AI Customer Service Solutions as Front-End Innovations

AI gradually shifts from an innovation to something most users are accustomed to in their everyday lives. However, some aspects and examples of AI customer service solutions can still help your business become a pioneer.

According to a HubSpot report, in 2024, over 84% of CRM leaders see AI as an instrumental tool for interacting with clients. The same report mentions that over 71% of respondents are planning to expand their investments in AI in 2024.

While statistics are overwhelmingly positive, it seems like a good moment to ride the wave of artificial intelligence customer service solutions. In this blog post, I want to focus on what solutions are worth your attention. So, buckle up to learn more about AI-powered customer service tools.

The Role of AI in Customer Service

AI in customer service can be represented as AI-powered chatbots, self-service platforms, voice assistants, video assistants, and other tools. Their role in this process depends on the business but will include the following functions:

1. 24/7 support.
2. Continuous automation.
3. Business and data analysis.
4. Requests routing.
5. Predictive analytics performance.
6. Customer experience personalization.

The functions of AI in customer service produce benefits that can upscale the business or even empower certain companies to outperform their competitors. These benefits include but are not limited to, better resource management, improved customer-centricity, accelerated workflow, and seamless processes.

The role of AI is clear, and its main functions in customer service are defined, but it might not look too innovative until you look at the stats. Businesses turn to successful examples of AI customer service solutions and utilize them in front-end development because they are both efficient and trendy, and the market overview proves this.

Market Overview for AI Customer Service Solutions

It’s a persistent thought that customer service often takes up too much time. Over 32% of customer tickets will be resolved in more than 3 hours, and this fact alone leads 68% of CRM leaders to implement independent customer service solutions in 2024.

In cases where a customer support manager’s help is not available for a long time, customers are leaning towards taking matters into their own hands. Thus, over 81% of customers would try solving the matter themselves before reaching out to other representatives.

The market is constantly growing, empowering the global generative AI in customer services market size to account for USD 482.72 million in 2024 and accumulate a CAGR of over 25.11% between 2024 and 2034.

Currently, tied to this, over 55% of customer service operatives believe that AI tools help accelerate their workflow and therefore improve the quality of the company’s performance. Customers’ opinions of AI agents are also overly positive. The graph below shows how, according to Zendesk, the customers feel about AI-powered customer support.

In conclusion, I would like to note that the market is not just quickly growing but also has a high demand for automation, and it demonstrates trust toward AI solutions. The current state of the market enables business owners to achieve higher effectiveness and even generate bigger volumes of profits from using AI to automate customer support services.

Interested in how AI will transform software development in 2024? In this article, you can find valuable insights about software development evolution with artificial intelligence.

AI-Powered Customer Service Tools

AI-powered customer service tools are assistant instruments that leverage artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Their goal is usually to automate and enhance customer support processes.

AI-powered customer service tools respond to customer queries in a human-like manner, which provides efficient and personalized assistance yet doesn’t take away a large chunk of time from customer support operatives. All in all, these tools improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs.

Types of AI-Powered Customer Service Tools

There are different types of AI customer care tools, and I’ve encountered some of them personally in my work. In this section, I will describe some of them briefly to give you an understanding of what they are and how they work.

#1 AI-powered chatbot assistant.

This tool is essentially a virtual agent present in private messages. It uses NLP to analyze customer queries and provide instant responses.

The workflow of chatbot assistants is linear: a user enters a query into the chatbot’s interface, the software analyses it using an NLP engine and generates a response based on its knowledge. These assistants can be trained on internal data that adheres to your business systems or utilize knowledge from the Internet.

Examples:

• Recommendations. AI customer care chatbots are widely used in e-commerce, such as by H&M and Sephora. They can provide style recommendations, track orders, and help customers find desired products.
• Personal assistance. Certain fintech products use chatbots to enable users to check account balances, transfer funds, pay bills, and receive personalized advice. An American bank, Capital One, is among the services that utilize this technology.

#2 AI-powered voice assistant.

This type of assistant uses speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies to complete basic tasks through voice commands. It utilizes machine learning to interpret human speech and generate appropriate responses.

