Consumers have high expectations for the use of AI in customer service

More than half of Americans expect future improvements in customer service thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence. This despite perceived bad experiences in the past with AI-driven customer service.

This is another signal that consumers anticipate AI impacting their experiences right across the customer journey.

Infobip survey. The survey, conducted by Propeller Insights for Infobip, a global omnichannel communications platform, collected responses from a gender-balanced group of 1,000 U.S. adults. Key findings include:

• 52.4% believe that the use of AI will improve customer service. Specific expectations include 24/7 support (34.7%) and no wait time (19.5%). Respondents also expected a reduction in phone communications.
• A healthy 70.5% don’t care about the gender of chatbots. Of those who do care, 56% view male chatbots as more trustworthy.
• 18.2% have made friends with chatbots, while 19.5% have actually flirted with them.
• People expect the future to be better than the past. Over 40% believe that previous interactions with AI-driven customer service made their experiences worst.

Why we care. We have faith that MarTech’s audience, at least, doesn’t believe that chatbots are actually gendered. Flirting with them is a matter for each of you. But seriously, what we see here are indications that consumers are becoming accustomed to chatbots as a key customer service channel, and that they expect AI to iron out the problems they’ve experienced in the past.

Whoever in your organization owns customer experience surely understands that it doesn’t reduce to a conversion. Engagement pre- and post-sale are critical and hanging on the telephone isn’t enough any more. There are tools out there that consumers will increasingly expect to be deployed (and, yes, let’s acknowledge that among Infobip’s offerings are AI chatbots).