AI is the tech trend of 2023. Everyone is looking for different ways to either use or discredit it, but there are unlimited possibilities when it comes to technologies like artificial intelligence. For B2B businesses, AI - and machine learning in general - can be an incredible partner in driving business growth and easing or smoothing mundane or time-consuming processes and tasks. Customer support is one area where it has proven incredibly successful.
Customer support managers know that their teams lie at the very heart of B2B businesses. They are crucial for the maintenance and development of successful and long-term customer relationships that drive repeat business through addressing customer pain points and providing high-level support throughout the customer journey.
Throughout the year, several trends have emerged in AI that have supported and improved customer success strategies and processes to reduce handling times, improve experience, and deliver value for businesses and customers.
How is it being used?
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis can help you to better understand customers, allowing you to respond more accurately, but it does take time to complete. AI analysis can do the work for you, saving you time and categorising comments and responses into positive, negative, or neutral. It can even predict sentiment in new, unlabeled text data. This allows you to understand and engage with their customers better for improved experience and performance, which can then lead to boosts in brand loyalty, brand community, and overall sales. Automating this kind of analysis also saves customer support workers needing to categorise responses and data manually.
Predictive AI
Anticipate and proactively address your customer needs by combining data analysis, AI, and machine learning. Predictive AI analytics uses advanced algorithms to analyse historical customer responses, identify patterns, and make predictions about potential customer behaviour and issues. Identifying problems before customers get to them means that businesses can reach out with solutions in advance, creating a seamless and higher-value customer experience. AI can also learn to personalise to increase customer engagement, which leads to increased opportunities for cross- and up-selling.
Workforce management and forecasting
Streamline your operations, enhance your productivity and foster a more engaged and efficient workforce by building upon the predictive and analytic powers of AI, the technology can perform analyses of management and coordination processes for optimisation. The data provided by AI can allow businesses to make better-informed decisions and proactively deliver value to customers through management and forecasting.
The Benefits
Faster response times
Implementing AI systems tailored to your business to generate online help resources and responses to customer queries can not only save time and labour but also improve the customer experience through increased speed and efficiency of service for reduced wait times. This also means that while AI takes care of the smaller issues, your team can focus on those that require more advanced levels of detail and attention.
Extensive customer support
Businesses can easily increase support and content creation processes via AI, meaning that more attention can be given to diversifying the support offered. The optimisation capabilities of AI allow it to regenerate or repurpose materials for different target audiences for better resources and, once again, a better customer experience.
But it can’t cover everything, right?
There will always be a need for human involvement in customer support and experience. Machine learning works best when it is utilised as a tool for support, rather than a replacement for employees or staff. The benefits of AI lie in its ability to smooth processes and free up time for customer support workers to involve themselves in the more complex cases that come across your desk.
By automating processes for smoother operations on an everyday level, and taking care of straightforward issues and mundane tasks, AI increases your team's productivity and can allow them to better serve your customers. Additionally, streamlining the sales process for B2B sales and marketing can lead to enhanced lead generation and scoring. Employing tactics such as parallel dialling software and developing ‘best customer’ models can also help avoid sales burnout and identify new prospects to increase revenue.
Basically? AI is good for business.
In essence, AI is a fantastic tool for supporting B2B businesses when it comes to identifying and solving customer pain points more effectively, prioritising efforts around customer satisfaction and loyalty, and preemptively implementing solutions to address customer needs. The predictive and analytical nature of AI lends itself easily to B2B businesses, streamlining and enhancing the customer support and experience process is just one added benefit.
All of the above benefits can help to grow your business and improve your relationship with your customers, allowing your customer support team to focus on innovations and developments that continuously build on these efforts. The more your customer relationships improve, the stronger your brand loyalty, which, as we know, is crucial for word-of-mouth recommendations and business awareness.
Once you’ve implemented AI for your service team, it’s time to build on that momentum and use customer experience to grow your brand. Get in touch with Mo Works and find out how.
