How to use generative AI for scaling customer support in e-commerce

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and can transform the way we work, especially for customer support teams who deal with plenty of repetitive tasks. AI can be a real life-saver. But the question still remains, how? Because garbage in is garbage out. Here’s how generative AI can be used to scale customer support in e-commerce and allow you to focus on the things that truly matter for your customers.

How generative AI transforms customer service in e-commerce

Generative AI had a real breakthrough in 2022. While it started off with funny images, sounds, and videos being generated, it really took off when ChatGPT was introduced in late November. Only a few months later, it’s making a big transformation in the way we work. Generative AI helps to create content, have text double-checked, and bring new ideas.

What is generative AI exactly? 

Generative AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence models designed to generate new content, such as text, images, music, or other data types. When used well, it’s hard to see the difference between content created by humans versus AI. Generative AI is able to create new data by learning from the data it's trained on.

Use cases of generative AI in customer service for e-commerce

One of the most interesting use cases of generative AI is when we apply it to companies dealing with a high level of customer support, such as customer service teams in e-commerce businesses. They are dealing with loads of content, high volumes of incoming questions, and repetitive work. It’s a great match when technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) can help out.

Let’s have a look at the most important use cases of generative AI for e-commerce support teams:  

• Give answer suggestions: it saves a lot of time for support teams if they get answer suggestions based on AI. 
• Provide multilingual support: Ai can provide real-time translation services. There’s no need to work with external translators or additional tools anymore.
• Summarize information: AI can sift through plenty of systems, tools, and databases to summarize the right information for quick responses.
• Retrieving the right order information: AI can generate and send automatic updates about order status, shipping information, and delivery timelines to customers.
• Sentiment analysis: AI can analyze customer feedback and interactions to gauge sentiment.
• Feeding knowledge bases: AI can analyze the most asked questions and suggested answers and can help decrease the incoming questions overall. 

AI customer service software uses generative AI to automate support and help to improve customer satisfaction. Let’s have a look at how e-commerce support teams can practically benefit from generative AI. 

5 ways e-commerce support teams can benefit from generative AI 

1. Increase speed and improve efficiency

Customer support usually involves long wait times, frustrating automated menus, and fighting with a poorly functioning chatbot. Consumers are spoiled these days; they are used to getting help at any moment. But these demands burden every company with a high workload on their customer support team.

Generative AI can help increase speed and improve efficiency as responses can be generated in a split second. When generative AI is connected to other internal knowledge bases or tools, it can significantly decrease the average first response time and time spent per ticket.

2. Personalize customer support

Generative AI allows for context-aware responses, meaning it allows you to give personalized replies. Past interactions can be analyzed, and the right Tone of Voice can be used and fine-tuned. Based on these fine-tunes, it can improve future answers. So, in time, these personalizations become even better.

By using personalizations thanks to generative AI, you can provide a more empathetic and human-like customer support experience. The end result? A stronger customer-agent relationship and more satisfied customers.

3. Scale and increase cost-efficiency

Traditional customer support is hard to scale, as you’re dependent on support agents to meet the increasing customer demands. Hiring and training new team members is time-consuming and often expensive. And let’s not forget about seasonality, especially in e-commerce, which is very challenging for hiring strategies and budgets.

AI models are the answer to scale support because once trained, they can handle close to unlimited numbers of conversations simultaneously. This scalability allows companies to provide consistent support even during peak periods without incurring additional costs.

4. Understand and generate responses in multiple languages

Especially in e-commerce, customers are used to shopping cross-border. But this also requests flexibility from support teams in the fact they need to provide answers in multiple languages. This is time-consuming, difficult, and maybe even requires native support agents.

Generative AI is the answer as it can break down language barriers by offering multilingual support. It’s able to understand and generate responses in multiple languages, allowing you to serve customers with diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Depending on the countries you’re active in, customers don’t speak English very well. Offering multilingual support allows you to provide inclusive answers and expand reach. It will also lead to more satisfied customers.

5. Offer consistent and qualitative support all year round

We’ve mentioned seasonality before. But unfortunately, support teams have periods in which their backlogs grow with huge amounts of new tickets on a daily basis, making it challenging for support teams to provide the right answers quickly and remain friendly at all times.

Generative AI can help to offer friendly communication at all times. It can help your support teams to give answer suggestions in the right tone and with complete information. Based on sentiment analysis, AI is able to provide the right answer showing the right empathy, which can make a big difference when it comes to the overall customer experience.

What to expect from generative AI in e-commerce in the near future?

In the near future, voice will become an even more important medium when it comes to customer support. Generative AI will not only understand text-based inquiries but also interpret tone, emotions, and voice comments. Implementing it now can help you fine-tune and enhance the customer experience, leading to a competitive advantage.

Don’t fear AI but implement it sooner rather than later. Because you can train AI as well. Generative AI doesn’t only learn from the databases you connect it to; it can also learn from your own customer support teams who can train models based on their own input. Was the answer incorrect or not yet perfect? Your own team can evaluate it and train the model to perform better. The next time AI is helping out, the input will be taken into account.

Hire a Neople to implement generative AI for qualitative support at scale 

At Neople, we help customer support agents with their repetitive inquiries, freeing up human resources for more specialized tasks. We offer a unique AI coworker for e-commerce businesses to help automate repetitive tasks while making support teams’ jobs more fun too.

A Neople can be integrated with all your tools, whether it’s your e-commerce platform, contact center, WMS, shipping software, or even Slack. It gets trained on your company information and customer support teams. It becomes smarter with every interaction thanks to an automated feedback system as well.

We know there’s a bit of hesitance to adopt AI for customer support. But at Neople, we want to change that. We allow you to offer the best support thanks to your own knowledge, skills, and TOV guidelines. This cost-efficient approach enables you to allocate team resources effectively and maximize operational efficiency and customer satisfaction at the same time.

Curious to meet your new AI coworker? Book a free demo and we’ll show you how it works.