It works similarly to a chatbot, except instead of texting the command, the user has the option of saying it out loud. Speech recognition later converts the output into text, which is analyzed by an NLP engine. The assistant completes the assigned task and generates the response, which is then transformed into audio.

Examples:

• Personal assistance. Everyone who has a smartphone uses a personal AI assistant. It can help with many different tasks, including navigation, reminders, and internet search. Examples are Siri by Apple or Amazon’s Alexa.
• Workflow planning and organization. Voice assistants can set reminders and tasks, as Google Assistant does when integrated with Google Calendar. One of the cases I worked on was even capable of scheduling calls to customers.

#3 AI-powered video assistant.

Such a tool would be considered more complex, as it combines the power of video and AI to offer virtual product demonstrations. It utilizes advanced technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning and can generate, edit, and analyze video content

Examples:

• Troubleshooting. Video assistants can help customers resolve issues related to their devices, such as updating software, by providing clear visual instructions. Apple Support is an example of such a solution that has been implemented into the workflow.
• Order support. Some retailers use video assistants to provide real-time demonstrations of size guides or common issue-solving processes. Visualizing a simple instruction can reduce the need for lengthy explanations and is actively used by retailers, such as the world-famous ASOS.

There are more tools, and more are appearing as the tech landscape progresses, yet these are the ones I have experience with.

How AI-Powered Customer Service Tools Can Improve Your Business

Now you know which tools you can use, and it’s important to note how this software might change your business. By this, I mean the benefits artificial intelligence customer service tools can bring to your business and what they can do to enhance the profits and quality of the processes.

1. Faster response times. AI-powered tools can quickly process queries, as AI can process ten problems in one minute.
2. Improved customer satisfaction. Accurate support in shorter times results in accumulating higher levels of customer satisfaction.
3. Round-the-clock support. AI doesn’t need days off or vacations and can, therefore, perform nonstop.
4. Personalized interactions. AI-powered tools can analyze the customers’ data to deliver personalized and accurate responses.
5. Analytics. Tools powered by AI will gather information used in queries and can analyze it to deliver predictive analytics and improve the company’s workflow.

In one of our cases, an AI-powered voice assistant Call Translator, we utilized AI-powered customer service technology to help provide the customers’ end-users with real-time translation. This software currently supports over 70 languages, transcribes voice-to-text to help record the meetings, obeys simple commands from the user, and corrects its behavior during a meeting.

Challenges in the Implementation of AI-Powered Customer Service Tools

Where there are benefits, there are also challenges. In this particular case, I believe these would be the biggest challenges of implementing AI-powered customer service tools:

1. Ensuring data security. Data that is being utilized by a chatbot or other form of AI assistant is uploaded to the servers of the AI API you’re integrating with. This creates an additional level of safety concerns and therefore requires you to utilize only safe AI engines.
2. Integrating a complex solution. Implementing and integrating AI tools requires expertise in AI and natural language processing. Such qualifications might not be present in your in-house team.

If you are looking for an outsourced team to help you create the software of your dreams, DasdDevs has experience with over 500 projects and countless API integrations to help you.

AI Self Service Portal

AI-powered self-service portals are digital platforms designed to use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide customers with the tools to solve issues independently. The goal of these systems is usually to enable customers’ independence and relieve the load on customer support specialists.

AI self-service portals automate routine tasks and provide instant information and support to customers. This, in turn, enhances customer satisfaction and improves the company’s operational efficiency. Although these systems might be a bit more complex, they can be implemented relatively faster with API integrations with the right team.

AI vs Database-Driven Self Service Portal

In this article, I will examine two main types of self-driven portals, separated by technology. We will discuss database-driven and AI-driven self-service portals.

A database-driven self-service portal is a digital platform that leverages a database to allow users to access and manage recorded data independently. These platforms usually focus on providing access to analytics tools, enabling users to analyze data manually. This helps users be independent in problem-solving while being able to do it comfortably, with having their hand on the pulse of the process.

