Imagine sitting in a restaurant. The atmosphere is nice, and the food looks good. But it takes forever for a waiter to arrive, and then they seem distracted and eager to move along. Your food takes longer to arrive than you expected. Even if it tastes good and the price was fair, would you think about returning for another meal? 

Chances are, you wouldn't. We can apply this example to any type of customer engagement, from calling a service desk to visiting a shop or branch office—and it's a universal preference: 93% of customers will make repeat purchases from a business with better service, and 48% have changed brands to get better service, according to HubSpot. 

Customer service and AI 

This effect means that if you own or run a business, customer service should be something you strive to improve. Modern technologies have been great in this regard, with examples such as customer relationship management (CRM) software and specialised marketing as ways to improve customer service. 

There is growing excitement about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for customer service, and even more interest since generative AI arrived. What are examples of how AI can improve customer service today? 

Smarter communications: Communicating with customers is crucial, but also a balancing act. Generic emails feel impersonal, yet personal emails take a lot of time to create. Generative AI offers a middle ground. By using "persona prompts," you can create personas and ask the AI to generate content related to them. Persona prompts can be elaborate, but you can keep it simple. For example: "My audience is a busy mom with three young children, a tight budget, and not much time for shopping. Write an email telling her about our broad online cosmetics collection and convenient delivery options."  

Chatbots: Chatbots can be very basic, responding only to very specific keywords (called rule-based chatbots). But chatbots can be more conversational by using Natural Language Processing (NLP), a type of AI that understands natural and conversational inputs. They are very popular and the leading use of AI in retail. Training such a system from scratch is complicated, but fortunately, many leading customer service platforms such as Zendesk and ServiceNow offer easy ways to create a chatbot for your business.  

Personalisation and prediction: Even before the emergence of generative AI, customer service used AI to forecast specific customers' sales patterns and anticipate their future needs. There's even a famous example of how an AI sent pregnancy coupons to a teenage girl because it figured out from her purchases that she was expecting a baby (something her parents didn't even know). Your business doesn't need to go that far. But using AI, you can upsell products to customers and personalise the correspondence.  

Intelligent Routing: Few things frustrate us as much as not getting answers from a business. The problem is often to find the right person to speak to, especially when customers can contact companies through various channels such as email or chat windows. At the same time, service and sales teams can become overwhelmed by calls. More companies are using AI-powered intelligent routing to solve these issues. Intelligent routing can detect a person's mood or sentiment, call up their previous interactions, and route them to specific agents best suited for their problem or profile. It's already a common feature in leading CRM and customer service platforms. 

AI is transforming customer service everywhere. Vodacom's customers can interact with TOBi, a digital assistant that offers help 24/7 via online chat, SMS, or WhatsApp. There are many other exciting things that AI can add to every business, large or small, including automation, planning, competitive analysis, fraud detection, and much more. 

Don't lose customers over a negative service experience. Find out more from Vodacom's experts and discover how artificial intelligence can attract and keep loyal customers.