When many people think about AI customer service bots, robotic, frustrating, and impersonal interactions often come to mind. Today, however, those experiences are a thing of the past. Integrating AI agents into your CX team makes your customer support more human, not less.
By leveraging AI to manage routine inquiries, your human agents gain more time and energy to deliver exceptional, personalized customer experiences. In this blog, we’ll break down the benefits of AI in customer service and explain how AI and your team can partner up to elevate your CX.
AI Chatbots for Customer Service: How Does AI Work in CX
When people discuss using artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service, they usually refer to chatbots that pop up on your website to help browsing customers. AI “agents” are autonomous systems that handle tasks like answering FAQs, resolving tickets, and routing inquiries using conversational AI and machine learning.
These AI tools can generally integrate into the rest of your customer service tech stack, like your CRM, order systems, and knowledge bases, allowing them to “learn” everything about your business and provide accurate, detailed answers to customer inquiries. They can also further learn from those interactions and your feedback, consistently improving over time and evolving as your business changes and grows, always using responses based on whatever material you feed it.
This results in bots that can accurately communicate with your customers/website visitors 24/7 and provide relevant information following your own brand guidelines and tone of voice–turning them into valuable “members” of your customer service teams who not only understand your business but also never sleep, get sick, or take any days off.
Focusing on High-Impact Customer Interactions - How AI Handles the “Easy Work”
One of the biggest criticisms we see with tools like AI-powered chatbots is that they aren’t human and, therefore, can be difficult to interact with and obtain the answers you need. This can absolutely be true if you intend to replace your whole team with something like ChatGPT disguised as a member of your CS team, but there’s a better way.
Using AI assistants alongside your real human customer service team enables you to have what is essentially a filter for your human agents. Use the AI to address your FAQs and common customer questions like order status, returns, and sizing, while also pointing them to other self-service options like your customer knowledge base when needed.
Conversely, your AI tool should also be able to tag inquiries by priority and complexity, passing on the questions that need human attention to your team, who can take over and handle the issue.
This helps improve overall efficiency: AI can simultaneously handle a high volume of simple tickets, something even the best humans can’t do alone. This doesn’t remove humans from the loop; it just filters out the low-hanging fruit, saving your team from the monotony of their fifth “Where is my order?” message of the day while also improving customer satisfaction.
AI and Customer Service: Myths vs. Reality
With AI still being a relatively new technology, it’s expected that there will be many misconceptions surrounding it. Here are a few common myths that often come up regarding AI and customer service:
Myth 1: AI chatbots alienate customers with impersonal service.
The reality? Customers increasingly expect instant responses, and well-implemented AI-powered customer service effectively meets this expectation. Moreover, AI solutions now offer conversational abilities that feel natural, enhancing the customer experience rather than detracting from it.
Modern AI customer service solutions are increasingly good at understanding language and tone, making interactions feel more natural and “human-like” than the clunky bots of a few years ago, and your customers won’t hate the AI as long as it’s used wisely. In fact, many customers appreciate quick, automated assistance for simple issues, while still having the option to reach a human when needed.
Myth 2: Deploying AI chatbots is all about cutting staff.
A recent Zendesk study found that 75% of CX leaders believe that AI amplifies human capabilities rather than replacing them. Conversational AI for customer service is here to help, not replace, actual humans.
While it’s fair for people working in customer service to feel a bit uneasy about deploying AI customer service agents at their place of work, CX leaders need to enforce that they’re there to make their lives easier rather than to take their jobs.
Customers prefer quick responses to simple questions and personalized experiences when things get complicated. The best way to achieve this is to use AI technologies alongside your human staff.
Myth 3: AI implementation is expensive and only for bigger companies.
AI customer service software is increasingly accessible and affordable, even for small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses. AI solutions can scale with your growth, making them a cost-effective way to enhance your CX team’s capabilities without breaking the bank.
Plus, you’ll likely start to see more return customers once your new AI bots create high-quality customer service experiences for shoppers anyway, so any extra costs are negligible.
Empowering Your CX Team with AI
AI integration transforms your CX agents into valuable AI coaches, guiding and refining their performance to enhance overall customer experience. This new role elevates your team's responsibilities, enabling them to focus on strategic tasks such as training AI, analyzing customer trends, and proactively enhancing customer journeys.
Teach your team members how to train, monitor, and fine-tune AI systems to ensure they stay accurate and on-brand. In practice, this might mean agents spend time feeding the AI better data, reviewing/adjusting its responses, and teaching it about new products or policies by maintaining FAQs and knowledge bases so the bot continuously improves. By doing so, human agents and AI work in tandem: the AI learns from humans, and humans leverage the AI’s speed and data-crunching capabilities.
On the other hand, the extra time AI creates generates new opportunities for your team that they wouldn’t have been able to work on otherwise. For example, agents can focus on revenue-generating activities like proactive outreach, upselling, or cross-selling to valuable customers (effectively acting as sales associates during support interactions).
They can also analyze customer feedback trends and share insights with other departments to improve products and services. In short, AI frees them to become more strategic and collaborative within your business.
The Hybrid Model: Better Customer Experiences and ROI
Deploying AI alongside your customer service team is absolutely the best way to improve customer service in the future, both in terms of customer experience and ROI.
On the customer experience side, faster response times and 24/7 availability mean happier customers. Customers appreciate quick help and don’t mind if an AI is involved as long as their issue is resolved. For example, 80% of customers who have used an AI chatbot report a positive experience.
Also, because human agents now have more bandwidth for personalized service, customer satisfaction scores often increase when AI is implemented as a support tool.
Regarding ROI, AI can cut customer service costs by up to 30%, leaving more cash on the table for you to funnel into improving other aspects of the business. Small businesses can scale support without a linear headcount increase, which is essential when resources are tight.
Conclusion
Integrating AI agents into your customer service team is not about replacing people; instead, it’s about giving them the space to work on resolving issues that require a human touch. No one understands customers better than real people. At the same time, AI can take over to handle the routine and repetitive tasks that your staff is tired of doing. This hybrid approach boosts efficiency, enhances customer satisfaction, and improves your bottom line, making AI a powerful ally rather than a threat.
At Blue Badger, we love setting up our clients with Gorgias’ suite of AI-powered customer service tools. From AI bots that can be trained on your help desk materials and perform actions in your store —such as updating or cancelling orders —to powerful helpdesk tools that consolidate all your customer service activities into a single platform, Gorgias is the secret behind many of our clients’ exceptional customer service teams. Get in touch with us today to learn more about building the CX experiences your customers expect.
