How adaptive AI is improving customer service for e-commerce companies

Consumers expect highly personalized service any time they interact with an e-commerce company, with 87% of consumers prioritizing brands that “understand the real me.” But are AI agents capable of providing excellent, personalized support to e-commerce customers? The answer is yes—but only if you’re using adaptive AI agents. 

How adaptive AI is improving customer experiences

As AI develops, there is a lot of new terminology to get up to speed with. So let’s start by explaining what we mean by adaptive AI and AI agents. 

What is adaptive AI? 

An adaptive AI system learns as data is continuously fed into it in real-time, meaning it modifies its behavior and decision-making as it receives new information. 

What is an AI agent? 

Often referred to as agentic AI, AI agents use adaptive AI models to learn exactly like a human does. This means that AI agents can now mirror how humans learn, think, interact, and work—but with much greater speed and accuracy. 

Combining adaptive AI and agentic AI to transform customer service

Leading e-commerce companies use adaptive AI agents to handle complex queries, autonomously carry out tasks, and adapt to customers’ needs as they change over time. This reduces the need for large customer support teams while improving customers’ experiences at the same time. 

With one in three consumers (32%) saying they’ll walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience, e-commerce companies can’t afford to not embrace adaptive AI agents—like hiring a Neople—to enhance their customer support. 

We’ll now explore the difference between adaptive AI and static AI models, how it learns, how it benefits e-commerce companies, and the risks of getting left behind. 

What is the difference between adaptive AI and previous static AI models?  

Static AI is a traditional, reactive model that is trained offline before deployment, and then “locked” i.e. it can only continue to learn if someone manually updates it. While this may work fine for basic chatbots that use predefined rules and responses, it requires a lot of human involvement and doesn’t account for individual customer preferences that change over time. 

On the other hand, adaptive AI is a dynamic model that uses adaptive machine learning to enable the system to learn as data is continuously fed into it in real-time. It can modify its algorithms and make new decisions as it receives further information.

This means that adaptive AI can handle complex queries, autonomously carry out tasks, and adapt to your customers’ needs as they change over time. It’s a no-brainer for e-commerce companies who want to provide excellent, personalized customer service with less human agents. 

How adaptive AI agents learn: supervised vs unsupervised learning

The ability of adaptive AI to mimic the human brain’s adaptability to changes as it gains new data is known as auto-adaptive learning. A machine learning model is trained either by supervised or unsupervised learning.

Supervised learning

Supervised learning is usually done when the expected output (response to the input data) is known. The AI develops its models by classifying data inputs or using regression techniques to predict continuous responses. This classification technique is used for inputs that can be grouped, while regression is largely used for ranged data or real number outputs.

Unsupervised learning

Unsupervised AI learning is used to extract trends from input data with no labeled response. It utilizes clustering, association, or dimensionality reduction to find conspicuous patterns from a data set. Unsupervised machine learning in support is beneficial for AI to adapt easier to unpredicted input data from customers.

Whichever approach you choose, we can guarantee that your adaptive AI agent will be the fastest, most attentive learner you’ve ever worked with—especially if you work with one of our Neople. 

Risks for e-commerce companies of not using adaptive AI 

But it’s not just about getting ahead, e-commerce companies who ignore the potential of adaptive AI will end up getting left behind in the very near future. The risks of not using adaptive AI agents include:

Loss of customers due to poor quality customer service

Chatbots and human agents are not always able to provide timely, accurate responses due to high volumes of tickets, especially during busy periods such as Black Friday. They also can’t process and learn from huge volumes of data in a time-efficient way, meaning they don’t always have the latest information and new ways to solve issues. 

This leads to reduced quality of customer service and may even result in loss of customers, as 79% of people admit that they'd switch to a competitor brand or company if they found out they had better customer service. 

Over-reliance on expensive human agents

Static AI usually ends up connecting customers to human agents to actually carry out actions, even though these actions tend to be straight-forward and very repetitive e.g. tracking a package. This is simply a waste of money, as adaptive AI can take over these tasks as well as helping automate and resolve more complex queries as you scale up.  

3 immediate benefits of hiring an adaptive AI agent

Customers want to feel seen, heard, and truly cared for by the brands they buy from, which can be really helped by adaptive AI agents who provide accurate, timely, and personalized resolutions to customers. This is one of many benefits that adaptive AI agents deliver:

1. Increased productivity of support team 

Adaptive AI agents can handle much higher volumes of tickets than human agents ever could. Faster, simultaneous ticket resolution leads to increased productivity of the customer support team, freeing up human agents’ time for more high-value tasks and reducing the need to hire more employees. 

2. Avoid repeated errors or misunderstandings

Humans by nature are prone to lapses in concentration, misunderstandings, and mistakes, particularly when they’re really busy during sale periods. The same can be said for static AI solutions as they cannot take in new information or correct outdated information without an extensive manual update. 

Whereas adaptive AI agents are continuously learning, improving their resolutions, and tailoring their actions for each customer. They consistently perform well as, unlike humans, they don’t have off days or get overwhelmed during challenging customer interactions.

3. Improved customer experiences build loyalty 

If you can make your customers feel valued, then earning and retaining their loyalty will be a whole lot easier. Adaptive AI agents help you identify trends in the data and ‘recall’ previous customer interactions, making every interaction feel attentive and personalized.

Imagine a customer returning with a problem and, rather than simply being met by a monotonous response, they are recognized and greeted by name before being asked about their problem. This alone will improve the customer’s mood and increase the likelihood of a good customer experience by the end of the interaction.

Why Neople are the best adaptive AI agents for e-commerce companies? 

Neople are already fully-fledged employees in leading e-commerce companies—like Haarspullen, Invicta, and Vitaminstore—helping them to automate ticket resolution, improve customer experiences, and reduce the need for expanding human support teams. 

You can train, update, interact with, and work alongside a Neople just like a human agent, and immediately trust that they’ll do exactly what you ask. Plus, you can of course customize your Neople to your brand, tone of voice, and lingo so that they look, sound, and feel like any other employee. 

Unlike other AI agents, Neople is an adaptive AI agent that works across your entire tech stack. Most other agents are native to the vendor’s own platform, which means you’d need to hire a separate AI agent for each platform. And the return on investment (ROI) is pretty impressive if we do say so ourselves. 

Ready to take the first step? 

At Neople, we’re confident that hiring a Neople to join your customer support team will bring a range of benefits - from cost savings to increased productivity to better customer experiences - that far outweigh its costs.  

Ready for a new digital co-worker to join your customer service team? Book a free demo, in just 30 minutes we’ll show you how your Neople can integrate with your team and improve customer satisfaction.