Automating Customer Service using Hybrid AI chatbots and conversational tools

Elegant customer service is one of the most critical factor that determines the success of a brand and the business attached to it. From a customer’s perspective, what define a good customer service is the following three elements.

1. Speedy resolution of their grievances.
2. Resolution for problems within a single interaction.
3. Friendly customer service agent.

Of course, there are several other factors that influence the customer’s impression on the customer service, however, some recent research indicates that the aforesaid three points are the primary filter to judge a business based on the customer service it provides. If a business fails to meet these demands, they are more likely to lose customers to their competitors.

The challenges involved in customer service

For a majority of businesses, customer service is provided through call centers manned by several agents. The number of agents would depend on the type of business and it could vary from less than ten to more than thousands. Some business would host their own call centers and some would outsource the entire customer support wing to an offshore team. This was the model everyone followed for a long time now, but, this model has reached its saturation point, meaning, it is no more efficient in delivering the demands of the customers.

The primary challenge is that, the number of customer enquiries, compliants, suggestions etc, increased drastically as the number of customers increased. Due to that reason, customers would need to stay in line, on queue, on hold etc to get connected to a customer service agent to discuss about their problem. Alternative options like email, call back requests are least preferred as customers want immediate resolutions.

Moreover, the interaction with the customer and service agent happens with multiple hierarchy of managers to get the issue resolved. And most times, customers are frustrated with the service. Afterall, the service agent at the other end is a human and keeping the smile on throughout the day 24*7 is a hectic task. Quite often, they’d deviate from the philosophy of “Always keep the smile on” and results in building a bad impression on the customer.

What AI can do to improve customer service?

Artificail Intelligence technology has advanced a lot. Today, we have good NLP (Natural Language processing) and NLU (Natural Language Understanding) algorithms that can understand what a person is talking about. This is a great opportunity to automate the customer service part. Customers can interact with an AI based customer service agent through chatbot, conversational tools etc to get the information they are seeking. Customer service automation came with plenty of benefits as followed.

• Customers are attended to 24x7x365 and they receive high-quality assistance and care from chatbots and other forms of personal assistants.
• Companies save money in terms of investments in employees’ salary, insurance, training and development etc.
• It can provide more comprehensive and detailed user analytics and statistics.
• Customers got a personal assistant that can help them find products and suggest products based on past purchases when they were shopping online.
• All of the above points and the constant attention customers get leads to a high level of customer satisfaction that could not have been possible with the traditional call center model.

Now, this may seem like automation is the best way to go for companies and e-businesses. But even this would have it’s set of problems. For instance, if a customer phrases a question in a way that the system has not been primed with or they ask complicated questions, the chatbot or the voice assistant would not be able to answer and that could affect the customer’s satisfaction level. This is where human intelligence becomes relevant again. Consider this. What if we combine conversational UIs with human intelligence?

Hybrid AI based customer service agents

Hybrid AI chatbots have their advantages as we’ve seen above. So do humans. Put them together and we have something that can revolutionize the way we’ve been providing support to customers. Here’s how it would work.

The chatbot would “chat” with the customer and address their queries until it is asked something it might find something that it can’t answer. The information gathered in the process would facilitate assessing and assigning the right customer service agent to address complex queries that require human intervention. The chatbot will learn from this human to human interaction and equip itself with that knowledge to respond to any similar queries in the future.

Benefits of hybrid AI

• Improved customer engagement: For a chatbot, any interaction with a customer is enlightening. It learns from it and uses that knowledge to assign an agent who can give a more social and personal attention to the customer.
• Chatbots are smart but it lacks human instinct. Customers, at times, prefer human intervention because it can fulfill their need for expediency. Bots can start the customers off by dealing with and assessing their queries quickly and then as needed, transfer it to an agent.
• The number of human representatives that need to be hired and trained is much fewer when you use chatbots.
• Most importantly, chatbots learn from every interaction and it gets smarter and more capable each time.

In a white paper released by Artificial Solutions®, they found that over 68% of users would talk to their voice assistants at least once a week with nearly 40% checking it every day. Make yourself visible and available on these platforms and be there for your customers and you’ll rake in profits like never before.

Nowadays, we can use AI solutions to organize and direct e-mail inquiries as well. Companies get hundreds of e-mails everyday and it can be extremely difficult to read all of them and understand what the customer wants and respond to them. This is why many businesses are harnessing the power of machine intelligence to make this process faster and more efficient.

How else automation can help?

• Reduction of average handling time: Through the rapid categorization of customer enquiries, an intelligent solution can direct the e-mail to the right department of the organization. This can boost agent capacity by nearly 40%
• Automation of repeat questions: Repetitive questions that require similar answers can be taken care of with an AI solution. This enables organizations to deal with volume spikes and staff shortages.
• Easy access to information: AI can recommend the right answers to your agents so that they won’t have to comb through articles or archives to find relevant information
• Enhanced customer and employee satisfaction: AI solutions can help reduce the load of employees and provide customers with prompt service at the click of a button

Another major benefit associated with using machine intelligence for customers service is predictive analytics. AI can anticipate the preferences and needs of a customer, which can help sales agents pitch the right products to people. For example, while scrolling through social media, the advertisements that are displayed are often personalized according to your preferences and desires. Such targeted advertising can help increase the number of sales for a business.

How to get started?

Setting up a conversational assistant can be done in multiple ways. For example, if your business have a lot of materials like product brochures, business documents etc, you can simply upload these documents to an AI based conversational tool and the tool would learn the contents from the documents and responds to customer queries related to the contents available in the documents. We’ve create such a solution for a customer to enable them to provide quick information to their customers.

Another example is what we built for Etisalat. Using the solution we built, which is an in-store digital sales concierge, our client was able to provide personalized experiences and interactions to every customer. This has boosted the customer experience as most of the customers engaged with the Kiosk based tool rather than talking to a human counterpart. Our client was able to reduce the number of staff assigned as sales concierges and was able to use them for more challenging tasks.

By adopting such intelligent hybrid AI chatbots and conversational tools in your business, you can create a much more rewarding experience for your customers. A number of industries are being transformed by AI solutions including retail, healthcare, logistics and finance. From increased speed and efficiency to personalized customer support, it can make a real difference to how your business operates.