Category Archives: AI

AI, Customer Experience

The 7 Benefits of AI in Customer Service

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for a while in the realm of SciFi. However, we are seeing it more and more in the world of business. Shown as a negative in the Terminator franchise, it does also have some very positive connotations.

As we keep adding more and more features to AI technology, its benefits become more visible and spreadable. Customer service is one of the areas that can rely heavily on AI if set up correctly. As customer service feeds into the entire organization, the benefits of AI can quickly be realized by the entire organization.

With businesses moving online to an ever greater degree, customer service plays an even larger role. Currently, due to the impact of COVID-19 around the world, companies are looking for tools that can help them. This could be due to being forced to furlough employees, but also an even greater demand for online infrastructure. Systems and companies that previously required manual intervention, need AI to move forward.

The following benefits are some of the most important for AI in customer service. However, limiting them to just a few of them would not reflect the huge effect that AI is having in this area. In addition, every day, we can see how new ways to use it emerge.

1. Handling Large Volumes of Data

As the interaction with customers grows, so does the generation of data about them. But obtaining such huge amounts of data would be useless without AI. Humans can’t process endless amounts of data. Due to that, AI is an invaluable tool.

By processing data with AI, it is possible to obtain powerful insights and predictions about customers’ behaviors. This allows creating targeted marketing campaigns and solving the most complicated issues about their inquiries and complaints. It is important to have a powerful and robust CRM in your corner for the data that you are gathering as Excel sheets will simply not cut it.

2. Reduce Average Handling Time (AHT)

This is one of the most remarkable benefits of AI in customer service. Such importance comes from the customers themselves who used to complain about the time they had to wait to obtain service and support.

Nowadays, chatbots answer basic inquiries and requests immediately. Customers also get reminders and notifications in advance. They can receive their products in 24 hours or less and can track them easily through delivery systems and programs. Some services and intangibles products are delivered online, and clients can enjoy them almost immediately too.

3. Customize Products Offerings to Drive Up Sales

Customization is the new frontier of customer service. As customers already know they can get it, they demand it more and more.

What looks even more promising is the fact that customization can reach many levels of service. For instance, it may start with personalized emails that consider preferences, tastes, geo-localization, previous purchases, and more. Then, chatbots and customer support agents can use it to improve the interaction with them.

4. Effective Omnichannel Presence

The presence of multiple channels that allow interacting with customers in many ways brought many positive changes. Firstly, customers seem to be always reachable in one way or another. Secondly, most of those channels are friendly networks that encourage customers to keep in touch with many sources.

But multiple channels also brought new challenges as they represent a lot of data and channels to cover. In this sense, AI became the ideal way to handle them all. Firstly, AI can rapidly collect and process data from multiple sources.

Secondly, AI allows centralizing files about each client and their interactions through different channels. With this information, it is possible to provide superb customer service that takes into consideration all the communications from the customer.

By having a single CRM at the backend that can gather all of the information needed, all of your agents will have access. In addition to this, CRMs like Hubspot provide powerful reporting and dashboards. This lets you better manage your customers and their expectations regardless of the channel.

5. Positive and Seamless Experience with a Company

As companies implement AI tools through their operations, customers have the opportunity to improve their interaction. This is to say that when every touchpoint includes an AI, the entire process becomes easier to handle.

For instance, one customer can receive personalized emails with recommendations that target his unique preferences. Then, the customer tracks its reception by using AI platforms that allow him to verify when he will receive the products.

After that, the customer can provide feedback and reach customer support through chatbots. In the end, the customer obtains all the services he needed to buy, receive, and use the products in a very positive and seamless way.

Leading companies like Amazon cover the entire process in this way. And every day, more and more businesses implement more steps to cover the same processes.

6. Optimize Resources

When businesses use AI in customer service areas, their resources automatically reach an optimal balance. Such optimization comes in many ways. For instance, if a company installs chatbots, a customer support agent can be more efficient in handling complicated inquiries, requests, and complaints.

Another example comes from the data that some retailers collect to fulfill their stores. They can select what they predict and base their decisions on the data they collect from customers.

In the customer service sector, there has long been a fear of AI and ML removing jobs. While this is true to some extent, it must be realized that in reality, it’s not about job removal but rather job creation. AI at the current time is not intelligent enough to be left fully unbridled. It will require human intervention. What is much more likely to happen is that AI will replace simple, menial tasks and jobs, letting human operators focus on more complex tasks.

7. 24/7 Availability

Offering 24/7 availability is particularly important for global companies as they have customers from all over the world in different time zones. Moreover, customers have new patterns of behavior because they use different schedules to sleep and work. Consequently, they need different ways to communicate and interact with customer service areas.

