Best AI Tools for Customer Service in 2024
Prashanth Kancherla
Apr 22, 2024 | 12 mins read
Is your customer service team overwhelmed with repetitive and increasing volume of queries? Are your customers waiting on hold, their patience wearing thin every minute? You know there must be a better way to provide the high-quality service your customers deserve. However, the task of improving efficiency without sacrificing quality seems daunting.
Automation as well as strategic use of AI tools can largely help mitigate this challenge. In fact, over 60% of customer service professionals say that using AI helped them save time, and nearly 50% say it makes their job easier
Today’s customers demand fast, accurate answers, 24/7 availability, and a personalized touch. They want to feel valued and understood, unlike another ticket in a queue. AI-powered customer service tools offer a powerful solution to these challenges. By automating repetitive tasks, deflecting simple inquiries, and providing real-time support, AI can empower your team to focus on complex issues and deliver a truly exceptional customer experience.
This article dives into the top AI customer service software options, giving you the information you need to streamline your operations, boost efficiency, and create a customer experience that keeps people coming back for more. Read along!
In this article, we will explore:
Overview of AI Tools for Customer Service
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the best AI tools for customer service, let’s just have a quick look at them and know what they are best for:| S. No | AI Tool | Best For | Standout Feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ozonetel | Digital CX Solutions | Intuitive bot designer, customer journey builder, Voice of Customer Insights |
| 2 | Help Scout | Email and ticket management | Collaborative email inbox for seamless team communication |
| 3 | Custify | Customer success management | Customer health scoring and proactive alerts for retention |
| 4 | ClickUp | Task and project management | AI-powered task automation and customizable workflows |
| 5 | Freshdesk | Omnichannel customer support | Unified inbox for managing queries from multiple channels |
| 6 | Tidio | Live chat support | AI-powered chatbots for automated responses and lead generation |
| 7 | Keap | Small business CRM | Personalized customer communication through automated marketing |
| 8 | HubSpot | Marketing, sales, and service automation | All-in-one platform offering CRM, email marketing, and live chat |
| 9 | Balto | Real-time call guidance | AI-driven coaching during live calls for agent assistance |
| 10 | Hiver | Email collaboration and management | Shared inbox with templates, snooze, and reminders |
| 11 | Kustomer | Enterprise-level customer service | Unified customer view integrating data for personalized support |
| 12 | Zendesk | Help desk and ticketing system | AI-powered self-service options for efficient issue resolution |
| 13 | Chatfuel AI | Social media chatbot development | Natural language processing for conversational chatbots |
What are AI tools for Customer Service?
AI tools for customer service automate tasks, deliver personalized experiences, and provide round-the-clock support, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants enable simultaneous handling of multiple customer conversations, preventing burnout. These tools learn from each interaction, enhancing their capacity to understand and resolve issues proactively.
Key features
- Automate repetitive tasks & provide personalized customer support
- Analyze patterns and trends from interactions, providing actionable intelligence
- Insights derived from AI tools enable process optimization for maximum efficiency.
- Anticipate customer needs & preferences, allowing for proactive support.
List of 13 Best AI Tools for Customer Service
AI tools can automate many customer service tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions, routing tickets to the appropriate agent, and even providing basic troubleshooting steps. This can free up your human agents to handle more complex problems and provide a more personalized experience for your customers.
Here are 13 of the best AI tools for customer service:
Ozonetel
With Ozonetel AI & digital suite, businesses are orchestrating seamless customer journeys. With our solution, we are creating opportunities for unique, personalized interactions across multiple digital touchpoints, driving efficiency and customer-centricity.
Features
- Customer Journey Builder: Use our intuitive, low-code tools like no code chatbot builders to build comprehensive customer journeys and provide connected experiences. The AI tool helps businesses personalize engagement at scale and increase the effectiveness of every conversation. Plus, you can quickly adapt strategies and enhance the digital customer experience with real-time AI assistance.
- Intuitive Bot Designer: With this tool, you can quickly build and deploy intelligent bots across channels and touchpoints using its simple drag & drop interface. Our LLM ensures contextual, human-like responses, empowering you to streamline communication across millions of conversations flowing seamlessly across digital journeys.
