Language is one of the most intuitive ways humans use to communicate, alongside gestures and visual elements. Yet, we often take it for granted.
Subtle factors that we generally consider insignificant, including our education, culture, previous experiences, and emotional states, influence how we use language as an effective communication tool.
Misunderstanding others is a leading cause of frustration across all areas of our lives - among our family, friends, other loved ones, or employees, colleagues, and customers. In the case of business, misunderstanding is fraught with danger to reputation and profits.
This blog post explores five elements of AI that you can use to improve your customer interactions and eradicate miscommunication among your team.
1. Understanding nuances of speech.
Psychologist Elizabeth Stokoe has spent the past 20 years studying the science of talk. During her career, she has analysed police interrogations, public mediations and everyday conversations for the pauses, nuances and details that can provide insight into how we can communicate better.
She explains that how we use language and interact with each another can be used to predict the outcomes of relationships. For instance, pauses - the human ear can't quite hear them, especially when we are engaged in a conversation. Prof. Stokoe uses a brilliant and somewhat amusing example of how the pauses in speech can predict whether a couple will break up. See her TED talk here.
The human ear has a tremendous range and sensitivity, but it cannot pick up the nuances of speech. AI — specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) — is advancing, providing machines with language capabilities, opening up a new realm of possibilities for how you can communicate with customers.
2. AI can identify whether "grounding" has been established between two speakers.
Lack of grounding is one of the leading causes of miscommunication. Grounding is a fundamental aspect of spoken language, enabling humans to acquire and use words and sentences in context. In Natural Language Processing (NLP) it refers to establishing the ground truth - a confirmation of whether a speaker understood the other one.
This may mean an agent repeating customer requests in their own words in a call centre, or a customer seeking a confirmation from an agent that they understood what has been discussed.
When communicating with someone over the phone and the two speakers come from different backgrounds and, in some cases, from different parts of the world, finding common ground can be difficult. This is where Natural Language Processing (NLP) comes in.
NLP is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). It helps machines process and understand the human language to perform repetitive tasks automatically. Examples include machine translation, summarisation, ticket classification, and spell-check. NLP helps machines make sense of human language faster, more accurately, and more consistently than human agents. While there are still many challenges in natural language processing, its benefits for call centres are enormous.
Being able to establish grounding through the use of NLP, means that you have to deploy a sophisticated dialogue act engine and algorithms capable of understanding not only what is being said, but also who has said what, and when, and what are the implications of this.
You can learn more about basic concepts of NLP here.
3. AI can be used to assess if one party feels being 'heard'.
When conversing over the phone, it can be challenging to establish whether there is a natural flow of conversation. However, AI today can be reasonably accurate in assessing whether one party is listening to the other. This is essential in the call centre environment as the customer needs to feel 'heard', and goes beyond mere measuring if one party speaks over the other.
Our cutting-edge Sentient Analytics platform will measure your agent’s ability to listen and understand, giving them useful clues on where and how they could improve.
In addition, it can notify you what customers like or dislike about your products or services, enabling full transparency to your customer interactions and giving you the power to keep customer needs at the heart of every conversation.
4. AI can gauge if there is an emotional charge to the conversation.
Artificial Intelligence is being used to assist staff in identifying upset clients and de-escalate problematic situations.
Research from Forrester, carried out on behalf of CX software firm CallMiner, found that 67% of call centres surveyed are dealing with more complex customer requests than the previous year, with 70% facing an increase in calls from emotionally charged consumers.
If there is an emotional charge, speakers will focus more on their emotions rather than finding a solution.
Our advanced conversational analytics platform, Sentient Analytics, can extract not only positive and negative sentiment, but a very granular emotions from the caller, giving you a better understanding of their feelings.
5. AI can be an 'emotion free' listener giving out objective views.
When we are in a heated conversation, it’s often hard to see a bigger picture. If a third party is listening to the conversation, they can immediately notice what and where went wrong and explain why there was a miscommunication.
AI can act as the silent listener highlighting objectively different elements that impact the flow of conversation. Is it a lack of empathy? Confusion? A concern? Fear?
The Sentient platform can extract granular elements such as empathy, confusion, anxiety, concern, and more than thirty other emotions, derived from millions of your customer interactions.
Conclusion.
Customer care and support are already among the leading use cases for AI technology, and 73% of industry leaders polled by MIT expect AI's role in this area to grow over the next few years.
Using AI in call centres aims to remove any language barrier, limit the chance of miscommunication, improve the customer experience and relieve human agents of time spent on simple requests. AI can help customer support agents be more productive, have engaging and personally satisfying conversations with their customers.
You can check out this short video from Sentient Machines here.