Providing great customer service is a cornerstone of business success in 2025. Customers are expecting businesses – both startups and well-established enterprises – to be reachable, responsive, and attuned to their needs.
Customer service is an integral part of customer experience (CX), which 96% of companies identified as key to driving business growth in a recent survey by Nextiva, a market leader in customer experience software.
But how can small businesses with limited capacities provide great customer service? Enter stage right: AI.
Here are five AI strategies small businesses in the US can use to provide outstanding customer service, 24/7.
Provide Seamless Multichannel Support
To start with, AI can help small businesses provide seamless customer support across different communication channels.
In 2025, customers expect to be able to contact businesses in a range of ways – from traditional voice calls over live chat and email to social media and messaging platforms. Keeping track of all these channels is challenging for the customer support teams of small businesses. AI can help.
In unified communication solutions, AI automatically aggregates data from multiple sources and centralizes all the information teams need to provide top-notch support. Has a customer reached out via chat about an issue they were having and is now calling to follow up on it? Agents will automatically get a heads-up from an AI assistant that enables them to respond efficiently and to the caller’s full satisfaction.
Maximize Personalization
Another way AI can support customer service teams is by maximizing the amount of personalization they are able to provide for each person reaching out.
As outlined above, representatives will have the history of interactions between their company and each customer at their fingertips. Going further, though, AI can also compile and summarize data on their communication preferences, including aspects like tone and sentiment analyses. It can even provide real-time prompts and suggestions for agents who may be struggling during customer interactions.
Overall, going all-out on personalization will help teams make customers feel understood and valued, increasing satisfaction and retention.
Analyze Feedback in Depth
From reviews left on Trustpilot, Yelp, and Google Business to survey responses, customer feedback provides crucial insights to help fine-tune businesses’ strategies and identify areas for improvement.
Leveraging that disparate feedback comprehensively, though, is a steep challenge for small businesses with limited resources for analytics.
By deploying AI to gather and analyze feedback, businesses can automate processes that would take team members hours, if not days. It can centralize all relevant feedback from numerous channels and automatically analyze it in depth to unearth patterns and trends.
Overall, this can provide businesses with invaluable insights into issues customers commonly face, aspects of the services they’re satisfied with, and frequent sources of frustration. Based on these actionable insights, small businesses will be able to optimize their resource distribution to make improvements in the areas that need it the most.
Automate Routine Tasks
Talking about automation, data analytics is not the only area of customer service that AI can help with. In fact, there’s a wide range of routine tasks that team members can delegate to virtual assistants so that they can focus on more high-priority, complex issues.
Prime examples include the (re)scheduling or cancellation of appointments, providing information on orders or the status of accounts, and pointing people towards resources such as product tutorials. Instead of dealing with dozens of these requests every day, teams can leave AI to handle them and turn their attention to more challenging queries.
Leverage Chatbots
Finally, a great way for small businesses to harness AI for customer service is by deploying chatbots, which provide 24/7 support.
No matter how dedicated customer support teams are, they can only handle a finite amount of queries per day. (They also have to sleep sometime!) AI doesn’t have any such limitations.
Not only can well-trained chatbots handle routine queries, cutting wait times and boosting satisfaction. They’re also available at all times to provide instant responses if a customer has an urgent issue outside usual business hours.
Finally, chatbots can also draw on the array of information AI has consolidated about each customer to provide personalized support perfectly in tune with people’s expectations and preferences.
Final Thoughts
Used right, AI offers an amazing opportunity for small businesses to level the playing field and match enterprise-grade customer service capabilities.
By leveraging AI for multichannel support, automation, data analytics, personalization, and chatbots, small businesses can provide competitive and efficient customer support that improves people’s overall experience.
Implementing AI systems does take some time and effort – as well as a certain budget. Overall, though, it is well worth it to streamline workflows and enhance customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Using the list above as a cornerstone, small businesses will be able to pinpoint the AI solutions that best match their teams’ needs and start delivering a first-class experience for their customers.
