Digital Transformation for Customer Service: 14 Practical Ways AI Improves B2B Operations
It’s like fumbling the football a yard from the end zone. As a business, you work so hard to brand yourself well, get the sale, and make the onboarding process easy, only to drop the ball when it comes to providing ongoing customer service.
If your customer service sucks, what does that say about how well your company can actually create and provide a product or service? It certainly isn’t going to instill confidence in your customers. Your customers want to be the best businesses they can be. If you’re not delivering, they’ll find someone who can. And if you’re in a commodities market, it’s even tougher, because you only have two things to compete on: price and customer service. Mess up your customer service interactions and your customers are gone.
B2B customers expect the smoothest processes, fastest responses and most accurate information possible. If your customer service efforts are manual, siloed or *gasp* paper-based, that’s not gonna happen. That’s why the businesses that are serious about customer retention and customer experience have turned to digital transformation.
What is digital transformation in customer service?
Digital transformation in B2B customer service is the practice of implementing and integrating digital technologies like automation, AI, customer relationship management software and e-commerce platforms to provide a buying experience that’s faster, more convenient and closer to the B2C buying experience that modern customers expect.
B2B buyers making purchases from your company are regular, everyday consumers just like the rest of us. They like how easy it is to research, compare, buy and track products from Amazon, Walmart or Apple and want the same ease when making B2B purchases.
Digital transformation is the means by which today’s B2B customer service departments can deliver that better buying experience.
How does digital transformation improve customer service teams?
If we tried to cover all the ways the various components of digital transformation improve customer service, this would turn into a book. So to keep things more manageable, we’ll focus on what AI and automation specifically can do in a customer service context to not only upgrade your customers’ experience but also amp up your team’s ability to provide world-class service.
Here’s how AI and automation enable better customer inquiry management, order management and claims management.
AI automation in customer inquiry management
Email classification
AI automatically analyzes the content of incoming emails with natural language processing (NLP) and instantly classifies them into the appropriate category (order status, pricing request, availability request, new order, new claim, etc.). Classified emails are then routed to the appropriate person or team.
Sentiment analysis
Using NLP, AI instantly analyzes email content and determines if the emotional tone of the inquiry is positive, neutral or negative so customer service reps (CSRs) can prioritize responding to messages with negative or mixed sentiments.
Answering product questions
When presented with a product question, Agentic AI determines which tools are best suited to provide the correct answer. It selects the appropriate tools to query internal knowledge sources (such as product data sheets), retrieve the necessary information, suggest an answer and provide links to their sources, allowing CSRs to verify the proposed answer and do additional research if needed.
Conversation summaries
AI quickly summarizes multiple message threads between various internal and external stakeholders so a CSR can quickly get up to speed on a situation.
Answer generation with GenAI
An AI automation platform can analyze a customer inquiry, find answers in your internal systems and then use GenAI to craft an accurate, appropriate response that ensures the customer’s specific context and emotional tone are taken into account. CSRs can review the proposed answer and either send it as-is or add their personal touch.
Digital assistant
Similar to the ChatGPT experience, CSRs ask an AI-powered digital assistant questions about product characteristics and capabilities, questions related to reports or views of customer service-related data, and even questions about how to navigate and use their AI automation platform.
AI automation in order management
Email order triage
Using NLP, AI separates orders from other emails in your customer service inbox, redirecting the orders to your order management system and forwarding non-order emails to a separate address.
Order type identification
AI analyzes the content of orders received in the customer service inbox and automatically sets the order type to standard order, change order, return order, quote request, etc.
Order data extraction
No matter the type of document layout, AI can accurately extract order data from headers and line items. It can even process free-text order data sent in the body of an email.
Anomaly detection
Leveraging machine learning, AI analyzes your customers’ historical order data and warns you if it detects unusual quantities or products.
Semantic product search
When you receive an order with product descriptions but no product codes, AI extracts the description and runs a semantic search of your products database to identify the correct product. It displays a list of best product matches that the CSR can select from. It then remembers that selected product for future orders using the same product description.
AI automation in claims management
Email claim triage
When a claims-related email hits the customer service inbox, AI identifies it as a claim and routes it to the appropriate team or application for resolution.
