How artificial intelligence in ecommerce market has swept the age old customer service

It’s no doubt that artificial intelligence has taken its firm position in every industry, making processes efficient and convenient than ever before; ecommerce of course is no exception. Especially during these pandemic times, buying preference of consumers have witnessed a sharp spike towards digital shopping thereby triggering a tectonic shift in the contours of the age old customer service operating model.

What has worked in the past for customer service teams will not work in the future and several ecommerce brands learnt this lesson the hard way in the recent past. Why?

4X-5X increase in online orders for ecommerce businesses during the global pandemic also means similar increase in call load at the call centers of these businesses. The age old model of call centers manned with trained agents to take incoming calls of customers just cannot support this exponential increase in call volumes and many ecommerce businesses had to look at re-inventing their processes using meaningful technology interventions. Enter AI to the rescue.

AI in ecommerce sector is nothing new though. How many of us actually relied on buying online before the automations, smart recommendations, virtual assistants etc.? Today though we enjoy online shopping more than before, most of us do not realize that we are interacting with an ‘intelligent’ system until we really try to notice it. The pandemic situation has just accelerated the pace in which AI gets adopted by businesses and especially for customer service, AI provides an assortment of benefits that can no longer be ignored or postponed.

Below are some top use cases of AI for customer service and how brands are able to deliver exceptional service quality to their customers anytime and anywhere

Customer needs translated to product suggestions within a second 

Suppose a customer is looking for a specific type of product and is finding it difficult to find the right one from the vast assortment available in the catalog. Instead of having to spend endless hours trying to locate the right product, an intelligent AI that is knowledgeable on the products, can make the customer’s product discovery journey much easier and faster.

Helps customer connect to the brand emotionally and strengthens the relationship

AI’s greatest benefit is that it helps build customer loyalty and hence strengthens the customer-brand relationship. The information provided is more objective and the customer has far greater control over the interaction experience. A study conducted by PwC revealed nearly 80% of online consumers feel that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience – something that was grossly lacking in yesterday’s customer service processes but no made a reality with AI based intelligent systems.

Intelligent QnA system to answer customer queries

Question Answering, one of the major Natural Language Processing tasks, has helped us build virtual assistants which can provide answers to user queries/ concerns, generated from all the data it possesses. Best part, this service does not sleep! It is always on, available across any channel and any device.

Automation of Order related Processes

An intelligent AI can be trained to understand the issues of the customer and based on the intentions of the customer it can guide them through the processes such as cancelling an order, changing shipping address, getting refunds all within a few clicks.

Artificial intelligence analysis to understand market demand and customer needs

When consumers interact with the AI, they provide a lot of their context information which can help the ecommerce business understand the needs of the customer better. It is impossible to manually go through these queries to find insights out of these. However AI based analytics made on user queries, can predict consumer demands, forecast sales and also help in competitor analysis as well.

Study of customers’ needs to make relevant decisions

According to Narrative Science, 61% of those who are using technology to implement innovative strategies, said they are using AI to identify opportunities in data that would otherwise be missed. Customer behavior has been changing expeditiously and companies, who care about their customers’ demands, know that they need to provide an amazing experience. A great advantage that AI offers is the ability to constantly learn from customers’ behavior and using that learning to take decisions cutting across diverse areas such as merchandizing, assortment, price match, new product ideas, geography expansion, inventory and price optimization and many more.

Conclusion

AI is the future and in order to survive this challenging and innovating environment, companies that haven’t implemented Artificial Intelligence yet, should consider conversational commerce in their roadmap. Ultimately, making an investment for the sake of great customer service and personalized marketing strategies is not at all a bad idea.

By Sanjoy Roy, Co-founder and CEO, AskSid Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd