Most of us have seen customer service change and adapt quite substantially over the years. Face-to-face problem-solving became over-the-phone interactions before gradually moving online. Now, there’s a 50/50 chance you’re talking to a human customer service agent and not a bot… and what about AI advancements?
In this post, we’ll take a look at whether there’s a chance that AI will replace the ‘traditional customer service agent’, taking into account elements like productivity, reach, and the arrival of new tools like Einstein Service Agent.
The Current Status of Customer Service
In 2023, the investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that AI had the potential to replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. It should, by now, come as no surprise that many experts agree that a ‘replacement’ effort is not in the cards but rather an augmentation and automation effort. However, it isn’t so clear cut; companies like Klarna have already leaned into this possibility by using AI to do the work of hundreds of employees, as well as justify hiring freezes.
Since the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the customer service industry – especially the phone/online sectors – has been dealing with a whole host of issues. Customer expectations are higher than ever, and demand is at an all-time high. With 72% of consumers saying that they will remain loyal to companies that provide faster service, customer service agents are feeling the heat; 69% say it’s difficult to balance speed and quality.
To combat these demands, the industry has responded with the help of technology. In just the UK, 79% of contact centers now employ at least one cloud-based application, and interestingly, chatbots now partially or wholly handle 50% of web chats.
So, with AI now making rapid advancements, where does it fit into the customer service equation?
AI in Customer Service: What Does That Look Like?
When we think of customer service, we have to remind ourselves that it encompasses so many different areas. Whether that’s support agents assisting in a call center, customer representatives helping people in an establishment such as a bank, or something more automated like bots on a webpage, it all forms part of the customer service experience.
With AI, it’s already being used in more customer service interactions than you might realize. It’s being used to take orders in drive-thrus, it’s being used in vet support chatbots (with varying degrees of success), and it’s even being used as conversational customer service support, with some being able to handle over 1,000,000 phone calls at once for businesses!
It’s evident by now that AI can not replicate the work of a human in its entirety. It continually misses the ‘human’ element, no matter how accurate it is, and problems such as hallucinations, dirty data sets, and a general lack of the human touch are all setbacks that AI creators and users have come to know well.
That being said, in customer service, the goal of AI seems to be to make things easier. After all, working in customer service is known to be very stressful, with companies in the US seeing turnover rates of agents of up to 45% every year. So, how does AI step in? It automates.
Much like it does in many other sectors, AI has the capability to take repetitive, manual tasks off of customer service agents’ desks. Whether this is responding to common FAQs, helping customers with ‘help themself’ inquiries, or even creating tickets for humans to look into issues like you can do with Einstein Service Agent.
And when there just isn’t enough staff or budget for a full customer service department? That’s when you can look into more advanced AI options.
The Benefits of AI in Customer Service
Although the lack of human touch can hold back businesses wanting to venture into the AI side of customer service, it still has its benefits. These include:
- Streamline the customer experience: With AI tools like AI-powered chatbots, you can ensure that a customer visiting your website is greeted and helped promptly, rather than making them wait for extended periods of time to talk to a human agent. If the case requires human intervention, then the chatbot can redirect the customer only when it is necessary, saving the agents time on menial tasks.
- Personalization with AI rapport: A big part of human-facing customer service is building rapport with your customer, but this can often take a lot of time, and if your company is dealing with a lot of enquiries, it can be difficult to do this. With a tool like Einstein under your belt, you can use customer service AI as a virtual “buddy” that draws from existing and real-time customer data to solve problems. No need for the customer to pull up tracking numbers or emails; the AI can have all this data to hand in seconds.
- Higher productivity: On the staffing side, AI processes in customer service can really help to increase productivity. In fact, 84% of IT leaders believe AI will help their organizations better serve customers, and data has shown that AI-based conversational assistants can increase productivity by 14% for support agents.
Costs and Drawbacks
As with any new implementation, cost is one of the biggest and most important things to factor into the decision-making process. And AI is certainly not cheap…
In 2024, companies can pay anywhere from 0 to more than $300,000 for AI software. This software can range from a solution provided by a third party to a custom platform developed by a team of in-house or freelance data scientists. The cost of course comes down to your requirements such as the AI type, customization, analysis systems, features, project type, and more.