Claim type identification
AI assesses the claim’s content to identify its type (missing products, wrong products, price discrepancies, sales promotions, etc.) and routes it to the correct team. It can even detect mixed claims based on the identified quantities or price variances within the claim.
Claim data extraction
For claims submitted with a PDF supporting document, AI extracts key data from the headers and line items (such as the related order or invoice numbers, total amount, item references, quantities and prices). If the claim details are included in the body of the email text, AI can also extract necessary information from this unstructured data.
Benefits of digitally transforming your customer service team
Far from replacing CSRs, AI and automation augment what they’re capable of. Instead of the unending drudgery of manual data entry, sorting through thousands of emails or tracking down product information, CSRs can leave the grunt work to AI and focus on what they do best — resolving problems and going the extra mile to make customers happy.
Bringing digital transformation to your team in the form of AI-powered automation means:
Peak productivity: By automating the time-consuming manual work of customer service, you speed up inquiry response times, end-to-end order processing times and claims processing.
The end of errors: Manual data entry errors become a thing of the past. Orders and claims aren’t caught in a back-and-forth limbo as mistakes are corrected. Product descriptions in orders are accurately matched to product numbers. Incorrect or unusual product quantities are caught before they’re shipped.
More money: When routine tasks are automated, operational costs go down. Customers keep doing business with you because your customer service is fast and dependable. CSRs can more easily find products in your catalog with better margins to suggest to customers when responding to quote requests.
A whole new world of visibility: Get a complete picture of the various types of customer inquiries you receive. CSRs can easily access internal systems and information to provide fast, yet accurate, responses to customer questions. They can also quickly get up to speed on customer issues in moments so they can get the resolution ball rolling.
Happier customers: When their questions, orders and claims are processed quickly and correctly the first time, customers breathe a sigh of relief. And because AI helps CSRs prioritize inquiries from unhappy customers, your team has a better opportunity to repair faltering customer relationships.
More satisfied employees: No more manual data entry or email triage? Check. Easy-to-find product information that makes a CSR an expert in seconds? Check. Report generation with a mouse click? Check. More confident, fulfilled CSRs? Check.
How to get started digitally transforming customer service
Although bringing AI-powered automation to your customer service operations involves more than simply rolling out a new piece of software, as you’ve seen above, the juice is absolutely worth the squeeze.
- Start small. Pick one high-impact use case (such as ticket triage and routing, answering order tracking and status update requests, etc.). Automate that process, track the results and then leverage that success into more AI automation projects. Pro tip: Using an AI automation platform that offers multiple modules allows you to implement automation one module at a time while keeping everything all connected on one platform. For example, you could implement a customer inquiry management module first and then expand into order management or claims management later on.
- Clean up your act. An AI automation tool is only as good as the data it has access to and can learn from. Before you start automating, consolidate, organize and update your knowledge bases, FAQs, product documentation, ticket histories, etc. so they’re ready for your AI platform to digest.
- Define what success with AI automation will look like for you. What improvements do you want to see? What can you measure to show that AI automation is working? Lower average response times, higher customer satisfaction scores or higher first contact resolution rates are a few key metrics to consider.
- Get leadership’s buy-in. Create a business case for why your company should invest in an AI automation solution for customer service. At the core of your case should be the concept that AI automation improves customer experience, which is critical to business success. The ebook below has tons more info on how to craft a compelling business case.
Esker is at your service
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by the thought of digitally transforming your customer service department, we can help.
Esker has more than 40 years of experience guiding companies through the transition to cloud-based, AI-driven automation. Our Customer Service solution suite seamlessly connects with your existing ERP, CRM, inventory management and other tools to provide a centralized, streamlined platform for your customer inquiry management, order management and claims management activities.
Modernizing and enhancing your customer service experience with AI automation is easier with a simple-to-use platform and a knowledgeable implementation team on your side. Check out our demo library for 2-minute demos of our Order Management Solution, Customer Inquiry Management Solution and Claims Management Solution to see how much better your customer service can be with Esker.
Betsy Francoeur
As a Copywriter at Esker, Betsy loves writing about the source-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles and creating valuable content for financial professionals. She also enjoys running 5ks, kayaking, traveling with her husband and snuggling her dog.
