4 minute read
AI & Customer Experience
Artificial Intelligence and Customer Experience: How COVID-19 has transformed Customer Service
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The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted significant growth in the use of artificial intelligence in customer service - an area that was already well on its way to becoming a norm, writes Pranay Jain, co-founder of Enterprise Bot
Do you remember the times of calling up an airline, a bank, or your insurance company only to sit on hold for upward of an hour as you slowly moved up the ladder of priority, repeatedly told by a robotic, pre-recorded voice that “your call is important to us, please stay on the line?” AI in machine learning is slowly changing this experience.
While we have certainly moved away from the over-hyped idea that AI would solve every customer experience problem, there is certainly a much clearer understanding of what it can do: • Solve 60% of the queries coming into a contact centre, most of which are repetitive but extremely expensive and time-consuming. • Using big data to highlight issues in service and helping the company improve its offering. • Proactively notify customers of issues who are likely to face similar problems based on automated clustering and prediction, to reduce the volume of inbound calls When an agent is in conversation it can provide the agent with response suggestions in terms of both content and tone to help improve customer experience.
These changes don’t mean that AI will replace customer support agents. Still, we’re moving into a new paradigm of the knowledge worker, where the agent can focus on bigger issues and is assisted by “smart knowledge” provided by the AI while also directly resolving the repetitive queries that take up so much of a customer service agent’s time.
With further improvements in AI we will continue to see a better and more customer-centric future with faster resolution times.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have generally shied away from AI assistance in customer support, in part because of a fear that setting up those systems is too complicated and expensive. Until recently, a reliable and useful AI system would cost anywhere from $150,000-$300,000, making it prohibitive for most SMEs. There now exists “pre-trained” models, that allow for businesses
to quickly deploy an effective AI customer service assistant. Companies can now utilise powerful AI by simply selecting the skills they want to train it with from a menu. This is why there has been such a visible uptick in conversational AI becoming a larger part of all enterprises, big and small.
COVID-19 Accelerates Change
COVID-19 has created challenges for all industries, but insurance has been hit particularly hard. Customer support has seen incredibly high demand, with anxious customers presenting complex queries alongside cost pressures that have forced companies to make staff reductions. This has made service wait times even longer, with some companies stopping all phone communication and only operating through email to allow time to deal with the surge in activity. In reality, in times of high customer anxiety this is counterproductive.
AI has proven essential in helping overwhelmed companies. COVID-19 has prompted an acceleration in the adoption of AI in customer service, allowing organisations to provide relevant information to their customers quickly, 24/7, without hurting the bottom line.
Fueling Change in Customer Service Strategy
In the past, customer service strategy was focused entirely on a human approach of devoting efforts towards peak times as well as the retraining of resources. With the rise of AI, customer agents have developed greater specialisation and can handle the most complicated issues, while AI deals with repetitive problems. Customer service strategy has also taken further notice of the need to get a more in-depth, easier integration into the IT landscape as it becomes clear that AI alone is not enough and a holistic approach is the best way to ensure success.
This has significantly increased cross-department communication and strategy to ensure that all parts of the business work together to provide a better customer experience.
Data Privacy and Security With AI
One key consideration is data privacy and security when dealing with conversational AI. There have been several high-profile hacks. Notably, Ticketmaster’s conversational AI was hacked, and millions of people had their credit card information stolen. It’s critical that all data must be encrypted and the highest level of security ensured to keep the entire ecosystem safe. This is made more complicated by GDPR, which has strict requirements around what data can be used to train the AI system as well as long that data can be retained.
It’s essential for enterprises to understand and build the right policies to ensure they work with AI in a GDPR-compliant and secure way. Further, it’s important to understand the biases in AI models and ensure that data is well filtered and audited.
The Future is AI
AI continues to improve and has proven to be a vital help to providing the quality customer experience that clients expect. It’s not just for the big corporations anymore, it’s readily accessible for SMEs who want to provide top-quality customer service with quick response rates.
