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AI self-service uses tools like AI customer service agents to instantly resolve common customer issues 24/7. This offers convenience to your customers by eliminating hold times. Our research shows that 93% of service professionals investing in AI report time savings. This efficiency allows customer service reps to focus on more complex tasks, making AI a valuable part of your customer experience strategy.

• What is AI self-service?
• What are the different types of AI self-service?
• Benefits of AI self-service
• How does AI self-service work?
• Use cases for AI self-service
• 3 best practices for building an AI self-service strategy
• Examples of AI self-service
• How to choose the best AI self-service solution
• What’s next for AI self-service?
• How Salesforce can help with AI self-service

AI self-service refers to the use of artificial intelligence to help your customers find answers and resolve issues on their own, without needing to speak to a person. It includes tools like AI agents and intelligent knowledge bases that understand natural language. It can guide users through common and complex questions or tasks. These solutions are available 24/7, providing instant support across customer service channels like web, mobile, messaging apps, and even voice.

What sets AI self-service apart is its ability to go beyond static FAQs. By tapping into customer data and business systems, AI can personalize responses, anticipate needs, and even complete transactions, like rescheduling an appointment or processing a return. This creates a faster, more convenient customer experience for your customers. It also reduces the volume of routine inquiries for your customer service reps, allowing them to focus on more complex issues. That’s why AI-powered customer self-service software is at the core of how 9 0% of organizations are shaping their AI strategies and designing customer portals.

While both tools handle customer inquiries, AI agents are more advanced than traditional chatbots. Chatbots usually follow predefined scripts and rules, making them effective for simple, repetitive questions. In contrast, AI agents can handle a wider range of tasks, learn from each interaction to improve their performance, and understand context across conversations, allowing them to manage more complex and dynamic situations.

By resolving an average of 30% of cases through digital channels, AI self-service improves customer satisfaction while streamlining operations. *This automation leads to lower costs, increased customer loyalty, and a better overall experience.

Here are some of the biggest benefits AI self-service brings to your customer experience:

AI self-service tools are always on, giving customers the flexibility to get support whenever they need it. This means no more waiting in queues or being restricted by business hours. An AI self-service contact center allows businesses to provide support 24/7.

AI can respond instantly to common questions and guide users through tasks without delay, leading to quicker problem-solving and a smoother customer service experience. AI self-service tools can answer simple questions without help. These self-service tools include: customer service chatbots, knowledge bases, voice support, and automated workflows. They provide customers with step-by-step help with everyday problems.

By deflecting an average of 29% of cases, AI agents lighten the load on customer service reps and allows them to focus on higher-value work. That’s where Agentforce comes in Agentforce Salesforce’s autonomous AI application for service, empowers both employees and customers to resolve routine tasks independently, which helps lower inbound volumes.

AI pulls information from a centralized knowledge base, making sure that your customers always get reliable, up-to-date answers. This reduces the risk of inconsistent responses that can happen with multiple customer service reps.

Unlike a static FAQ page, AI self-service provides a truly personalized experience for each customer. By analyzing an individual's history, preferences, and real-time behavior, AI can deliver tailored responses and guidance that go far beyond generic answers. This capability to check account details and past interactions makes customers feel understood and helps them resolve their issues much more quickly.

Automating high-volume interactions with AI self-service directly reduces operational costs, with customers seeing an average decrease of 24% in support costs. By handling routine inquiries that would otherwise require a human agent, Agentforce allows businesses to maintain excellent support with fewer resources without sacrificing quality.

AI self-service provides scalable support by handling thousands of interactions simultaneously, allowing it to meet demand 24/7. Whether a business is experiencing rapid growth or a sudden seasonal spike in customer questions, the AI scales effortlessly without the need to hire additional staff. This ensures that every customer receives a fast, consistent response, whether it's a slow day or a holiday weekend.

AI self-service improves the customer experience by delivering fast, accurate answers to common questions, boosting satisfaction while reducing wait times. It also frees up human agents to handle more complex issues. Beyond direct support, the AI analyzes interactions to identify trends and pain points, providing the valuable insights needed to proactively improve products, processes, and the overall quality of service.

How does AI self-service work? AI self-service uses a combination of natural language processing, information retrieval, and automation to provide quick and accurate support to customers. This process involves understanding customer requests, finding relevant information, and taking action automatically. By breaking down this process into four main steps, we can better understand how AI self-service works.

First, the AI has to determine what a customer needs. It uses natural language processing to understand regular language. This means customers don’t need to use special keywords. Whether a person types "Where's my stuff?" or asks, "What's my order status?", the AI knows they're asking for the same thing.

Once the AI understands the question, it searches for the answer across multiple sources. It can look into your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, help articles, and past support chats. However, this access is carefully controlled. Companies can implement security guardrails to define exactly what data the AI is allowed to see, preventing it from accessing confidential information. For example, an AI can be permitted to retrieve an order status from the CRM while being blocked from viewing a customer's payment details. In addition to these secure internal systems, advanced agents can also tap into external knowledge bases and live web results to find relevant information.

After finding the right information, the AI uses self-service automation to act on its own. This could mean answering a question, updating an account, or scheduling an appointment. Because it’s automated, this system can provide this help without delay at any time of day.

Sometimes a problem is too hard for AI to solve alone. A smart system knows its limits and can hand off the conversation to a customer service rep. It also passes along all the notes from the chat, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat everything.

Use cases for AI self-service AI self-service supports customers by automating a wide range of common and repetitive inquiries. This provides instant, 24/7 assistance, increasing customer convenience and speed while significantly reducing inbound support volume. Here are five common use cases where AI self-service makes a major impact:

Customers can ask questions like “Where’s my order?” or “When will my package arrive?” and AI instantly pulls real-time shipping or delivery updates from backend systems. This eliminates the need to wait on hold to speak with a rep or navigate a complex website to find basic order info.

