The AI-driven future of customer service

We sat down with Richard Kimber, the CEO and Founder of Daisee, who provides a SaaS solution that automates quality management using artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service, to learn more about AI and how it’s shaping the future of customer service.

Some people are nervous or sceptical about AI—what’s your view?

AI is a very exciting technology that should be embraced widely within the Australian and broader community. It's one of those areas around which people tend to have a low level of understanding, so it's important to emphasise the benefits and opportunities it provides and not to be too sceptical or nervous about it.

How can AI be used in customer service?

There are many ways AI can be used. A particularly useful way is analysingand prioritizing masses of information: being able to sift through thousands and sometimes millions of different customer interactions to understand which ones matter. Another is prediction: using AI to predict what will happen in the future to allow you to adapt to provide better, consistent customer service. AI is very much underused in these areas but it’s also where a lot of companies can benefit from using it.

What are the benefits of AI and automation in customer service?

The main benefit is in the removal of waste, such as the wastage of customers’ and agents' time. We can use AI to identify mundane or straightforward interactions that can be automated using self-service technology—things like password resets or tracking packages. Ultimately, we want to make sure high-value or complex interactions are directed towards people in the customer service teams.

AI analysis of customer interactions can also be used to dramatically improve customer experience as it can provide deep insight into the reason for customers calling in, as well as their sentiment, emotion and any other characteristics of the call that may indicate a poor customer experience. This information can then be used to customise and personalise coaching and development for each team member to ultimately improve customer experience.

Can you share case studies where AI has helped improve the customer experience?

All our customers have seen a significant uplift in customer experience and satisfaction scores and this is due to our solution being not just a stick but moreso a carrot. The insights that our customers are providing their agents are improving their day-to-day life as it’s not just about where things can be improved; in a matter of seconds, managers are able to bring up a dashboard that shows exactly what agents are doing well. It's easy to show the wins.

One of our customers in particular, MYOB, showed over 20% improvement in their already very strong CSAT scores. Another win for MYOB that is related to customer experience but also revenue, was that their coaches were able to identify areas of improvement for their sales teams to become more solution-centric in their pitches, which resulted in an 18% increase in conversions. That is huge! These types of improvements are echoed by all of our customers.

What’s involved in implementing AI in an organisation?

AI can be complex, which can be a barrier to implementation. Where Daisee fits is that we are an intelligent middleware that sits on top of your existing systems. Our suggestion is that you look for very-easy-to-implement solutions such as the Daisee solution that easily fit into your existing infrastructure and data layer rather than something that has a difficult implementation. You can be up and running within a matter of hours and days rather than weeks and months.

How do you see AI shaping the future of the service industry?

I think AI is going to have a dramatic impact on the service industry. The most important impact will be what I call ‘right channeling’; having the customer use the correct channel for the appropriate issue and ultimately putting higher-value tasks to humans and using automated channels for more everyday issues. That's how I see it will shape the future—much less wastage of people's time.

The service area of a company will no longer be thought of as the back office. The connotation that the contact centre is the cost centre of the business is going away. Companies are realising that the service part of their business is super important and much more like the new front office. AI will dramatically change people's perceptions around service because it is the information that service teams are gathering that is so critical to their companies and that has largely been unknown and untapped until now. It is going to really change how we think about service and its importance to all companies.

What advice would you give to organisations considering or starting their journey towards automated operations?

Do not start with a chatbot, whatever you do. Really big mistake! Unless you have analysed and fully understood your customers in terms of their reason for calling, complexity of issues and resolution, you should not even begin to design a chatbot—the experience can be very frustrating and annoying for customers

Any final words?

In its broadest sense, service is all about moments of truth. These are the interaction points when your customers come and talk to you about an issue or problem they have, so it's important to be able to surprise and delight your customers with these interactions. Keeping a customer is much more cost-effective than attempting to win new ones, so this idea that service is somehow something we haveto do has to be changed. We need to use AI to focus in on looking after our most valuable customers—our existing customers.

AI will also help us with consistency of interactions with our customers across the organisation. That's one of the biggest challenges we all face—when a customer interacts with us, they get a different experience depending on who they talk to. With the use of AI and tools like Daisee’s, we can lift the bar on the overall standard of service.

Humans remain the superior intelligent beings on the planet but I believe AI can help us be even better. It's like having Google Maps in our car. We don't need the car to drive itself, but it's helpful having Google Maps in it. That's the context we should think about when we think about the impact AI will have on customer service— augmenting human capacity.

This interview was transcribed using DaiseeAI.

Daisee analyses and automatically scores 100% of customer interactions using a world-first automated, digital quality scorecard. Daisee enables you to see far beyond words alone, surfacing the underlying emotion hidden deep within your interactions—what your customers are really saying, thinking and feeling.