- WhatsApp Switch Board: This tool can help you to engage your customers and prospects seamlessly, anywhere, anytime. You can seamlessly connect them to the right agents via WhatsApp, enabling field teams or relationship managers to respond to queries, regardless of location. Also, you can track every interaction for intent and sentiment, preventing data leakage.
- Our Omnichannel + Digital Engagement: This tool doubles the effectiveness of every voice interaction. It empowers agents to manage WhatsApp or other messages while actively engaged in a call. It also facilitates quick document exchange during calls, transforming sales and customer service. It can help solve customer issues over a single interaction, significantly boosting customer satisfaction.
- Conversational Intelligence: The AI tool offers real-time context to agents thereby enabling them to provide quick resolutions. Further, you can fine-tune your sales pitches and skillfully handle objections to drive more conversions. The capability also helps businesses discover the root cause of customer dissatisfaction with ‘Voice of the Customer’ insights.
- AI Optimization: Leverage our AI technologies such as speech analytics and voice bots to enrich customer interactions and yield valuable insights. This empowers businesses to understand their customers better and tailor their services accordingly.
- Real-Time Analytics and Reporting: Our platform provides real-time insights, enabling effective call queue management and performance tracking. This helps businesses optimize their operations and make informed decisions promptly.
Pricing: They offer customized pricing depending on your specific business needs.
User Rating: 4.6/5
User Review: Ensuring compliance and data security is key in the sensitive insurance sector, and Ozonetel delivers this alongside multi-channel support.
Help Scout
Help Scout is a communication platform that helps different departments in an organization have better conversations with their customers. It offers various features to streamline customer interactions and enhance support experiences.
Features:
- AI Summarize: This feature enables agents to spend less time catching up on long email threads and more time providing high-quality support. With just one click, it offers concise summaries of email threads, enabling teams to quickly understand the context of customer conversations.
- AI Assist: Help Scout’s AI Assist feature leverages machine learning to provide agents with suggested responses based on past tickets and resolutions, accelerating resolution times, and improving consistency in agent responses.
- AI Drafts: This feature allows agents to quickly draft responses based on the conversation’s context, further enhancing agent productivity and response quality.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $20 monthly.
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: Helps in managing all tickets in a streamlined manner.
Custify
Custify is designed to assist customer success teams in leveraging customer interaction data for business growth. It is geared toward SaaS (Software as a Service) companies. It consolidates customer data from various systems and provides actionable insights.
Features:
- Customer Data Consolidation: Custify consolidates all customer data into one place, gathering information from different systems for a comprehensive view of customer interactions and behavior.
- Advanced Data Analysis: The platform uses advanced techniques to process and analyze customer data, extracting significant insights about customer life cycles, satisfaction levels, upsell opportunities, and potential churn risks.
- Automated Tasks: Custify utilizes automated tasks to reduce the time spent on manual processes, allowing customer success teams to focus more on interacting with customers.
Pricing: They offer customized pricing depending on your specific business needs.
User Rating: 4.7/5
User Review: I made the 500 customers feel that I was much more available, and this has a positive effect on churn.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a project management tool with customer service features that help teams become client success champions. Its AI-powered writing assistant helps automate repetitive tasks and generates customer notes, email responses, and status reports, maintaining high-quality customer engagement. It also allows breaking projects into tasks and subtasks, assigning multiple people to a single entry, and leaving comments for team collaboration.
Features:
- Templates: ClickUp offers over 1,000 templates, including the Customer Support Work Breakdown Structure Template for organizing and assigning tickets, setting deadlines, analyzing KPIs, and monitoring performance.
- CRM Features: ClickUp’s CRM options enable building customer databases, prioritizing tasks, collecting customer feedback via ClickUp Forms, and centralizing outreach activities.
- Integrations: ClickUp offers over 1,000 integrations to streamline customer data management.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $7 monthly.
User Rating: 4.7/5
User Review: Clickup has changed the game for our small business.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a customer service software solution that empowers support teams with various tools and flexibility to meet customer service demands, from managing tickets and automating workflows to engaging with customers in real time across various messaging channels.
