Tag: sales

AI is expanding into new areas of customer service. Here’s why it can help the customer experience ... [+] getty

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of customer service. AI has shown up everywhere in recent months, even taking fast food orders in drive-thrus. And with it come many ethical gray areas and calls to slow down the speed of its development. One of the biggest opportunities and fastest adoption rates is in customer service.

But AI’s growth in customer service brings a big question: Will AI replace human customer service jobs? Although Goldman Sachs says AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, most experts agree that customer service jobs will be augmented and automated but not replaced.

By automating mundane tasks, AI could provide a better experience for customers with more self-service options and help fix some of the industry’s biggest problems, especially employee burnout and inefficiency. Working in customer service is notoriously stressful—it was named one of the world’s top 10 most stressful jobs—and companies see turnover rates of up to 45% of agents every year….Continue reading….

Blake Morgan

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist. Blake is the author of two books on customer experience.

Source: What Impact Will AI Have On Customer Service?

Critics:

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.

Related contents:

• “A Customer Service Makeover”.
• Customer support services: more than administrative support – it has to be strategic!”. 
• “10 reasons why AI-powered, automated customer service is the future”. 
• Implementing an online help desk system based on conversational agent”.
• Google Duplex’s Conversational AI Shows a Path to Better Customer Service”.
• Enhancing customer engagement with interactive voice response”.
• Seven Keys to Building Customer Loyalty–and Company Profits”. Fast Company.

• Net promoter score: a conceptual analysis”.
• Lunch Lesson Four – Customer service”. 
• Customer relationship management and big data enabled: Personalization & customization of services”. Computer-Aided Marketing & Selling.
• “Management Tools – Customer Relationship Management – Bain & Company”.
• “Customer Relationship Management
  “Market Share: Customer Experience and Relationship Management, Worldwide, 2020”.
• “CRM History: The Evolution Of Better Customer Service”. 
• “Software survey: CRM systems in 2021”.
• “How Context Sits at Intersection of CRM, ACD”.
•  “How to build a global company from a small town: The Zoho story”. 
• “It’s official: Oracle closes on PeopleSoft acquisition”. 
• Customer Relationship Management: A Strategic Approach. ISBN 9788190721127.
  “Gartner Announces Customer Relationship Management Summit 2009”.

• “Industry Specific/Vertical Market CRM Solutions”.
• The Forrester Wave: CRM Suites For Enterprise Organizations, Q4 2016, Forrester,
• Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies.
• Customer Lifetime Value in Organisations

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