You and your organization’s fellow stakeholders know that you must consistently provide customers with outstanding experiences to boost their satisfaction and loyalty. But it can be tricky to address customers’ needs for prompt, courteous service when facing challenges in budgeting human resources in your call center.
Consider that the mean annual wage of customer service representatives is $43,520, or $20.92 per hour, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. When AI provides some assistance for specific calls, that frees up live agents for more complicated tasks, reduces consumer wait times, can increase the accuracy of responses and improves overall customer satisfaction.
Using automated systems to support your human workers allows them to focus on their ability to make real connections with customers, while AI takes care of repetitive and lower-level tasks. Accordingly, companies aim to harness new automation tools for each customer interaction.
This article explores the evolving landscape of customer experience in the age of automation. It examines the delicate balance between leveraging artificial intelligence-powered technologies and preserving the value of human interaction.
Customer Experience in the Age of Automation
Artificial intelligence systems can significantly enhance the customer experience. For example, AI is able to generate relevant content for specific industries and each customer’s persona, while customizing this content according to how people search and request information. Based on historical customer interactions, AI can write responses to their questions and email messages.
AI will call up the most relevant products to add on as suggestions according to a customer’s previous purchase history. Customers appreciate such personalized recommendations, which may suggest new products or services they want or need but didn’t know about.
Conversational AI agents or assistants can quickly answer frequently asked questions or address typical scenarios customers contact you about for help.
When comparing chatbot vs. conversational AI technology, be aware that conventional chatbots rely on prewritten answers, following the company’s rules. On the other hand, conversational AI is more advanced, as it can respond on the fly to create personal responses and engage in conversations with people for a more seamless customer experience.
Machine learning and AI can adapt to what customers say, such as escalating a frustrated customer’s call to a supervisor.
Best of all, your use of AI in the call center can scale up to meet demand. Contact centers can address numerous calls from customers at the same time, cutting down on their wait time, without needing to hire additional human agents.
However, it’s important to know your customer demographics. Younger customers typically are more accustomed to using automated technology to save themselves time, while older people may want more human interaction.
You can segment your customers according to which of them will benefit more from a purely AI-driven approach and which will prefer a hybrid approach that brings human customer service representatives into the conversation, with the AI system doing the initial groundwork to support the live agents.
Companies Using AI-Powered Technology Can Improve Customer Service
In a dynamic industry like the travel business, a company typically inundated with large numbers of customer inquiries turns to AI for a solution. Because customers contact the company through multiple channels, such as text messages or questions posed through social media, it takes time to collect all these inquiries and determine where to route them. AI gathers these requests, prioritizes them, and then sends them to the correct call center workers to deal with overbooked, canceled or delayed flights.
A bank uses AI-powered voice interaction technology to reduce congestion in its call center, enabling customers to speak to their Smart Home devices, instead of humans, for tasks such as ordering new checkbooks, blocking credit cards or requesting credit card bills and account balances.
Meanwhile, fast-food restaurants deploy AI systems that allow customers to order sandwiches using chat, such as through Facebook Messenger, or speak to the system to ask for a pizza.
High customer volumes can motivate companies to set up AI systems to help more people faster. One Fortune 500 company uses enhanced AI to handle more customer questions each hour, using a customized tool based on OpenAI’s GPT system.
As a result, customer sentiment improved, and the company experienced fewer calls for a manager to intervene. What’s more, using AI helped keep customer service representatives happier and less likely to quit, because the system enabled them to have better interactions with each customer.
AI for Better Customer Experiences
Technology professionals and practitioners with a mandate to deliver exceptional customer service in the digital age will want to explore using AI tools to augment human customer service agents, and even replace some of the more mundane aspects of the customer experience with automation.