Features:
- Freddy AI for CX – Agent Assist: Freshdesk’s AI-powered service uses machine learning to continuously learn from past tickets and resolutions, suggesting appropriate responses to new customer queries, accelerating resolution times, and improving response consistency.
- Sentiment Analysis and Ticket Prioritization: Freddy AI uses sentiment analysis to automatically prioritize and classify tickets, streamlining the ticket management process for support teams.
- Real-time Engagement and Self-Service: Freshdesk’s AI offers real-time engagement, providing customers instant responses and support. It also features AI chatbots that can perform actions directly in the chat interface, like looking up order status, booking appointments, and more, enabling self-service for common queries.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $15 monthly.
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: Freshdesk is solving our customer support ticket needs. The benefit is primarily realized in increased efficiency and better customer experiences.
Tidio
Tidio is a customer service software that combines various tools to provide a comprehensive solution for businesses to communicate with their customers effectively. It offers live chat, chatbots, and email marketing capabilities, bridging the gap between companies and customers by facilitating real-time support and interactions.
Features:
- AI-powered Lead Qualification and Routing: Tidio’s AI can automatically assess website visitors’ readiness for sales conversations and route high-potential prospects to the appropriate team members, ensuring efficient allocation of support requests and personalized interactions.
- Customer Behavior Analysis: Tidio’s artificial intelligence complements the analysis and gives companies valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and sentiments. By leveraging this AI-driven data, businesses can refine their support strategies to deliver a more personalized and efficient customer experience.
- Lyro AI: Tidio offers a separate product called Lyro AI, a virtual support agent designed to interact and engage with customers as if a real person were conversing with them. This AI-powered solution enhances customer experiences and streamlines service processes.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $19 monthly.
User Rating: 4.7/5
User Review: Tidio makes it easy to engage with visitors and increases the likelihood of conversion by increasing the personalization of the customer experience.
Keap
Keap CRM is sales, marketing, and customer support software for entrepreneurs and small businesses. It offers a comprehensive suite of features to help capture leads, manage invoices, and compile client data. Keap CRM also enables businesses to automate their marketing efforts, including email campaigns and lead nurturing.
Features:
- Sales Pipeline: The platform includes a sales pipeline management tool to help businesses track and manage their sales processes.
- Payment Collection: Businesses can collect payments directly through the platform, streamlining the invoicing and payment process.
- Reporting and Analytics: Keap CRM offers reporting and analytics tools to help businesses track their performance and make data-driven decisions.
Pricing: Premium plans begin at $159 monthly, with a trial period.
User Rating: 4.2/5
User Review: We also love sending welcome emails to all our new evaluations, which has the added benefit of allowing us to track how each patient heard about us, what they are being seen for, etc.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform incorporating advanced AI features to enhance customer service and support. It employs AI assistance in its ticketing system to ensure customer issues are directed to the most suitable team or agent based on the inquiry.
Features:
- Chatbots: HubSpot’s chatbots can handle customer queries around the clock, providing instant support and freeing time for human agents. These chatbots learn from past interactions to deliver tailored responses and improve the customer experience.
- Customer Feedback Analysis: The platform leverages AI technology to analyze customer feedback, using sentiment analysis to uncover patterns and trends in customer satisfaction.
- Personalized Support Strategies: HubSpot’s AI integrates with CRM and marketing automation capabilities, allowing companies to develop personalized and targeted support strategies.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $45 monthly.
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: HubSpot enables our customer support staff to automatically capture service requests through a shared inbox or manually capture service requests and assign a ticket to those requests.
Balto
Balto is an AI-powered customer service tool that provides real-time guidance and assistance to contact center agents, enhancing overall call quality and customer satisfaction. Its real-time coaching feature alerts managers whenever there are coaching opportunities, allowing for real-time interventions to promote immediate performance improvement.
Features:
- Real-Time Notetaker: This feature uses AI to automatically transcribe calls in real time, freeing agents from taking notes during critical customer interactions and highlighting key information that could impact the conversation.
- Dynamic Prompts: Balto provides dynamic prompts to live call agents and virtual assistants, using machine learning models to fetch carefully worded phrases and questions at the right time, enabling faster support delivery.
