I recently had a very interesting conversation with an air passenger whose flight had been delayed 12 hours by the “Beast from the East,” a cold snap that was sweeping across Europe at the time, bringing some countries to a frozen standstill.
During his long delay, the disgruntled flyer had heard nothing from his airline, nor had he been able to reach them through any of their communication channels. He even tried tweeting them. Knowing what I do for a living, he ended his tale with the question, “If they had artificial intelligence, would this fix their customer service?”
The question illustrated how people often see artificial intelligence as a magical answer to all woes.
This was particularly evident at Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona last month, where artificial intelligence was one of the hot topics, with companies using the AI buzzword for everything from handsets that help you take better selfies to sat-nav that tells you where you want to go before even you know yourself. Whether all these innovations were truly powered by artificial intelligence or just rigid algorithms is debatable, however, one thing was clear – the world is high on AI.
In fact, artificial intelligence now sits on such a lofty pedestal that people are talking about how it could cure cancer. Let’s hope that one day it will, but we are a long way from there. You see, the answer to the air passenger’s question was simply “no.” If a company doesn’t value its customers, then it doesn’t matter how much technology they throw at customer service — it won’t get better.
First, you have to change the culture of the company to become customer-centric. And that airline needs to act quickly. For example, a study by digital agency Wunderman found that 79 percent of consumers said brands must demonstrate they understand and care about them before they will consider a purchase.
Equally, according to a study by Accenture, when customers are unhappy, they act much more quickly. It found that half stopped doing business with a company immediately after a bad sales or marketing experience.
