By Teri Llach
Public relations is all about interacting with the public on behalf of an organization. PR professionals might wonder where they fit in a world where customer engagement is increasingly coming from machines. The good news is that the growing use of AI works perfectly in line with PR goals. By focusing on the positive impacts that AI can have on customer service, PR professionals can discover how to integrate this technology to achieve their career and organizational aims.
Integrating Customer Service Into PR Goals
Public relations is a big umbrella, encompassing facets of the business, such as brand perception, customer engagement, crisis management, and more. Suppose you want a company to put its best foot forward every day. In that case, focusing on customer service is an excellent choice. Client and customer service involves most aspects of the customer experience, which means that businesses can survive or fail in these interactions. If you want the top client and customer service available, business AI provides a viable way to achieve it.
AI Role in Customer Support
Thankfully, the days of routing customer concerns to a call center with long wait times are ending. Customers want an efficient experience that addresses their needs without making them jump through many extra hoops. You should consider implementing AI into your customer support to get all that and more.
Personalize Response
Customers long for a personal response that treats them like humans, and AI can create it in surprising ways. Customer data collection and management allows a business to learn more about its customers’ preferences, from their favorite colors to the amount of time they are willing to spend on the site. This information provides key inputs for AI to create a personalized response to customer needs. Customers can log onto a chat and receive personalized advice based on past orders and other preferences or sign up to receive emails that customize product suggestions according to their search history.
Decrease Response Times
Decreasing response times is a key feature of AI. Few people are willing to wait on hold for an hour to speak to a customer service representative or sit for days anticipating an email response. This sentiment is especially true if they feel like the information should have been readily available in the first place. AI can lower response times by creating quick options that businesses can use to resolve issues, such as chatbots or smart voice assistants on phone calls. Customers with simple requests can get answers faster, saving time for human representatives to address complicated problems.
Process Feedback
PR involves knowing how to interpret the information you receive from your target audience, which AI can help you process. Customers provide a spread of valuable data in what they do, such as expressing frustration to a chatbot or giving five stars on a review. They provide even more information concerning the things they do not do, like leaving a site because they cannot figure out how to complete a transaction. AI can collect and process this data into practical insights for PR professionals, so you know where to target improvements for the most significant impact.
Increase Efficiency
Ultimately, AI makes it easier for businesses to meet efficiency goals in employment, equipment, and performance without sacrificing customer service aims. With a robust AI system in charge of most operations, organizations can work within smaller margins. AI automates and optimizes most of the routine tasks of the business, leaving more time for employees to focus on concerns that require a human touch. AI and an expert team can handle everything from minor customer issues to site outages and security breaches.
PR and customer service just got so much easier, and you have AI to thank for the improvement. By understanding how AI fits into your customer service goals, you can provide effective PR and brand management for your organization.
Teri Llach spearheads marketing strategies at LiveX AI and is an innovative leader in AI agents for customer experience. As a co-founder and former CMO of Blackhawk Network, Llach was instrumental in leading the company through a successful IPO. She also served as the head of marketing at Tynker, an educational technology company.