- Win-rate Analysis: Balto tests different phrases against each other and automatically fetches the better option, helping agents rely on data-driven insights rather than guesswork.
Pricing: Premium plans begin at $36 monthly, with a trial period.
User Rating: 4.8/5
User Review: I love the automatic feedback it gives to our agents after a call and the note summary, saving us time.
Hiver
Hiver is a customer service platform that integrates with Gmail, helping teams handle customer interactions across email, phone, live chat, and WhatsApp. Hiver’s AI bot, Harvey, employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enhance the efficiency of customer support teams.
Features:
- Intuitive Gmail-Based Helpdesk: Harvey integrates seamlessly with Gmail, offering a user-friendly interface for support teams familiar with Gmail, ensuring a smooth transition.
- Context Identification: Using NLP, Harvey recognizes the context of customer interactions, pinpointing the exact nature of customer inquiries and enabling effective responses.
- Intelligent Template Suggestions: Harvey recommends the most fitting templates for customer messages, ensuring swift and relevant responses. Agents can merge suggested templates to craft tailored responses.
Pricing: Premium plans begin at $15 monthly, with a trial period.
User Rating: 4.6/5
User Review: Hiver has completely changed the process for us. We are able to communicate with customers and see them on one platform while accessing our inbox at the same time.
Kustomer
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform that streamlines the customer journey through omni-channel messaging and a unified customer view. It offers AI-driven automation as a usage-based add-on called Kustomer IQ (KIQ).
Features:
- Proactive Assistance: Kustomer’s AI-driven approach enables proactive assistance, addressing customer needs before they ask for help, potentially reducing inbound support volume.
- Multi-channel Bots: Kustomer offers powerful multi-channel bots that automate routine agent interactions, delivering personalized experiences and promoting faster resolutions.
- Unified Customer View: The platform provides agents with a unified customer view, including context and information for making better and faster decisions, eliminating the need for tab switching and duplicate tickets.
Pricing: Premium plans begin at $89 per month.
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: It benefits me as a user and customer support in many ways, such as easy communication and viewing of files sent by the customers for evidence, depending on the issue.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a popular customer service platform that centralizes all service interactions and customer history in a unified interface. This enables support teams to track, prioritize, and solve customer inquiries seamlessly and efficiently.
Features:
- Query Identification and Routing: The platform utilizes AI to identify and categorize customer queries, routing them to the appropriate agent or department. This ensures efficient handling of inquiries and prevents agents from spending time on tasks that could be handled by AI automation.
- Answer Bot: Zendesk’s Answer Bot leverages machine learning to deliver instant and precise answers sourced from your knowledge base, community forums, and other help resources. This accelerates response times and allows agents to focus on more complex inquiries.
- Predictive Analytics: The platform’s AI capabilities extend to predictive analytics, offering insights into customer experiences and satisfaction and enabling proactive customer engagement strategies.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $19 monthly.
User Rating: 4.3/5
User Review: Implementing Best in Class Support.
Chatfuel AI
Chatfuel AI is a bot builder developed using OpenAI’s API and the GPT-4 model. It allows businesses to create AI-powered bots to answer basic questions and recommend products. The platform also provides an intuitive flow builder interface for creating and customizing chatbots.
Features:
- Ready-made Bot Templates: Chatfuel AI offers pre-built bot templates that businesses can use as a starting point for their chatbots.
- Communication Automation: The platform enables businesses to automate customer communication through chatbots, facilitating efficient interactions.
- Knowledge Bases: Chatfuel AI allows businesses to integrate knowledge bases into their chatbots, providing access to relevant information and resources.
Pricing: A free plan is offered; premium plans begin at $15 monthly.
User Rating: 4.5/5
User Review: This user-friendly tool allows quick and accurate chatbot development, saving time and resources.
Conclusion
The future of customer service is intelligent, efficient, and personalized. By implementing the right AI tools, you can empower your team to deliver exceptional experiences that build customer loyalty and drive business growth. Remember, AI is a powerful tool but should not replace the human element entirely.
The best AI customer service solutions work seamlessly alongside your human agents, providing the support they need to shine. And the tools you discover in this article can help you transform your support operations, empower your team, and create a customer experience that sets you apart from the competition.
