Incorporating AI: The Future of Customer Support

A I – Two letters that are commonly being heard across all industries in the business world. But what is so big about AI??

Simply enough AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, however, to explain it briefly it is a machine operated intelligence – yes that’s right it’s robots at work! The first human reaction to AI, especially when it comes to tasks or actions such as Customer Support, is: WILL ROBOTS be TAKING OVER making us humans redundant?? The answer is NO – the purpose of having AI, and hence robot machine intelligence is to allow the human being to do the complex things, and let the robot handle the mundane day to day work/tasks.

But how will AI be incorporated into the Customer Journey? Let’s take a look at three (3) main AI implementations that can be incorporated in Customer Support in order to provide a smoother Customer Journey

RPA – Robotics Process Automation

RPA is being used by various industries for scalability and cost savings because through AI it blends “intelligence” and “automation,” putting customer service on autopilot.

RPA offers widespread benefits for Contact Centres namely because:

It will increase the company’s service levels – by bringing software robots into the picture, companies can secure a consistent service level where mainstream interactions are dealt with efficiently, and around the clock;
It provides a more seamless experience for the customer by having a near 0% error rate simply by removing manual intervention;
It allows the robot to handle those queries/processes that are repetitive but still consume valuable Customer Service Agent (CSA) time – consequently, it saves costs to the Contact Centre in terms of both resources, as well as process efficiencies as RPA can handle more queries in a shorter amount of time;
With RPA handling the repetitive processes, the company can shift its knowledgeable CSAs to handle to more detailed enquiries thus ensuring that the team is not stuck bored at doing the same process.

Chatbots

In today’s world, Millennials and even more so Generation Z, and very soon Generation Alpha, are very much IT social and savvy. Research has shown, that Customers born as of the 20^th Century typically prefer to resort to channels such as Live Chat in their journey as customers as it enables them to get immediate access and reply to their queries. This is why Chatbots are proving to be an effective tool. Why? Similarly to how RPA works, Chatbots are computers programmed to simulate conversation with human users for Frequently Asked Questions. However, what’s so intelligent with Chatbots is that there is a continuous learning mechanism and the Bot is also able to learn from these simulated conversations, in order to be able to help and support Customers going forward.

Other benefits reaped by integrating Chatbots into your Customer Support include the following:

By incorporating bots, Contact centres are able to improve their outputs as Bots allow them to streamline the operations more efficiently;
Through this AI tool, companies would be able to collect some valuable granular data on the reasons behind the customer contact – as a result, this will optimize not only the Customer Support Process, but by gathering such data on why customers reach out, companies can be more proactive and can then correlate every interaction with their potential clients as well as the internal systems;
Similarly to RPA, by filtering queries to be handled through Chatbots, Contact Centres can filter what queries require the assistance of an agent as opposed to a robot – thus saving cost and improving efficiencies;
Instead of calling and talking with the live agent, customers can get the privilege to communicate with artificial intelligence Chat Bots on your business website for different issues;
Moreover, some AI tools that are being developed today include sentiment analysis which can also help speed up the Customer Support process by quickly spotting trends like anger or dissatisfaction within a large data set, often faster than a human advisor can.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP is the application technology and computational techniques to the analysis and synthesis of natural language and speech. But what benefits can companies reap by introducing NLP into their Customer Support service? Here are three (3) key benefits:

Through NLP, Contact Centre can replace their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Processes. How? NLP and machine learning techniques can understand Customer’s statements rather than simply giving customers a set of choices. NLP helps improve the calling customer’s experience by putting an end to the frustrating “Press 1 for marketing” or “Press 2 for support”, and allowing the customer to express his/her request. By predicting Behaviour, this AI tool will accelerate identification and mean that there is less need for human intervention.

Since NLP and machine learning can adapt to manage Big Data and can integrate features such as Sentiment Analysis, NLP and machine learning can deliver insights to the most important customer inquiries more quickly. As a result, with high volumes of customer interactions creating the need for a critical capability to prioritize which tasks to act upon first, using voice to text AI will make the customer journey easier and more pleasurable.

Are you looking to implement AI into your Customer Support? Here at Centrecom we will help you understand your customer’s journey and processes so that you may step up your Customer Service. By understanding which workflows and processes could and should be simplified through Artificial Intelligence tools, we will show you how such a simplification would feed back to the customer journey and your operational organization. Ready to take your Customer Support into the future? Get in Touch:

info@centrecom.eu
+356 2364 4011