it all. You can make the content accessible on demand, but the time required for agents to review it is impractical during a typical day.
With the best AI customer service platform, meetings are not only recorded and stored, but AI summarizes the meeting and provides a highlight version of the video. Agents can go through a one-hour session in a matter of minutes to reinforce key messages or training items.
8. Enhancing menu navigation for better customer experiences
The frustration of navigating through exhausting website or app interfaces is one factor that deters customers from using self-service features. AI customer support software reduces or eliminates this barrier altogether.
With AI-driven customer support tools like chatbots, customers can interact more conveniently and efficiently without clicking any buttons. This example of AI is often more inviting for customers using the self-service option.
9. Finding out how your customers really feel with sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is another hot example of how AI can proactively transform your customer service. Interpreting a customer’s emotions while a call is taking place is very challenging for service agents. This point is particularly true in a voice-only interaction.
Conversation intelligence leverages multi-modal emotion recognition to determine core emotions and sentiments from voice data. Cues, intensity, and the pitch of the customer’s voice all contribute to the AI assessment.
Greater insight into a customer’s sentiment offers tremendous value to agents trying to defuse tension and detect unspoken concerns.
10. Going global with AI-powered translation, transcription, and more
Supporting a global customer base is difficult for companies that don’t have enough multilingual personnel. AI for customer support can empower agents and customers through speech recognition and accent detection.
In addition to basic language translation and transcription, AI converts audio into text with extreme accuracy. Reps can follow conversations with non-native English speakers much more effectively by using this tool when accents impede understanding through voice communication.
AI and customer service are a natural match. This type of global support for language transcription eliminates a lot of frustration for agents and reps by speeding up the communication process.
The benefits of AI in customer service
It should be clear by now, then, that the potential applications of AI in customer support and customer service more generally are broad and growing. The benefits of AI customer support for businesses that do adopt the technology, too, are equally wide-ranging:
Greater productivity and efficiency
A key role of AI in customer service is to streamline workflows and make teams more efficient. To that end, AI-powered contact center solutions offer a range of productivity-boosting automations.
AI automates tasks like data entry, after-call work (ACW), call routing, and customer conversations, reducing the time it takes to answer support tickets and resolve customer issues.
For example, instead of relying on a human operator to manually direct incoming calls, customer service artificial intelligence leverages data to simultaneously route calls to the right agent. And, instead of having to respond to lots of simple requests, AI chatbots can handle them to lighten their workload.
Agents also don’t need to trawl through different systems to view customer data, as they can access entire customer profiles from a centralized system.
These features reduce call queues and wait times, minimize transfers, and increase productivity by giving agents more time to focus on providing attentive support to customers with complex needs.
Improved customer experience
AI systems improve customer experiences on multiple levels, from improving customer service speed and availability to personalizing experiences.
Speed and availability
AI customer service agents (such as chatbots) operate 24/7 and can handle limitless conversations simultaneously. This empowers them to deliver fast, convenient support across time zones and channels. 60% of customers say that using chatbots saves them time thanks to their round-the-clock availability. And 45% value the immediate response times of chatbots.
In turn, another of the benefits of AI chatbots in customer service is that they make your human agents more available. With reduced queues, agents can quickly respond to, and spend more time helping, customers who need complex assistance.
Even better, you can implement chatbots onto webpages to provide proactive support at friction points. This improves the flow of your customer journey, prevents churn, and boosts satisfaction.
Personalized customer support
AI can perform intricate data analysis to understand individual customer preferences, behaviors, and sentiments, enabling them to tailor in-chat experiences. The technology can also provide agents with the information they need to deliver empathetic, personalized service.
Sentiment analysis, for example, can use natural language understanding to infer positive or negative customer sentiments in real-time. Agents can be alerted to positive sentiments that indicate satisfaction or intent to buy, which they can use to tailor the interaction to meet specific needs.
In the case of negative sentiments, agents can use the info provided by AI to respond with the appropriate emotional reaction. This allows agents to reach customers on a more personal level and ensure that they feel heard and valued. You’ll soon see an improvement in CSAT and NPS scores.
