Virtual Customer Service 2024: Everything You Need to Know

All successful businesses share one thing: great customer care. It is the fundamental building block of strong relationships with customers. Today, 97% of customers say their interaction with customer services decides whether they’ll stay loyal to a brand. This means that companies must focus on effective customer care methods, and that is where virtual customer service comes in. 

Although some companies prefer dedicated in-house support teams, it can be pretty expensive. Businesses can save a lot of money by replacing it with virtual customer service. So, what is virtual customer care, how does it work, and how does AI assume a significant role in it?

Keep reading, and we’ll answer all of these questions for you below. 

What is Virtual Customer Service and How Does it Work?

Virtual customer service is a comprehensive customer support mechanism that operates remotely through agents. Although it is not an in-house team, it is trained extensively on the company's products, services, goals, and market outlook to deliver support that cannot be differentiated from an in-house team's services. The commonly used forms of communication in virtual customer services are phone calls, messages, live chats, and emails.

Let's say a customer buys a gadget from an e-commerce platform , and it turns out to be defective. They will instantly hop on to their live chat support function on the website and put their query to a virtual customer service representative.

They assist customers from a completely different location without any physical connection with the company itself. Remote agents can access all the important information that's needed to help customers, such as order timings, delivery timings, product details, tracking, billing, and more.

Here are some of the essential components of virtual customer service that make it work. 

1. Chatbots

Chatbots are known for their 24/7 virtual assistance. They not only respond to customer queries instantly but also collect their feedback regarding products, shopping experiences, booking appointments, and more. The millennial population wants instant gratification, and that's where chatbot-based virtual support really shines. Chatbots access and analyze data much faster than humans, allowing them to answer queries within seconds.

2. Social Media

Millions of customers use social media networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. Companies assist customers on these platforms, answering their queries and addressing their suggestions. In the fast-paced social media world, 37% of customers expect companies to respond within the first 30 minutes of contact.

 

Many brands integrate their live chat functionality with social media for an even better user experience. If a customer sends a message on social media, it's received directly in live chat, and virtual support is ready to handle it.

3. Live Chat

Live chat is a popular option in virtual customer care because it helps teams understand and resolve queries effectively from any location. What differentiates chatbot customer care from live chat customer care is that the latter has a human element. Live chat can also mean proactive customer support, as human agents can ask customers if they're satisfied with the products or the services they're using. 

Pros and Cons of Virtual Customer Service

Now that we have understood what virtual customer service is and how it works, it's time to discuss its pros and cons. Once you understand them as a customer service provider, you can make well-informed decisions that suit your business.

1 Cost

High-quality customer support is essential and usually becomes the biggest expense for a business. You must have knowledgeable employees to handle customer care queries, but they don't need to know every single detail. That's why it's better to hire remote employees that cost you a lot less money and deliver the same services. If they receive an issue they cannot resolve, they can simply escalate it to the relevant teams. 

2 Candidate Choice

It's natural to look for potential candidates locally, but you might not always find talent that way. The local candidate might be too small for your needs, and that's where remote agents for virtual customer service come in. They might have more experience, cost less, and be available at odd hours. All they need is an internet connection and the right support platform. 

3 Scalability

Virtual customer service is a challenging area: your support teams might sometimes be overwhelmed with requests, prompting you to hire more customer support virtual assistants. Doing that might help you temporarily, but once the glut is over, you'd be left with full-time employees that you don't really need. Dismissing employees repeatedly doesn't sound ideal, either. The most effective way out of this dilemma is hiring remote support agents. It helps you easily get back to the normal headcount once the rush is over. 

Cons

1 Product Knowledge

One of the biggest drawbacks of hiring remote agents is their lack of product knowledge. That leads to them only dealing with low-priority issues. When it comes to complex queries that require product knowledge, they'd need to refer to an in-house team. While it is possible to have a training program for these remote employees, it's hard to do it when you want to ramp up support quickly. 

2 Agent Tracking

The purpose of hiring remote agents is to improve customer care experience. But it can be tricky to read every conversation and listen to every call they're having with customers. You can ask customers to complete experience surveys, but not everyone will. Remote agents can be beneficial, but in some instances, they do more harm than good. 

How to Utilize AI for Virtual Customer Service

Customer service has traditionally been understood as a tool to resolve queries, but it's much more than that. It's also about driving brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Around 46% of companies are already using AI to improve customer relationship management.

With technologies like Machine Learning, large language models, and Generative AI advancing rapidly, this wave can expect to become even stronger. AI in customer care isn’t another buzzword; it is a well-defined process that aims to enhance customer care and make businesses more productive. 

