Artificial Intelligence in the customer service business.
Over the last decade, experts have predicted that AI or Artificial
Intelligence in the customer service business would take up the majority of the current workforce activities.
The World Economic Forum estimated that by 2025, digital workers
would account for 52% of the total workforce, whereas humans would only make up
48%. As per Accenture's model, it presented
that the risk of not implementing AI would be much greater than the risk of
early adoption, the report presented based on a positive economic climate.
Now, this all has changed, COVID-19 broken everything. Presently economies
are stuck. Consumer spending dried up. To survive in this current situation, enterprises
have started looking at new ways of doing things.
In this market scenario, employing
AI-skilled digital employee doesn’t sound nearly as scary when enterprises need
radical change to get out of this valley. This becomes true when enterprise seeing
at deploying AI for customer service roles.
Enterprises were well experienced
in the difficulty of maintaining good customer service with periodic changes in
load, before this pandemic also. Customer service demand has spikes, and
service call supported by the human struggling to meet customer demand.
Maintaining a good
Customer Satisfaction Score, which is used to gauge the loyalty of a customer, is
difficult even in “normal” times. When our world getting changed, businesses
were typically faced with two scenarios.
The first was that they had to shut
down or dramatically change how business was done, meaning they had to take care of inquiries around how these impacted their customers. Many businesses experienced
a massive spike in the number of customer inquiries due to their services,
even more, important due to the outbreak.
Taking
example of the banking sector. At the time of any crisis, banks observe an increase
in the amount of customer management requirements, and the current pandemic has
been no exclusion.
The customer service departments at banks flooded with
questions and requests as their customers prepared to face uncertain financial
times.
This is on the only sector where to be flooded with customers query, there
are other sectors like Travel agencies, airlines suddenly started getting
thousands of calls to change travel dates, asking about refunds and so on, etc.
In fact, customers have to wait a long time to speak to a service representative.
The present approach to customer service will not be able to cope up or ready to handle this type of unexpected pressure of
customer calls or queries in the modern world.
Good and sustainable Customer Satisfaction
scores require that a business should be able to scale the number of service
agents in proportion to the load; otherwise, your business simply fails to
respond when your customers need you the most.
The only way to provide this
level of flexibility handling such pressure of customer call is by implementing
digital technology. This is also fact and seen during the current crisis -- and
for future ones, we'll certainly face.
How its can protect business?
Enterprises must take a closer look at problems to
analysis which actually need to be solved, before jumping into AI solution,
else it will be a mistake.
Without proper understanding of the requirement of AI, will unavoidably lead to an unnecessary rise in expenses, which can reduce the firm’s working capital, while
allowing unaddressed problems to persist.
The actual problem needs to identify. Once
identified, enterprise can, enterprises
can start to think about the ways that AI can help to resolve the identified
issue, simultaneously enterprise also has to understand and realize that AI is
not magic technology- it cannot do everything.
How
its can protect humans?
AI can help, protect employees. AI-powered technology
can provide businesses with the choice to scale their customer service employee as
needed, and these AI-powered reps don’t burn out to respond one difficult call
after another.
Multiple studies showed that on the psychological toll that
dealing with irate or panicked customers has on individuals, and that is likely
even more noticeable during a time when everyone is dealing with extra stress
and anxiety. with AI assistant, however, it is protected from this stress, AI protects
humans from having to face it directly while knowing that the job is still
getting done, because AI is not impacted by these factors, as customers won’t
see a drop in their level of customer service due to stress.
Conversational Artificial intelligence offers an unprecedented level of natural
language understanding. However, with more advanced AI, its ability
to account for context in a conversation.
Modern conversational AI is able to go past
providing answers to frequently asked questions and instead have an interactive
conversation that helps the customer, which actually solve their problem.
Additionally, advanced AI can demonstrate empathy
by analyzing the emotional state of the user and respond accordingly. Till now this level of intelligence was not observed from a
machine, but advanced AI may have this.
The simple truth is that an AI system having many ways and its better to be equipped
a customer service agent, and that is a good thing for people.
As organizations
should focus to reorder and reengage their workforces in the wake of a
recovery, an organization should be found to move people out of customer service
support roles into jobs where they can use their unique human skills like
critical thinking and creativity.
Furthermore, AI can
handle the call volume when a crisis can start. As a customer, No one wants to
wait for 15 hours just to talk to a service rep. Digital technology can help to
improve that wait time down to zero and customer satisfaction rises.
AI utilising in may sector, especially in the defence sector. Read my article artificial intelligence in defence sector.
Other articles
on AI :
Photo by Icons8 Team / Petr Macháček
0 Comments