Enhanced agent engagement
AI customer support benefits your agents as well as your customers. By eliminating time-consuming, tedious tasks from your agents’ workload, you empower them to engage with their roles more meaningfully.
Take ACW tasks, for example. AI can not only transcribe calls in real-time, but it can extract action items from them and create automatic summaries of conversations, reducing ACW and enhancing meaningful engagement.
More directly, AI removes the influx of repetitive customer questions from queues. So, agents can focus on handling more complex issues that provide more fulfillment, increasing agent satisfaction and engagement.
Reduced costs
Another notable AI impact on customer service relates to your bottom line. AI analytics highlight areas of inefficiency in your contact center, such as long wait times and low first-call resolutions. With insight into these metrics, you can implement data-driven strategies to reduce the negative financial impact that these issues cause.
Predictive analytics can also predict call volumes using AI. So you can optimize staffing levels to prevent overstaffing and understaffing. Your labor costs are also directly reduced as, instead of hiring more employees, you can leverage AI chatbots, for example.
Considerations when implementing AI in customer support
As with any new technology or innovation, introducing AI-based customer support to your organization takes thought and planning. That said, here are some important considerations to keep in mind:
What are your business goals?
What are your objectives for implementing AI? It’s crucial to make sure that the technologies you implement align with your key business goals.
So, start by identifying the current inefficiencies in your contact center, such as high average handling times or long call queues, and focus your attention on the relevant AI-powered customer support solutions.
How can you overcome resistance from agents?
When you plan to implement an AI customer service platform, you may face some pushback from agents. Some may resist the change to their existing workflows, or lack confidence in using advanced technology. And they may also have concerns about being replaced by machines.
The solution to this is all about reassurance. Make sure your agents know that the aim is to complement their work by adding an extra layer of efficiency—it will make their jobs less tedious and free them up to work on more complex (and rewarding) interactions.
Onboarding and coaching is crucial, too. Even with a user-friendly platform, you’ll need to train your customer service agents on using the new features—otherwise you’ll lose those all-important productivity gains.
Make sure they’re aware of the tools’ limitations as well as its capabilities, so that they can look out for any anomalies. While autonomous AI will improve itself through self-learning, you still need to track its performance and accuracy.
How can you overcome resistance from your customers?
Your customers may also resist the introduction of AI for customer care, especially older customers who tend to distrust new technology. Many people prefer to speak to a human agent instead of using chatbots or IVR menus, particularly when it’s a complex query.
It’s essential that you give them the choice, including phone as an option, and making sure that AI tools can escalate interactions to a human when necessary.
You must also build trust with customers when it comes to your use of AI. According to Salesforce, 43% of customers either completely or mostly distrust companies to use AI ethically. Be transparent from the earliest interaction about what data you collect using AI, as well as how and why it’s used by the system to improve customer experiences.
Can you afford (not) to implement AI-based customer service?
Think carefully about the features you need and what you can afford. As well as the price of the solution (and the maintenance if you own and develop the tool yourself), you’ll need to consider the costs of employee training and any downtime you might experience while implementing the system.
All of that should help you understand the return on investment (ROI) to expect. As well as calculating the likely ROI of an AI customer care solution, it’s worth considering the time to value.
That’s the time it’ll take before the benefits of the AI customer service platform start to kick in. It makes sense to choose a platform with easy setup and a shallow learning curve, to minimize any downtime or need for developers. Pick a solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing tools such as help desk software and CRM systems.
Luckily, there’s an affordable cloud-based contact center solution with built-in AI that fits the bill, in the shape of RingCentral RingCX.
How can you ensure security and privacy?
As well as customer concerns about what companies are doing with their personal information, data security is also a key consideration when introducing artificial intelligence for customer service.
If they’re not properly trained and maintained, AI-powered chatbots might accidentally expose confidential data. They could also be the target of cyberattacks.
You can mitigate these risks by picking a customer service platform with enterprise-grade security, and providing security training to everyone involved in using the AI tools.