AI is the solution because this technology can be connected and interacting 24/7 during the entire year. By allowing AI to respond first either through chatbots or self-directed knowledgebase queries, customers continue to receive service, while staff are offline.

Conclusion

AI is coming. It’s somewhat inevitable. While the impact will be felt in many industries and businesses, from a customer perspective it is almost entirely positive. This technology is included in almost anything we handle now. And customer service is one of the most benefitted. After all, the goal of its development and evolution was to improve people’s life.

If we had to choose the most remarkable benefit we would definitively go for the collection and handle of data. This is definitively making a substantial change in the way we do business. Every other AI development relies in one way or another on the use of the data.

The benefits that we mention here are among the most visible. Certainly, they also affect many other areas too because success in customer service implies benefits for the entire business.

AI, IT service management

Separating Hype from Reality: Exploring AI in IT Service Management

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IT service teams have been under continuous pressure about two matters for quite some time now. On the one hand, they must to do more with less. On the other, they need to deliver superior customer service and reduce downtime. We have seen that the complexity of these issues has also increased to a significant extent.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are a helpful solution to all these issues. AI offers many opportunities to address these challenges. Besides, it helps improve the overall IT service management. It is worth observing how IT managers and directors can implement AI to improve their operations.

ITSM is improving but still needs work

We are continually witnessing the evolution of IT operations, how they adopt new technologies as they progress. We see organizations using more and more IT management systems and automation. IT management systems help to realize their strategies better. ITSM can not only develop and implement but also, manage and optimize IT domains.

ITSM can help to optimize both IT services and the end-user experience. There is an ever-growing business dependence on IT services. This is a testament to the fact that there is a need for constant improvement and innovation in IT operations. Above all, IT customers have imposed an irresistible necessity in the department.

We believe that the IT team still faces a great deal of pressure from its stakeholders. This is due to the fact that we face “delivering more with less” mentality. This has an underlying implication of the concept of “faster, cheaper, better – pick any two.” Fast-paced improvements in IT services or operations attract users along with greater flexibility.

Again, doing things cheaper is not about reducing operational costs and realizing efficiencies. Instead, it is necessary that we focus on value over cost and add business value wherever possible. The concept of being better can mean many things. It can mean improving IT service quality and including availability. It can also be about meeting the end-users’ high expectations of IT services. At the same time, it also means that we have to have a continuous drive to offer better support and customer service.

As faster, cheaper, and better are all equally important, we recommend a solution for ITSM that doesn’t force organizations to pick two of the three. Lucky for us, AI and automation in the present day make it possible for IT departments to prove all three qualities.

AI and automation will change the game.

When it comes to IT management, AI, machine reasoning, and automation are gaining rapid momentum. It’s not merely hype. We understand that AI’s well-deserved popularity is on the rise for many reasons. AI is already helping different business functions across many industries in several ways. AI can replace or augment existing manual processes. Moreover, automation adds “heavy thinking and lifting” capabilities to various assets.

We have observed a movement toward digital agents that use Natural Language Processing (NLP). They use machine reasoning to add intelligence to IT management tasks. This is possible due to the early application of machine learning, which includes concepts like pattern matching. Automation libraries, adding to this, will provide end-to-end automation. This will help to resolve up to 50 percent of repetitive manual tasks in an instant. Applying these innovations in the correct manner can help us in large ways. They allow IT, service employees, to focus instead on bigger and more important issues.

This will help employees to provide a 24/7 “consumer-like” IT services. This, in turn, helps to increase employee engagement and productivity. AI and automation increase the speed of execution and task or process adaptability. They are useful in reducing costs. AI provides efficient alternatives to human intervention and cuts errors caused by humans. Thus, we can see how AI provides better customer experience to the end-users. This then helps to increase customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).

Examining specific use cases of AI and automation

We have put forward some of the cases that provide demonstrations of how AI and automation will transform the field of ITSM below:

  • A digital agent with auto-resolution. Here, end-users interact with a digital agent through chat and voice conversations. The digital agent understands the intent of the conversation. The agent deciphers what the problem is. The agent, in this way, proceeds to auto-resolve up to 50 percent of end-user requests.
  • Self-serve resolution. It is now possible to put in place an automation solution that increases optimal end-user productivity. Moreover, AI enables us to do this in a cost-efficient way. It enables us to find pertinent information. This supplies the solution to our problems instead of filing tickets. These articles may also be served by digital agents on request.
  • Catch and auto-dispatch. We understand that we lose too much time waiting for the ticket to be assigned to an agent. There is an extra issue of fixing a mischaracterized ticket. AI enables intelligent ticket routing that optimizes ticket assignment. It considers factors like the priority of the request. It also considers the knowledge, availability, and past performance of IT agents. These factors are based on past data and continuous learning.
  • Advanced agent assist. A lot of “tribal knowledge” is generated in the operations team that is not formally captured. A knowledgebase should incorporate tribal customer knowledge. That makes available the right knowledge articles and information about similar past incidents to IT operations staff (L1, L2, L3). This goes a long way to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) while troubleshooting.