Customers can manage their own accounts by resetting passwords, changing a shipping address, or updating subscription preferences directly in a chat window. This empowers users to instantly make changes on their own schedule and frees support teams from handling these routine manual updates.

AI can assist customers with billing questions, such as explaining a specific charge on an invoice or guiding them through setting up automatic payments. This provides immediate clarity for customers, which helps reduce confusion and lowers the volume of billing-related support calls.

For common technical issues, AI can guide customers through step-by-step troubleshooting, like figuring out why a new speaker won't connect to Wi-Fi. This provides an immediate first line of defense for support, helping customers solve problems on their own and ensuring issues are only escalated to a rep when necessary.

Customers can easily book, reschedule, or cancel appointments directly through an AI agent without needing to talk to anyone. The system can also send automated reminders, providing convenience for the customer and reducing costly no-shows for the business.

To set up an AI self-service plan, you need to consider all aspects, test ideas, and build a strong foundation. Here are three ways to build a system that helps both your customers and your team:

Begin by identifying tasks that slow down your most important work, such as password resets, account lookups, order status updates, and billing questions. Focus on tasks that occur frequently and consume a significant amount of your customer service representatives' time. These tasks are ideal candidates for customer-facing and internal employee self-service automation.

AI can only answer questions that it has been trained to recognize. If the information isn’t clear or is not documented, it won’t appear in self-service. A robust knowledge base is crucial for AI self-service to provide accurate and reliable information. By consolidating relevant data into a single, accessible source, organizations can significantly enhance their AI's ability to answer customer inquiries.

No one wants to feel stuck in a loop. Even the best AI won’t cover every scenario. Provide your customers with a clear way out, and make it easy to find.

This means designing the system to recognize when it’s time to hand off a customer to an employee. If the system is unsure it understands the customer’s request, it can connect them to a customer service rep, for instance, if the customer keeps rephrasing their question. The system shares the whole conversation with the customer service rep, so the customer doesn’t have to start all over.

AI self-service encompasses a wide range of technologies designed to make support processes smoother. Businesses can apply these tools across different channels, including web, mobile, and voice, to make service more efficient and personal. Here are several key applications:

AI agents provide 24/7 support on websites and mobile apps. They can instantly answer common questions or guide users through more complex processes, offering help whenever it's needed.

Using AI to power voice support offers a natural and convenient way for customers to interact with a company. Smart voice systems can understand spoken questions and provide immediate answers, making the support process faster and more conversational.

By proactively offering solutions as a customer is asking a question, AI can often resolve an issue before it needs to become a formal support case. This smart case deflection reduces the number of support tickets and frees up service representatives.

Within an application, AI can deliver real-time, personalized support to users as they need it. It can provide step-by-step assistance for complex workflows or automate routine tasks, allowing users to get help without interrupting their experience.

Intelligent search uses AI to understand the context and intent behind a user's query. This allows it to sift through large knowledge bases more effectively to deliver fast and accurate answers.

By analyzing customer data, AI can tailor self-service interactions to each user’s unique needs. This allows for personalized recommendations, offers, and support, making the experience more relevant and helpful.

Selecting the right AI self-service solution is a critical strategic decision that enhances customer experiences and improves support processes. A comprehensive platform like Service Cloud combined with an advanced autonomous AI application like Agentforce, provides a powerful foundation. To make the right choice, you need a thorough strategy that covers your business needs, system integration, and the overall user experience.

Start by identifying the key use cases for your business. Determine which customer interactions and support scenarios would benefit most from AI automation. Understanding whether you need to prioritize simple Q&A, order tracking, or complex troubleshooting will help you select a solution that aligns with your specific business goals and customer needs.

A self-service platform must integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, especially your CRM. This deep connection allows the AI to access customer data, history, and context, enabling it to provide more accurate and personalized support instead of acting like a separate, disconnected tool.

Customers expect consistent and reliable assistance whether they are on your website, a mobile app, social media, or using a voice channel. The best AI self-service solutions offer true omnichannel support, ensuring customers can get the help they need anytime and anywhere, on the channel of their choice.

The ideal solution should be intuitive for both customers and your internal support team. Look for a platform that is easy to set up, configure, and manage, but also offers the flexibility to adapt and scale as your business needs evolve and grow over time.

Finally, select a vendor with a strong reputation and proven success in the customer service space. Reading reviews and case studies gives you valuable insights into how a solution has performed for other businesses. To continue building your team's skills, check out resources like the Trailhead learning platform and join the Serviceblazer community on Slack to connect with other support leaders.

As AI technology continues to evolve, AI self-service is poised to become even more sophisticated, enabling businesses to provide more efficient and personalized support to their customers. Future advancements are expected to bring significant improvements to the AI self-service landscape.

Soon, AI systems will more closely replicate human conversation by handling multiple, unrelated goals in a single request. This will enable more complex and efficient interactions.

The future of AI self-service is expected to include multimodal interactions, using voice and vision to provide more natural and intuitive experiences.

Salesforce provides a comprehensive AI platform for customer service, empowering businesses to boost efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Through tools like Service Cloud and Agentforce, Salesforce enables advanced AI self-service capabilities. These solutions use generative AI to scale processes with automation and tailor every customer interaction using unified data to the customer’s unique needs.

Agentforce is also fully integrated – by connecting all of your Customer 360 data with Data Cloud, Agentforce can help customers find answers and complete tasks quickly, and all in one view. This seamless integration of AI and customer service reps leads to higher engagement and loyalty.

*Source: 2024 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights. Data is aggregated from 3,747 customers across 9 countries.