The Future Of Customer Service is Pos’AI’tive
Love it or hate it, the future of contact centres rests on AI. From NLP and data analytics to predictive analytics and speech recognition, technology and agents will work in tandem to revolutionise the concept of customer service.
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It’s not unlikely that future generations will come to know Apple by Siri and Amazon by Alexa. There will come a time when brands are not remembered by their name but by their AI avatar, created specifically for customer service.
A Gartner study revealed that 54% of customer service agents used some conversational AI platform, such as chatbots or virtual customer assistants (VCAs), for customer-facing purposes until last year. The figures are only rising. By 2027, chatbots are expected to become the primary customer service element for almost a quarter of organisations everywhere.
On the other hand, generative AI has already found a warm place across industries, geographies, use cases, and personal devices. It has made one thing clear – the future of everything is AI, and it’s ready to change the customer service game.
While controversies over its raw potential and consequences due to over-indulgence are valid, AI’s future in customer service has a favourable road ahead. For instance, one of the first studies that examined the generative AI tech used by employees in an actual workplace reported that enhanced AI boosted the productivity of customer service representatives by 14%.
AI will nurture modern business strategies.
By 2030, the conversational AI industry is expected to be worth $41.39 billion. As conversational AI technology advances, more brands will look to enhance their contact centre operations with features like a virtual agent. CS teams have already noticed improved customer experience, cost-effectiveness, faster response times, increased efficiencies, and enhanced data analytics to integrate with other technologies.
A report revealed that AI will replace 85 million jobs by 2025 but also suggested that 97 million jobs will be made available by 2025 due to AI. Love it or hate it, the future is pos-AI-tive.
A shot of adrenaline to conversational AI
For quite some time, conversational AI has been the talk of the town. Still, businesses have been facing a slew of challenges, including natural language understanding limitations, handling complex and unique scenarios, emotional intelligence, and misinterpretations.
With the introduction of generative AI and its human-like sophisticated technology, the customer service ecosystem has received an encouraging shot of adrenaline to continue down the path of AI adjustments. According to a study, human support agents reported resolving more customer queries per hour when aided by a custom-built tool powered by generative AI.
Modern AI solutions, powered by natural language, machine learning, and reinforcement learning, can now understand the subtleties of human conversation, such as tone, inflection, and context, ensuring seamless interactions. It allows customer service teams and contact centre models to enhance request routing, sentiment analysis, agent analytics, interoperability, app integrations, and customer journey orchestration.
Several technologies will work in tandem to fuel the massive advancement of AI in customer service. For instance, the progress of Deep Learning technology will enable AI systems to process complex and unstructured data, including images, audio, and video. It will be instrumental in developing more intelligent facial recognition software, voice assistants, and visual search for better customer service experiences.
Further unravelling of NLP technology will be fruitful in understanding and interpreting human language in all forms. From speech recognition and sentiment analysis to language translation, NLP will help advance AI-driven bots and assistants to understand customer queries and emotions better. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Fuelling the future of CS, technology companies are already knee-deep into working on impressive AI solutions to deliver more personalised, efficient, and satisfying experiences. As AI technology continues to advance, the potential of taking your customer service to greater heights through AI is limitless.
For instance, consider Sprinklr’s AI-powered guided workflows. Think of it as the trusty co-pilot for customer service agents, guiding them through the turbulent skies of complex customer inquiries. With the increasing power of AI, these workflows will be able to understand customer intent better and provide a wealth of knowledge at agents’ fingertips.
Sprinklr recently added 120 new CCaaS features and 25 new AI features for the Sprinklr Service product suite, including predictive intelligence, AI-powered quality management, impact analysis, top contact driver, and outbound voice.
Amazon has updated features on Chime SDK, a call analytics tool that can analyse customers’ tones to evaluate sentiment. Cisco incorporated AI into Webex Connect, its cloud communications and contact centre offering. The latest upgrades will allow CS teams to automate personalisation and use ML to incorporate self-learning.
AI will bring a paradigm shift in the customer service landscape, and the future is not far away. But here’s a word of caution: In order to make AI the face of customer service, developers have a long road ahead of them. Without room for personalisation and empathy, bias-free intelligence, AI can only be limited to back-end coding, automation and more minor inquiry-led services. Until then, the human agents will have to continue being the world’s Atticus Finchs’, Fred Rogers’ and Betty Whites — all known for their empathy and kindness.
