AI-Powered Customer Service
If you tried contacting your favorite retailer, airline, or bank around late March, chances are that you spent on average 12 hours getting hold of a customer support agent and on average 3 days to get your case resolved. This worrying trend has its underpinnings in three key challenges that companies are facing. AI-Powered Customer Service is the key solution that businesses are leveraging to enhance customer experiences.
First, contact centers are already overwhelmed with support requests across a growing number of channels from email, phone call, messaging, text, and social media. Agents were simply not able to meet SLA’s with changing business environments and customer habits. Any self-service initiative that companies undertook only addressed the tip of the iceberg but not the major case drivers thereby falling short of expectations.
Secondly, CSAT scores have remained relatively flat across industries as companies have not been able to crack the challenge of delivering personalized customer service. In fact, a study by Qualtrics states that 80% of CEOs think they are delivering a great customer experience while only 8% of customers actually agree. The key reason is companies don’t have the technology toolset to close the experience gap.
The third major area is that customer service costs are simply becoming unsustainable. The key reason is rooted in the fact that traditional customer service departments are centered around optimizing cases and agent productivity. While this is good for companies that are in the business of selling customer service software it is not necessarily game-changing in delivering a five-star user experience. Moreover, customers are required to have a number of solutions from different vendors for chatbot, RPA, case management, and knowledge base–each solving a niche problem without addressing the entire customer experience gap.
The current macro environment has basically forced every customer experience-focused company to pause and rethink their strategy. CX Leaders are looking for AI & Automation as tools to catapult their organizations into the next phase of growth.
Gartner predicts “By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017.”
AI-Powered Customer Service can deliver on the promise of offering instant, personalized and automated customer service while simultaneously enabling agents to be more productive with automated classification, routing and resolution of cases. This powerful combination of AI & Human collaboration can dramatically improve CSAT Scores, have zero wait times as virtual assistants are available 24/7, and drastically cut down license and operating costs resulting in a new normal for Customer Service & Support.
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