You can also set your own standards by putting a clear AI policy in place for your organization. Keep this updated and easily accessible, and consider any laws or regulations specific to your industry.
The future of AI in customer service
AI in customer service has far from hit its peak. As it grows more mature, it looks set to revolutionize customer service in new, exciting ways.
In recent research, Gartner predicted that 80% of customer service teams will have applied generative AI technology by 2025. Conversational and generative AI is rapidly evolving to provide more personalized, human-like interactions and customer service proactivity.
This is projected to streamline contact center operations, boost agent productivity, and improve the overall quality of self-service support. With the ability to handle increasingly nuanced requests and help customers at critical friction points, customers can progressively trust in, and recognize, the value of AI.
With increased demand comes increased adoption. It’s likely, then, that Gartner is accurate in their prediction that one in 10 agent interactions will be automated by 2026.
AI’s analytical capabilities are also growing more intelligent. As we accumulate more and more data, AI will be able to make hyper-accurate predictions that empower businesses to optimize resources and meet customer needs.
Personalization, for example, may grow more accurate as AI uses intricate data analysis. That may allow more tailored product recommendations and personalized customer support suggestions in alignment with customer preferences and behavioral patterns.
And, with deeper insight into contact center operations, AI will be instrumental in uncovering hidden inefficiencies, leading to reduced costs and improved performance.
AI-powered customer service made easy with RingCX
Thanks to AI automations in RingCX, delivering top-notch customer service is easier than ever.
At RingCentral, we’re always working to streamline and evolve our products and services. Our goal is to provide your organization with the features and functionality you need to combat communication challenges and elevate both your customers’ and agents’ experience.
Start building better customer experiences today—explore RingCX and see what AI customer service can do for you.
Customer service AI FAQs
How is AI used in customer service?
AI is used in many areas of customer service to improve the speed, availability, and personalization of support.
For example, it’s used in call centers and contact centers to intelligently route calls to the right agent, identify customer sentiments in real-time, automate agent workflows, analyze agent performance and efficiency, make predictions to guide optimization, and much more.
Which industries and businesses benefit most from AI customer service?
Any industry that receives incoming support requests from customers—whether it be via phone call, email, social media, or live chat—can benefit from using AI tools. AI is often leveraged in healthcare, ecommerce, and financial services.
It’s particularly useful for businesses that receive high volumes of incoming calls, as it’s a cost-effective alternative to hiring new staff. But any customer-centric company can utilize AI to provide smoother, more personalized experiences.
Will AI replace customer service agents?
In short, no. While AI is certainly intelligent, the belief that it will replace human agents is rooted in myth. Why? Because human agents possess the art of empathy, understand the subtle nuances of problem-solving, and can intuitively adapt to situations—all things that are totally lost on AI.
The relationship between AI and human agents is a complementary one. AI is there to shoulder and remove the inefficiencies that prevent agents from achieving peak productivity. Ultimately, it empowers agents to deliver the rich, empathetic experiences that foster emotional connections and enhance loyalty.
What is the best AI customer support tool?
There’s no one-size-fits-all AI customer support tool that’s best for every business. Precisely which solution will best suit you is down to your unique needs and goals.
How can you choose the best AI customer support tool for you?
Choosing the right AI customer support tool is first about understanding what you need. Pin down your business goals and map out how AI could help you get there. From there, you can drill down on the specific types of AI customer service solutions that fit the bill.
When you broadly know what you’re looking for, you can compare available tools to your must-haves. Look into reviews from current users and take advantage of free trials where you can to help solidify your decision.
How much does AI customer service cost?
Again, it depends. If you decide to build your own AI solution, you can expect it to be pretty expensive. But if you choose a customer service platform with built-in AI capabilities and easy implementation, you won’t require developers or even a dedicated IT team.
With a cloud-based solution, you don’t need to pay for equipment on-site, nor maintenance of the infrastructure. You can choose the pricing that suits your budget and upgrade your plan as and when you need to.
Originally published Jun 03, 2025
