The triple A solution: How analytics, automation, and AI will redefine customer service
A quick trip down memory lane to the 1990s will help us see just how far customer services has changed. In the past, customers would have walked into a physical store for a real person to help solve their problem. But, we are now in the machine era – where we will do everything we can to avoid talking to a human, preferring to use a variety of channels that allow us to either serve ourselves or allow a robot to take our calls and respond to queries.
Technologies, platforms, solutions, and applications have worked together to enable this evolution. The innovations of tomorrow could be so removed from our current reality that we can’t even predict them – in the 90s, who would have been able to predict that we could have the world at our fingertips in a smartphone? What we can predict, and what we are already seeing, is the impact of a certain set of technologies which are underpinning all current innovation – the ‘Triple As’ of customer service: Analytics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
While call centres have been recording calls for a long time, it’s usually just for ‘quality and training purposes’; the goldmine of data collected just sits idle on disks and tapes. Today, enterprises are waking up to the potential and opportunity this data can provide in revenue generation and customer satisfaction. By applying analytics, companies can open up insights and correlations that would be completely obscured, for example:
• Speech to text: With speech and text analytics, organisations can convert recorded conversations to text, and then analyse what customers say, build patterns and trends, and spot opportunities. This helps enterprises respond in real time to what’s happening out there, based on detailed contextual analysis of thousands of calls. The approach swings from reactive to proactive mode.
• Social chatter: There is a lot going on in the virtual world, but there is no logic, sequence or pattern. Social media data truly adheres to the definition of the ‘three Vs’ of big data; velocity, variety, and volume. Slicing and dicing this unstructured data is challenging, but if businesses are able to ‘tame’ this chaotic realm, they can know what topics are trending in real-time and understand mass customer sentiment. This empowers agents to tailor and target promotions, and even proactively intervene to mitigate potential issues.
• Customer analytics: The 360-degree view of your customer is a complete package; incorporating demographics, preferences, and prejudices, history of interactions, patterns, and styles of individual customers. This helps in predicting the issues they may face, the reason why they reach out and enables relevant cross-selling and up-selling of personalised offers and treatments.
While analytics can pull customers towards a site with eye-catching and personal offers, that experience falls down if they are then unable to find the specific offer that enticed them in the first place.
