What Role Will AI Play in the Future of Customer Service?
What comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence? Most people immediately associate the term with Terminator-like robots or self-driving vehicles — and they aren’t entirely wrong. But artificial intelligence (AI) and robots aren’t exactly one and the same. Though often used in conjunction with bots, AI specifically refers to the simulationof human intelligence processes by machines. From sorting your trash to replacing your furry friends, AI powers many technologies we use on a daily basis.
According to Transparency Market Research, the global artificial intelligence market is worth about $126 billion, with that number expected to reach $3 trillion by 2024. With a growth rate of about 36% every year, it’s easy to see why companies are heavily investing in AI, especially in the realm of customer service (CS). By incorporating AI-powered bots and AI-assisted human agents, AI can help improve the overall customer experience, and drive value across businesses. Looking into the future, AI will be a skills-enabling technology that empowers businesses — and differentiates them from one another.
A Kayako study indicates that, for 73% of CS professionals, managing time and workload is the greatest challenge. As the frontline of the customer experience, CS professionals face a constant bombardment of tickets to resolve and customers to pacify. But according to Agent.ai, up to 80% of the questions that customer service reps get each day are repetitive, low-level questions with simple answers.
Mike Murchison, the CEO of Ada Support — a platform that allows companies to build custom CS bots — experienced this problem firsthand. “For months, my co-founder and I manually responded to thousands of support emails for six companies. We discovered that virtually every company had the same problem: repetitive questions asked via email, live chat, and phone calls,” he says. “We thought: there has to be a better way to do this.”
That’s where AI-powered bots come into play. Not to be confused with AI-assisted human agents, these conversational computer programs interact directly with customers — without human intervention. Using deep learning and Natural Language Processing, chatbots can easily understand and provide answers to consumer questions. They can also simplify the ticket triaging process by handling low-level inquiries at first contact.
Dutch airline KLM uses an AI-powered bot to address low-level customer concerns via Facebook Messenger. The bot can push check-in alerts, flight status updates, and boarding passes to customers — but it can also handle common inquiries, like requests for seat changes.
Because bots like KLM’s can push personalized, accurate, on-demand data to customers in real time, they ensure a higher level of satisfaction. And they’re useful for agent productivity, too; SparkCentral reports that CS bots can lower the average agent handle time (AHT) by over 10%. With chatbots handling most of the mundane, low-level inquiries, CS agents can move on to more complicated questions that require empathetic care or a more human touch.
While AI-assisted chatbots can easily answer simple questions, they have a limited ability to carry out more nuanced requests.
