Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers. With AI iterations such as ChatGPT seeing success, there is increasing investment into the development of more robust and agile AI solutions. It is important to understand how AI works, the advantages, and the disadvantages of how AI can complement your business.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
IBM defines Artificial Intelligence as a technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human intelligence and problem solving. Along with other technologies, AI can think, learn, and problem-solve just like a normal person. They are designed to automate manual, time-consuming tasks, analyze data, engage with customers (where appropriate), and make interactions more streamlined and efficient. Included below are some advantages and drawbacks of AI usage in a customer service environment.
What are some advantages?
Availability: One of the biggest advantages of AI is that it can provide ‘round the clock services. This can help fill in the gaps when your business is closed after hours, on weekends, and during holidays. This availability ensures customers they can receive assistance whenever they need it which increases customer satisfaction and the business’ reputation.
Efficiency: AI aims to provide a significant improvement in efficiency. AI can process many customer queries simultaneously, minimizing wait times and helping customers faster. Businesses can also leverage AI to adjust capacity to demand, allowing more flexibility during busier periods. This allows the human support staff to engage with the more complex customer interactions if needed.
Personalization: AI can rapidly analyze and process enormous amounts of customer data. This helps the system understand preferences and behaviors. This can assist the customer support staff in providing personalized interactions and making tailored recommendations. This will go a long way towards making customers feel valued.
Managing repetitive tasks: AI is exceptionally suited to handling repetitive, mundane, and labor-intensive tasks. This allows customer service agents to focus on complex, high value, and emotionally charged customer interactions. AI can remove heavy workloads that would otherwise distract human employees from more nuanced tasking.
What are some disadvantages?
Lack of human touch: AI applications lack the empathy, nuance, and judgment of human beings. It is completely reliant on the data it uses. While it can handle routine and simple tasks, human interaction will still be needed for follow-up to double-check information, handle more complex problems, and resolve situations for displeased customers. Because of this, many customers still prefer interacting with a real person. It is important to maintain a good balance as AI solutions cannot replace human empathy and judgement.
Complex implementation: Implementation of an AI system requires the integration of multiple systems. It will change the way the organization operates and, therefore, has the potential to impact the culture. Implementation needs to be treated as a change process and will require professional assistance to handle the integration into processes and workflows.
Unanticipated cost: There is a risk, as with any investment, that significant funding will be required before cost savings start to kick in. Overall maintenance, development, and training costs may be particularly risky for smaller businesses. Training your AI with data specific to your business as well as developing the AI for new use cases can present ongoing operating cost past the initial investment. Expansion is an opportunity, but technology costs will increase because of the acquisition. It is important to consider this and keep it in mind.
Errors and malfunctions: AI systems are not perfect and relying too much on their processes without human supervision can be disastrous. As with any technological solution, although increasing with reliability, there is always a risk of error and technical malfunctions. AI can still struggle to comprehend complex language or context that can lead to unsatisfactory experiences. It is important to retain human employees who are ready to intervene if necessary and have a backup plan for any technical errors.
Key Takeaways and Items to Consider
- While customer acquisition costs can vary, higher end customers can cost upwards of $80-100 just to get them to call your company. What are you doing to ensure this lead is captured?
- AI agents are never a great replacement for humans but are an excellent option for calls to be answered outside of business hours, on holidays, during weekends, and as a surge/overflow option. An AI agent clocks in when the phone rings and clocks out when they hang up.
- Take care to gauge your customers’ experience. Are they happy or upset with the use of AI call answering systems? How are you measuring successful interactions with AI?
Conclusion
While AI can handle simple tasks, it is important for businesses to ensure that AI works in harmony with humans. The key is to integrate your human employees seamlessly with AI for the automation of routine tasks, while allowing human employees to handle more complex and empathetic interactions. Striking the right balance is crucial to providing the best customer experience, while retaining the best talent.
Rossware is working with our trusted partners who have been actively developing AI tools (Such as SCS Communications and their tool the SCS AI Companion) that will be integrated into ServiceDesk including call scheduling and much, much more. Paul MacDonald & Dean Landers will be hosting a webinar on September 5th at 11am for SCS Communications customers and will be looking at an AI Agent and the best ways to utilize this tool enhance your business.