An AI-driven self-service portal is a digital platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to empower users to resolve issues and access information independently. They provide users with automated intelligent assistance by responding to more complex queries by obeying commands, visualizing data, and generating reports. Self-service portals based on AI can also remember queries and personalize customer experiences based on the data analyzed.

How AI Self Service Portals Can Improve Your Business

There are a number of benefits AI customer service tools, such as self-service portals, can provide to your user. The most prominent of them are the following:

1. Data-driven insights. AI-driven self-service portals can remember and analyze user interactions to track customer activity and improve customer support.
2. Optimized resource management. With AI-driven self-service portals, your business can identify peak demand periods and optimize staffing.
3. Reduced costs. Automating your customer support drastically reduces the volume of support tickets, hence saving costs.
4. Knowledge base. AI can provide users with answers formed based on a large knowledge pool, allowing them to learn and explore it at a comfortable pace.
5. Full independence. In self-service portals, AI integrations can enable users to be fully self-sufficient, enabling them to be more in control over their inquiries.

Challenges in the Implementation of AI-Powered Self-Service Portals

Yet, of course, the challenges of integrating a complex platform are prominent and need to be discussed. So, to not brush it off the table and be completely transparent, let’s talk about what makes it complex to integrate AI into self-service portals.

• The need for regular updates. This challenge is much less prominent with AI systems integrated, whereas with database-driven systems, you would need to update data continuously. AI helps automate this process; however, the model should be rigorously trained. The need to ensure that the model has the necessary data and always keeps up with time also creates the need for updates, albeit it becomes easier to manage with AI helping to update the data.
• Requirement for customer-centricity. Systems designed to be user-centric and enable independence have to be understandable for users. Therefore, you might need to perform user testing and gather feedback to see if your software is intuitive enough to achieve its main goal.

Best Engines for AI-Based Customer Service Front-end Innovations

There are countless engines for AI customer service solutions, as there is a bit of potential and demand for software that utilizes AI tools. However, as I mentioned previously, it’s important to utilize only safe and trustworthy engines. And in this section, I will talk about those.

• OpenAI. This is an AI development holding focused on creating advanced AI technologies, including the famous GPT-4. OpenAI’s models are used in a wide range of applications and can be integrated into customer service platforms to answer complex queries.
• Gemini. Google AI designed Gemini to generate creative texts and translate languages. Gemini is well-positioned to enhance customer service interactions via chatbots, and this engine would be ideal for AI chatbots and virtual assistants.

Bringing AI-Based Customer Service Innovations to Frond-End Development

From my experience, combining different AI tools for customer support solutions can a more effective support system.

AI-powered assistants can help your user search for the answers and utilize the knowledge base of the system, while self-service portals can enable the end-customer to wholly solve their problem independently.

Front-end development can tie them together via a user-friendly interface for input that intuitively guides users to be self-reliant. It can seamlessly connect self-service portals with chatbots or voice assistants, which would help the user navigate the landscape of the created portal.

Combining AI-Driven Customer Support Tools and a Self-Service Portal: DashDevs Success Story

Challenge: Flexibility, which is needed for customer support solutions, often requires implementing unusual combinations. It turns some self-service portals into integrating voice assistance or video instructions and creates unusual combinations.

Solution: We worked with a case exactly like this: Whippy, an application for process automation aimed at helping marketing, sales, and customer support departments. To solve this challenge, our team combined AI voice assistance and an AI-based self-service portal.

Result: Now, the application can perform complex data analysis and launch automated CMS and email campaigns. Whippy also enables users to search for users in the database and AI-powered calls.

Thus, a combination of AI tools and self service portal creates an unprecedented synergy between AI-based components and self-service platforms. It brings together various artificial intelligence tools with regular data-driven solutions to deliver seamless processes capable of upscaling the efficiency of the software solution.

Wrapping Up

Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for automating and improving software if used mindfully. Combining different tools or integrating with the engine that’s perfect for your specific solution can help you achieve more effective processes and drastically enhance your customer support.

However, the opposite might happen if you decide to go in blindly and without proper support. Here at DashDevs, we have over 14 years of experience with software development and have created over 500 software solutions. If you need any help figuring out a perfect AI engine for your customer service, drop us a line.