Artificial Intelligence (AI) in CX, or Customer Experience, is having an amazing impact on our day-to-date work. And the fun is just beginning.
Some of this can get technical quickly (particularly the embedded links), and this is a little bit of a longer post than others. But it is important for us to think about AI’s impact on all of our roles, and how the technology to drive efficiency for our business and meaningful customer experiences. To note, the more we know, the more informed our decisions will be.
Before we get into the topic though, it’s important to get a baseline understanding of AI: the difference between AI and Machine Learning or even Deep Learning – a few other terms you may have heard.
There are several business applications for AI in business; some are more mature than others, but we’ll explore each in a little detail. For more learning, click on the embedded links if you’re curious.
There is so much effort being put into implementing AI tools and programs to improve both the employee and customer experience; from analyzing unstructured data, fraud prevention on credit cards, robotics, reviewing and optimizing commercial business contracts, personalizing the customer experience, and helping contact center employees answer customer questions more quickly.
Machine Vision has been around for some time. A great example of this technology is an app called Vivino, which can give you all sorts of information on a specific wine just by taking a picture of the bottle’s label, and all in a matter of seconds. If you’re a wine lover and have not used the Vivino app as yet, I highly recommend it – it’s a game changer.
This technology can potentially add real value to your business eventually. Think of the customer who can take a picture of their dream home one day via a mobile app, and immediately see the listing, key specs of the home, as well as get pre-qualified for it because they’re already a customer at your bank – all from the front entrance of that home.
Artificial Intelligence for communicating / language and engaging customers has also been around for a while. Think of chatbots that can sometimes come off as human, or are smart enough at least to hand you off to one when your questions become too complex for them to respond to. They seem to be on every site these days.
So many companies are employing some level of the technology today. SalesForce has Einstein, SAP has HANA, and Infosys has Nia (to name a few). These are all very different in scale and scope of sophistication, but they build off the same premise of thinking.
There is also a prevalence of software that translates speech to text automatically for analysis, but also helps Contact Center Agents understand how happy or irritated the customer is through real-time speech sentiment analysis. The software even suggests Agents slow down if they’re talking too quickly, and policies / procedures to open based on the customer’s inquiry. Salesforce recently came out with similar tools last year.
Think about the value this would bring to your Contact Center, or to your customer complaints team. Technology like Cogito’s not only creates a customized experience for customers, but also helps the Agent be more successful through employing empathy and be more focused on resolving the customer’s issues vs. taking notes on it.
Our own capacity in using data has limits, but technological advances, particularly in the last 3 – 5 years have really just gone exponential. As we move beyond chatbots and into the Cognitive Agent space, like IPsoft’s Amelia, the game fundamentally changes.
Amelia is being used by a number of banks already. “She” can memorize a 300-page manual in 30 seconds, speak 20 languages, and handle thousands of calls simultaneously – she can interact with customers on the phone, as a chatbot and as a 3D avatar on your smartphone or PC/Mac. She remembers every customers’ call history, across channels, and has been proven to reduce avg. call duration by about 10%. Not only that, Amelia can pass customers onto human Agents, and she’ll stay on the call, silently, to listen in on the conversation and learn to improve her next interaction.
Kinda creepy? Yes. Amazingly useful and cool tech? YES. Concerned that these avatars are going to replace solid jobs in the very near future? Maybe. Here’s a great example of why: tractors didn’t get rid of farming altogether like everyone thought they would. Tractors changed the role of the farmer, and a lot of farmers’ kids left to get skilled in other jobs.
Ray Kurzweil, a Futurist and leading thinker on Singularity, predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach human levels by around 2030 – that’s not far off! But in the same context, he said we will have also multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold. So all is not lost; we still will survive and just get even smarter.
And I will leave you with a quote from one of my heroes; it is one of the best quotes out there, and also sums up the intelligence component to all of this, and why we have to be so careful with any technology:
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits.” — Albert Einstein
I hope you’ve found this post a little bit useful and it helps you get a little bit better each day!
