How AI Is Transforming eCommerce Customer Service

eCommerce is an important section of the retail industry that has seen significant growth in recent years. There was the Covid boom period when so much shopping was forced online by the closure of non-essential retail stores, but many eCommerce companies retained some of those new customers - there was no automatic return back to 2019 sales volumes.

Now artificial intelligence (AI) is helping many eCommerce companies to improve their customer experience (CX). They are using AI to both improve self-service options and also improve the quality of service offered by human agents when a customer needs help.

IBM data from October 2023 suggests that this is what eCommerce customers really want. Their survey found that 86% of customers now expect that AI should be helping them to resolve issues or to manage basic service interactions.

Improved customer service is perhaps the most visible way in which AI can help to improve eCommerce CX, but there are several other areas in which these companies can use AI to improve their service to customers, including:

• Personalization: targeting customers based on their specific taste and preferences can have a dramatic effect on sales conversions - for example offering discounts only for a single customer based on their shopping history. Alternatively, using AI tools to imagine how products will look in the customer’s home environment can create a stronger bond and drive sales.

• Inventory: always a challenge for eCommerce brands as the traditional free shipping has allowed customers to order far more than they need, try the products, then return what they don’t need entirely free. The free returns approach is changing, but tools such as AI “try-on” tech can dramatically help customers to order only what they need.

• Sales: AI can help to monitor advertising and marketing campaigns, to indicate what is working and what is not. Sales initiatives can be planned around the most high-performing type of marketing with timing that works for specific products.

All these aspects of the customer experience can improve the service the customer receives and can also lead to an increase in sales, but there are several important and very visible ways that the customer service process can be improved and these are where most customers will see an impact.

Self-service can be dramatically improved through the use of Generative AI (GenAI). This allows a chatbot to be trained on a large amount of information - such as product specifications and user manuals. The bot can know everything there is to know about a product and can easily formulate answers to questions from the customer.

The customer service team can be supported with digital assistants. This can reduce the manual tasks that an agent would traditionally need to undertake - such as writing up a summary of each call - but can also offer a ‘next best action’ where the AI listens to a call and can suggest documents or information that may help the agent. This can dramatically reduce the number of times where an agent has to say ‘please wait on hold while I search for some information’ - most of the time it will be there without the need to search because the AI anticipates what is needed.

In addition, AI can look at customer history, monitor customer sentiment, and absorb additional real-time information to predict what individual customers may want or need - this can create the opportunity where offers or discounts can be created just for a single customer based on a number of different variables.

As this article published by Shopify outlines, the outcomes from this application of AI will be more satisfied customers who receive better service faster than ever and this in turn will increase their loyalty to your brand.

Applying AI to your customer service strategy has many different effects - it can improve sales and increase customer satisfaction, but most importantly it can really increase the number of customers who keep returning to your eCommerce brand.