Customer Service is a massive industry that has created jobs for millions of people with a very small skill requirement, but a general sense of communication. It’s only a matter of time, that we won’t be able to tell apart a human customer support agent from an AI one.
Following companies have been investing heavily into this field, and have created some astonishing lifelike AI assistants, that talk and react exactly as you would expect from a real person.
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Facebook
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Apple
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Microsoft
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Google
Today, Customer Service, has become so reliant on AI, that most companies use this form of communication between their users entirely, to the point where they don’t even hire people for the job. We’ll be going over some aspects of customer service that have been affected deeply by Artificial Intelligence in detail.
Dynamic Problem Solving
When a user contacts customer service, they want their problem to be rectified almost immediately. But when a customer agent, constantly asks them to hold, or gives them a waiting period for the task to be completed, it can certainly be annoying.
AI customer service handles this in a far more reliable and dynamic way. Most AI customer service agents are referred to as bots. These bots are equipped with various tools that they can dynamically use while assisting a user.
Dynamic Problem Solving gives users the following advantages and features over regular call-centered services
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You are given various options during your conversation with the said bot.
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Various options allow you to solve your problem dynamically.
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It’s a fairly useful technique that leaves the user satisfied without wasting their time.
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The bot constantly stores your data for future references.
Consistent 24/7 Quality Service
While it’s true that many companies that still employ people for their customer service positions, offer 24/7 customer service, it isn’t always as helpful as advertised. The cost of creating an AI responding to a user is significantly less than training, hiring and then paying a human employee.
That isn’t to say that AIs are perfectly adequate agents for this job, but their availability is one thing that is guaranteed due to the fact that they are fundamentally a series of code that will respond, react and adapt to situations required by the user.
Even if a user wants to contact customer service at 3 a.m. in the morning, they won’t be greeted by a half sleepy employee that doesn’t want to work so late. You will be greeted with an AI agent, that is ready to process your request, and with the tools and information it is equipped, solve your problems.
Conversational Process Automation
Conversational Process Automation is a technique used by AI developers, that has allowed these bots to understand conversations. This means, that while you converse with an AI, it uses deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms to judge the tone and structure of your sentences to make sense of what you’re trying to convey.
The benefit of this in the field of customer service is that an AI can be programmed to react appropriately to every situation and response by a customer.
Instead of getting a generic and unhelpful response from a human customer support agent, an AI if programmed efficiently will always have an answer ready for the problem or query of the user.
Accessibility and Availability of Services
According to a study, 70% of companies will adopt some form of artificial intelligence in their company’s infrastructure as it is a rapidly growing field. Given these facts, most companies are already implementing digital customer service in their customer relations. This means that with time, almost all online services will have some form of AI agent available at all times for its users.
The prospect of constant availability is a highly beneficial one, for both the company and the user. It allows for both sides to retain a healthy relationship. Smartphones now come equipped with powerful AIs that can be used to full extent by the user for whatever needs they may have. This technology has been available for quite some time, but it’s implantation in directly catering to the needs of the user have been heavily upgraded with time.
AI assistants are all capable of solving many problems much more efficiently than a regular human employee would. Some of the more popular one’s are listed below:
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Amazon’s Alexa
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Microsoft’s Cortana
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Google Assistant
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Apple’s Siri
These are all integrated in your phones, your computers and thus you don’t have to come to a specific platform for help. All you need is an internet connection, and sometimes not even that as some of these works offline as well.
Personalized Care
Modern customer care services are already embedded into your personalized accounts, and keep track of your previous queries and experience with the service you are using. Modern AIs are capable enough to constantly learn their user and evolve according to the user’s needs.
Following are some benefits of personalized customer care:
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It allows AIs to cater to each user differently
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It keeps track of each user’s habits, needs and requirements.
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Every time you contact the AI based customer support, it’ll be more advanced from last time as it now has more information about your behavior.
If we compare this with a human customer support agent, we’ll see that the user has to walk them through everything and they constantly transfer you to different agents. It’s tiresome and highly inefficient for any user that has contacted help previously as well.
With AIs, your needs are taken care of based on your needs alone, with consistency.
While AI based customer service is definitely something that has its benefits, it’s still going to take sometime to perfect the system, and for users to understand it’s significance.
Some obstacles in this form of digitized customer service are listed as follows:
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Not everyone is equipped with enough computer knowledge to easily navigate to these services.
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Many people rely more on a phone call, and feel it more human than talking to a machine.
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Intensive programming has to be done to make a perfect AI agent.
With the heavy investment in AI, times are changing. The use of AI customer service is becoming increasingly common, and while it’s benefits obviously outweigh its shortcomings, it will still lead to a massive shift in career structures, as millions of people are working in the industry already.