The time is now

Finally, it is high time for IT service teams to strive to meet the needs of demanding users on the rise. This is a time of increasing complexity. Fortunately for us, AI and automation are finding their way into the IT department to help save the day. AI is already helping organizations across industries with external customer support. Thus, IT teams should expect to be valuable for both customers and the IT teams themselves. AI will soon become a necessity for IT departments shouldering heavy loads. Organizations that want to stay ahead of the pack should begin their AI journey now.

AI, Future, Predictions

Is the Terminator our Eventual Fate? AI in the Contact Center

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Artificial intelligence is the future of customer service and the CX world is excited to grab the opportunity by the scruff of the neck. As many analysts and professionals have already deduced, AI will change the way contact centers work. 


AI like many other new technologies has a lot of misconceptions since it is in its infancy stages. So it would be important to expound on what artificial intelligence is at its core. While humans and other animals use “natural intelligence”, machines use artificial intelligence where every data input makes it smarter; like learning new chess moves after a match. This is called “machine learning” and is combined with “natural language processing” where AI analyzes written language to maximize its abilities. This is how AI can categorize queries from chatbots and answer accurately or transfer the customer to the right agent.

How AI can be Used in Contact Centers

CX managers will be delighted to hear that speech technology has evolved and virtual assistants can now communicate with customers. There is an increased adoption of virtual assistants that are backed by AI-powered speech technology according to a speech by Jon Arnold of J Arnold and Associates at Enterprise Connect 2018.

 Google, for instance, have developed speech recognition AI that is 95% accurate. At such high accuracy rates, we can confidently say that speech recognition AI is ready for the market and CX managers can take advantage of this. Another advantage of speech recognition is that it converts large sets of unstructured data into structured data that can be enforced in sentiment analysis where new customer trends can be identified. Other benefits of this conversion of data include quality monitoring, compliance with internal procedures, boosting the efficiency of call centers and recording calls.

 Contrary to popular opinion that AI will replace call center agents, AI can actually help the agents. First off customer facing AI, be it chatbots or speech bots, will handle routine tasks and free up the agents’ time to handle more complex queries. This makes call centers more efficient and it is easier to meet key performance indicators (KPIs) for call centers.

 Another reason to employ AI is that it can accurately give customers the right information negating the need to call in the first place. Agent facing AI can also supply call center agents with enough information to sort out complex issues. Additionally, the AI can listen to calls and analyze the impact on the customer i.e. how well the issue has been resolved and the effect on customer loyalty.

The Maturity of Current AI

Right now, we are in an era where customer expectations are rising by the day which has forced CX managers to use AI to fill the void. However, AI hasn’t matured as such and most companies are only dipping their toes in. Most companies are trying their hand at chatbots and there are currently more than 100,000 Facebook Messenger chatbots in operation today. A recent report by Gartner revealed 55% of companies have already started investing in AI or have plans to adopt the technology by 2020. A new trend has emerged where companies are rushing to promote their brands on social media.

 This has led to the adoption of real-time chatbots (like Facebook Messenger chatbots) to communicate with new and existing customers. We can now see AI rapidly changing customer service through automation where the AI can respond to customer queries with greater speed and accuracy than humans can achieve. AI has matured to the point where it is used to identify customer issues, behaviors and patterns and process this data. This, in turn, enables the company to identify customer preferences, resolve issues before they appear and offer alerts of personalized offers and promotions.

The Future of AI

When contemplating the future of AI, the sky is literally the limit. This can be evidenced by advanced digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Users like them so much that CX managers are forced to integrate such virtual assistants in their customer journey.

 At the same time, other benefits are accrued such as cost reduction, a boost in productivity and streamlining processes. Customer facing AI is increasingly being used to take control of repetitive tasks that previously took up the majority of agents’ time. Nowadays, chatbots can resolve 10 – 35% of customer queries without the assistance of a human agent and this number is expected to rise.

 CX managers can attribute higher accuracy of issue resolution to AI and chatbots; call center agents are left with time for more complex issues which boost their confidence and sharpens their skills. As of now, AI is reactive but in the future, chatbots can be expected to predict customer questions and give accurate answers by analyzing the conversation. This leads to a higher personalization of the customer journey leading to increased customer retention.