If you’re looking to get stuck in with Salesforce’s customer AI options, then one avenue to look into is Einstein for Service, which comes to $75 per user per month. Different editions will have access to different features, so it’s worth checking out the full guide, but depending on what you’re looking for, this could be a good solution for you and your org.
Cost can definitely be a disadvantage of utilizing AI in customer service processes, and it’s not the only one you will need to consider. According to HubSpot, some of the main drawbacks of customer service AI are unpredictability, alienating segments of the market, the lack of emotional intelligence, a limited understanding of context (tool dependent), the lack of human touch, fewer customer interactions, and continuous maintenance.
This being said, AI is still a cheaper alternative than hiring entire customer service teams in the long run, so depending on your requirements and the scale of your company, this could be something that’s easier to get around than you might think.
Einstein Service Agent: A Case Study
Last month, Salesforce unveiled Einstein Service Agent, what Salesforce calls its first “fully autonomous AI agent to revolutionize chatbot experiences.”
With its ability to render conventional chatbots ‘obsolete’, Einstein Service Agent can understand and take action on a wide range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios.
What sets Einstein Service Agent apart from traditional chatbots is its intelligence. Your traditional chatbot is typically only able to handle specific queries that have been explicitly programmed into their system and don’t understand context or nuance. ESA, built on the Einstein 1 Platform, interacts with large language models (LLMs) by analyzing the full context of the customer’s message and then autonomously determining the next actions to take. From there, it uses generative AI to create conversational responses grounded in the company’s business data with a specific set of guidelines, brand, and tone.
Diving deeper, some of its top features include:
- Sophisticated reasoning and natural responses: ESA uses its reasoning engine to interpret and process information to provide answers and solve problems for customers, with the advanced reasoning engine interacts with LLMs by analyzing the full context of the customer’s input to understand their intent, drawing logical inferences from the data, and connecting various pieces of information to determine the right set of actions to take.
- 24/7 swift resolutions driven by trusted data: Einstein Service Agent grounds its responses in a company’s trusted business data, including Salesforce CRM data. Using Data Cloud and Unified Knowledge, companies can even integrate data and knowledge from third-party systems to help Einstein Service Agent generate accurate responses.
- Built-in guardrails: As ESA is built on the Einstein 1 Platform, it leverages the Einstein Trust Layer to perform functions like masking personally identifiable information (PII) and defining clear parameters and guardrails for Einstein Service Agent to follow.
- Quick setup: Salesforce understands that the thought of lengthy setup processes can put businesses off of using AI, which is why ESA can be turned on in minutes with its out-of-the-box templates, Salesforce components, and an LLM.
Something important to note with Salesforce’s customer service AI offerings – particularly Einstein Service Agent – is that the goals always bring the two worlds together. Salesforce’s official description of ESA states: “Experience intelligent customer support with seamless collaboration between digital & human workers for rapid case resolution.”
Although ESA’s capabilities are advanced and impressive, it still has built-in processes to seamlessly hand off to humans if the requirements fall outside of its scope.
When it comes down to it, this is what customers are after too. According to a report by Zendesk, there’s a near 50/50 split between consumers preferring AI over humans when they want immediate service, with 56% of respondents saying they think that AI agents help them better understand products. This near-equal divide signifies one main thing: customers want the choice, which, in the world of CX, is why AI and humans working together harmoniously will always be the best decision.
Final Thoughts
Companies are always looking to reduce their costs, and human workers are some of the most expensive costs any company has – especially when compared to automation. This means that customer service agents do run the risk of becoming obsolete.
This shouldn’t be a concern in the near future, as experts still work out some of AI’s main issues, but with the advancement of AI, humans’ involvement in the future of customer service is certainly not set in stone.
AI is a powerful tool that can bring a myriad of benefits to the customer service industry including increased productivity, streamlined processes, and personalized assistance. However, at the moment, you can’t take humans out of that equation, which is why a united work front makes sense going forward.
However, as the biggest companies aim to scale down the results of pandemic mass hiring and focus more on profitability, it will not be surprising to see more stories like Klarna’s appear.