Generative AI’s ability to generate new content at scale, translate text in real-time, and offer end-to-end assistance unlocks unprecedented efficiency and agility in customer support. With Gen AI, eCommerce businesses can provide always-on customer support almost mimicking human-level intelligence, answer diverse queries (both routine and complex) to lighten the load on human agents, and deliver customer satisfaction (CSAT).
This is part two of a series of three articles discussing Gen AI’s role in support, marketing, and operations for eCommerce companies.
Read part one of the series, “5 Ways Generative AI Transforms Marketing in eCommerce”, if you haven’t already
How Generative AI Reimagines Customer SupportWith superior context retention, the ability to adapt responses based on conversational context, and continuous learning capabilities - Gen AI provides a more cohesive, seamless, and personalized experience for customers. The higher accuracy and consistency of responses provided by Gen AI assistants ensure that customers feel heard and understood.
Let’s understand how Gen AI’s advanced capabilities shine through in an eCommerce setting with an example.
The scenario is that a customer faces an issue with the order they received. They have received the size “small” for the shoe instead of the actual “medium” they had ordered. They interact with the Gen AI assistant for a solution.
The Gen AI assistant remembers the specific issue faced by the customer who’s received the “wrong size” of shoe (context retention). It then personalizes its response by giving the customer the option of exchanging or requesting a refund. Finally, the Gen AI assistant offers an efficient and smooth resolution by handling the customer’s concern end-to-end without escalating the issue to a human agent.
This level of context retention and personalization was not feasible with traditional, rule-based AI assistants, which would often escalate complex queries to human agents. Considering the example discussed above, the AI assistant would get the order ID from the customer and hand over the conversation to a human agent, making the support process significantly less efficient.
Generative AI Use Cases for Customer Support in eCommerce
Let’s look at the high-value use cases driven by Gen AI in eCommerce customer support.
Gen AI Q&A Assistant for Instant Query Resolution
A Gen AI Q&A assistant, leveraging unstructured data and integrated with help content, significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of post-purchase support. It can seamlessly handle queries around order status and returns, product troubleshooting, and others - reducing wait times and improving customer satisfaction (CSAT). A positive post-purchase experience fosters lasting customer relationships and encourages repeat business, leading to better ROI and increased customer lifetime value.
And the best part? This intelligent Q&A assistant can be built using unstructured data (PDFs, CSVs, websites, blogs, and more) and deployed in a day.
Gen AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis for Innovative Product Development
While traditional methods analyze customer reviews to gauge overall sentiment such as positive, negative, or neutral - Gen AI takes this a couple of notches higher. It analyzes vast amounts of reviews and identifies recurring themes even if those reviews don’t explicitly state any particular customer sentiment. By identifying customer issues and preferences, Gen AI helps prioritize product development efforts based on actual customer feedback and needs. Understanding customer needs also allows eCommerce companies to build innovative products and launch them faster to stay ahead of the curve.
Gen AI Agent Co-Pilot for Enhanced Agent Productivity
Gen AI Agent Co-pilot boosts productivity and augments agent capabilities by empowering them with AI chat summaries, AI response suggestions, and AI tone enhancer for responses based on customer sentiment. This allows support agents to resolve queries faster and deliver consistent and personalized responses that customers expect. Agent Co-pilot ensures agents can automate routine queries in an efficient and faster manner.
Also read: Live Chat Agents in the Generative AI Era & What It Means for Customer Support
Gen AI-Powered Churn Prediction for Reduced Churn and Increased Retention
Gen AI excels at analyzing a plethora of data, including purchase history, browsing behavior, customer feedback, and engagement metrics, to identify signals of dissatisfaction. eCommerce businesses can maximize Gen AI’s ability to build predictive models to predict customers who are at risk of churning. The gathered insights can then fuel proactive targeting strategies such as tailored offers and discounts, and enhanced customer service, for retention.
Gen AI Chat Transcript Analysis for Performance and Service Improvement
Historical chat and audio-based customer interactions are a treasure trove of insights, ripe for extraction. Haptik, in collaboration with a large electronics brand, leveraged Gen AI to monitor, evaluate, and enhance customer service interactions. The process of converting large volumes of audio calls into transcripts helped with easier data analysis and gleaning actionable insights. The insights help with understanding agent performance and customer sentiment, which can drive service improvements across the customer support ecosystem.
Final Thoughts
Customers look for fast and efficient resolution to their queries and concerns. Generative AI-powered solutions offer comprehensive support by providing instant and personalized responses to even complex queries, and automating tasks without the intervention of a human agent. Thus, the technology ensures customer interactions are seamless, significantly reducing wait times and enhancing overall satisfaction. eCommerce businesses can thus deliver superior service, win customer loyalty, and foster competitive edge.
