Najeebah Al-GhadbanThe idea of removing humans from customer service is not new,” says Jeff Galak, associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. And with recent rapid advances in generative A.I. technology, marked by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its numerous offspring, many business owners might be tempted to eliminate their human customer service teams altogether.
That’s especially true of companies on the Inc. 5000, which are fielding an ever-increasing number of calls from their growing customer bases. Even so, Galak says a shift to full automation right now would be premature. The reality is that many businesses are going in the opposite direction–employing A.I. to enhance, rather than replace, their customer service agents.
Here’s what we learned from a few of them about using A.I. to supercharge service teams….Continue reading…
Source: How A.I. Can Supercharge Your Customer Service Team | Inc.com
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Customer service may be provided in person (e.g. sales / service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, websites, and apps. An advantage of automation is that it can provide service 24 hours a day which can complement face-to-face customer service. There is also economic benefit to the firm. Through the evolution of technology, automated services become less expensive over time.
This helps provide services to more customers for a fraction of the cost of employees’ wages. Automation can facilitate customer service or replace it entirely. A popular type of automated customer service is done through artificial intelligence (AI). The customer benefit of AI is the feel for chatting with a live agent through improved speech technologies while giving customers the self-service benefit.
AI can learn through interaction to give a personalized service. The exchange the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates within devices, lets us transfer data when we need it, where we need it. Each gadget catches the information it needs while it maintains communication with other devices. This is also done through advances in hardware and software technology. Another form of automated customer service is touch-tone phone, which usually involves IVR (Interactive Voice Response) a main menu and the use of a keypad as options (e.g. “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish”).
In the Internet era, a challenge is to maintain and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of online commerce. “Online customers are literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it’s easy to shortchange them emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online arena.”
Examples of customer service by artificial means are automated online assistants that can be seen as avatars on websites, which enterprises can use to reduce operating and training costs. These are driven by chatbots, and a major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing. Adversely, automation has created a need for information that can sometimes harm privacy.
The two primary methods of gathering feedback are customer surveys and Net Promoter Score measurement, used for calculating the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. Many outfits have implemented feedback loops that allow them to capture feedback at point of experience. For example, National Express in the UK has invited passengers to send text messages while riding the bus. This has been shown to be useful, as it allows companies to improve their customer service before the customer defects, thus making it far more likely that the customer will return next time.
Customer service does not only focus on the external aspect of the organization, but also the internal relations that facilitate the business activity. For service firms, customer service plays a vital role due to the close interaction with clients, as in the healthcare or legal industries.[2] When close interaction is not required, there are different methods to provide individuals with a sense of attention. For instance, when withdrawing money from an ATM or skipping the line in an amusement park.
Customers still receive the service they are looking for in a direct level without face-to-face interaction. The evolution in the service industry has identified the needs of consumers. Companies usually create policies or standards to guide their personnel to follow their particular service package. A service package is a combination of tangible and intangible characteristics a firm uses to take care of its clients.
Due to the introduction of instant messaging (IM) in contact centers, agents can handle up to 6 different IM conversations at the same time, which increases agent productivity. IVR technology is being used to automate IM conversations using existing natural language processing software. This differs from email handling as email automated response is based on key word spotting and IM conversations are conversational. The use of text messaging abbreviations and smilies requires different grammars to those currently used for speech recognition.
IM is also starting to replace text messaging on multimedia mobile handsets. With the introduction of web services into the contact center, host integration has been simplified, allowing IVR applications to be hosted remotely from the contact center. This has meant hosted IVR applications using speech are now available to smaller contact centers across the globe and has led to an expansion of ASP (application service providers).
IVR applications can also be hosted on the public network, without contact center integration. Services include public announcement messages and message services for small business. It is also possible to deploy two-prong IVR services where the initial IVR application is used to route the call to the appropriate contact center. This can be used to balance loading across multiple contact centers or provide business continuity in the event of a system outage.
Surveys show IVR is generally unpopular with customers. It is difficult to use and unresponsive to the caller. Many customers object to talking to an automated system. There is a perception that IVR is adopted because it allows companies to save money and allow the hiring of fewer employees to answer the phone. Additionally, as basic information is now available online, the calls coming into a call center are more likely to be complex problems and not ones that can be resolved in an automated fashion, thus requiring the attention of a live agent.
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