Let's discuss some of the ways in which companies use AI in virtual customer service.

1. Quick Query Resolution with AI Chatbots

Sometimes, customers present problems that are difficult and time-consuming for human agents to search the knowledge base for. In those scenarios, companies can use AI chatbots to understand user queries, quickly explore the available resources, and provide highly relevant answers. Since an AI chatbot can do all of this on its own, users might not even have to contact human support to get a helpful answer. 

2. Enhancing Customer Satisfaction With Personalized Recommendations

Since customers bring a wealth of data when they contact support, AI can use it to improve their experience significantly. For instance, if the AI system has detected that a user frequently interacts with a particular feature, it can create a detailed FAQ or tutorial video link even before the user encounters a problem. It is useful not only in predicting potential issues and addressing them proactively but also in making customers feel understood, improving retention rates. 

3. Sentiment Analysis

AI has advanced to the point where it can tell you how customers feel about a particular feature, product, or even industry by collecting and analyzing relevant data. It can easily collect a massive amount of data in the form of support tickets, social media comments, and survey results that can provide valuable insights for crafting a more user-centric business strategy. 

If customers are not happy with a particular product, the sentiment analysis informs you about it so you can either discontinue or improve that product. 

Customer Care Chatbot Creation

Now that we have discussed how AI can help with customer care, let's move on to a step-by-step guide on how to create effective customer care chatbots that deliver the results you want. 

Step 1: Build AI Chatbots Tailored to Your Business

The first step is to create a chatbot that is well-suited to your business. It is important to understand the nature of your business, its customer base, and other requirements to create a suitable chatbot. Are you trying to build a chatbot that answers simple queries, or do you want it to provide extensive troubleshooting steps? Do you want it to become a lead-generation tool that captures valuable customer information? Which demographics do your customers belong to? 

Step 2: Choose the Right Platform

Building AI chatbots from scratch is perfectly possible, but do you really want to go the extra mile? Thankfully, advanced platforms are available today that provide tried and trusted frameworks for building AI chatbots for virtual customer service. Choosing an user-friendly platform like GPTBots helps you save a lot of time and money and ensures that your AI chatbot works exactly as you intend. 

Step 3: Craft the Conversation Flow

Designing the conversation flow is one of the most important steps of AI chatbot creation. You can do that by trying various things, such as trying various inputs, creating dialogue trees, and the possible responses to user queries. Try to make the answer quick and concise while ensuring a consistent tone. 

Step 4: Train Your Chatbot

Without proper training, your AI chatbot is like that bright child who cannot perform in the classroom. It is not just about providing your chatbot with a lot of data - it's also about training it in a way that it can actually help customers. What's the best way to do that, you might ask? Testing, testing, and more testing is the only right answer. 

Put your chatbot through a series of tests and closely monitor its responses. Make adjustments wherever necessary to ensure that the end product performs effectively. 

Step 5: Integrate the Chatbot With Relevant Platforms

Chatbot integration is critical to ensure that it continues to perform optimally and enables personalization with valuable data. Integrate your chatbots with platforms used by your audience, such as your website, social media, and messaging apps. You can do that by either using APIs (application programming interfaces) or native platform integration tools. 

Here's how to do that:

• Embed a chat widget on the website.

• Connect to Facebook, WhatsApp, and other relevant social media platforms. 

• Use APIs for internal business tools or messaging apps.

Conclusion

The AI chatbot trend is only picking up pace, and we'll see more companies using them to handle their customer care loads. After all, they can help them enhance customer satisfaction, handle multiple queries at once, reduce costs, and earn customer loyalty. You might have some concerns about them, but customer care AI chatbots are worth a try.

If you also want to reap the benefits of AI chatbot customer care for your business, look no further than GPTBots, a powerful platform that helps you build class-leading AI chatbots. We are committed to providing advanced AI chatbots that are available 24/7 and are fully integrated with the platforms your customers visit. 

With human-like conversations, proficiency in 90 languages, and very high customer retention rates, our chatbots are exactly what your business needs. So, build your AI bots today with GPTBots.ai and start seeing the results yourself. 

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is an AI chatbot?

An AI chatbot is a computer program powered by artificial intelligence that interacts with humans through text or voice. They use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze queries and provide relevant responses. 

Can AI chatbots improve virtual customer service?

AI chatbots have proven to be pretty effective in customer care, as they can generate instant responses. They learn from extensive datasets and keep improving their problem-solving capabilities to offer even better responses. 

Can AI chatbots replace customer service?

Currently, most companies use AI chatbots to complement traditional customer service agents. As AI advances even further, it may claim a larger share of the customer care industry and replace many human customer support virtual assistants.