In the last decade, the contact centre industry has largely failed to embrace real AI. Partially because of the fears that AI will replace jobs, and could turn against us? And partially because pretend AI products have now saturated the market, creating suspicion and confusion around what real AI is capable of. Ironically, since AI evolved in 1950s, it's encountered similar scepticism and praise, in many other industries, while quietly becoming mainstream, for example in trading, fraud, and defence. So why not in contact centres?
The requirement to change now, while transformative benefits are perceived to come later. The main challenge with AI adoption has been the understanding that change is immediate. While the need to adopt AI is pressing, the transformative benefits are perceived to come later. True AI adoption necessitates a paradigm shift, towards instant savings and industry transformation rather than tiny changes over a longer time frame.
Expectation Management - AI does what it's been trained to do. The main difference between AI and most other technology is that AI is typically measured in probabilities. AI is usually trained to do a particular task, and the performance is directly proportional to the data it's been trained on. How do you select the data? How do you know if your data is fit for purpose? How do you know what the expected behaviour is of your algorithm? How do you decide when it's ready for production? And how do you collect a consistent human-annotated data? To truly benefit from AI, answering these questions is critical, as well as understanding at least the basics behind how AI works. It explains why pretend AI systems have sneaked into the industry.
World pandemic with Covid-19, has accelerated adoption of many technologies whose uptake is now rapid. What was the role of AI in this?
As a part of the New Normal Series, we recently discussed The AI for the bounce-back - different ways that AI will be used to help us come out of the current situation in customer service, and beyond.
Contact centres have been completely overwhelmed, asking customers to refrain from getting in touch unless they absolutely must. How will Contact Centres now transform to thrive?
Understanding emotion is key to effective flow in human communication. Emotional Intelligence touches all spheres of our lives, at home and at work. Positive emotions have previously been seen to be correlated with increased sales (see the impact of emotional elements to sales outcomes we analysed before), but what about emotions in not-so-normal emergency situations?
Here are 9 ways that Customer Service will change, and where AI will be able to help, during and post-pandemic:
AI Scepticism to AI Love: As discussed above, there has been a lot of scepticism around AI since its beginnings in 1950s. Overpromising (perhaps guided by the films?), and underdelivering, guided by reality and science, has caused AI Winter in 1970s. - What if 'it' decides to kill us? Some worries can be of course justified. But most of them are myth. The truth is that humans and AI are stronger together. We can't stop the technology progress, and we shouldn't. Pandemic has made us turn towards that help: Can AI help us? Can we help anyone with AI? Right now?
AI replacing people's jobs: Due to technology advancements, new positions exist. This extends to industries beyond contact centres. It's part of the progression, and we need to embrace advancement to thrive. What can I do with my skills right now, and do I need to embrace change? Can AI can now be the helping hand that will enable everyone to accelerate their learnings? AI has a massive potential in empowering humans, and helping them become super-humans. We can transform our business and in the process transform ourselves.
Cloud-based revolution. During pandemic, some businesses had to shut because they adapt to working from home. Before pandemic, the adoption of cloud-based solutions was slow, despite the cloud being easier to set up and scale, cheaper, and more secure. Pandemic has amplified the advantages of cloud-based benefits to even the biggest skeptics and we will now see accelerating growth in adoption. Contact centres have been shut because they couldn't work from the office. There is no need to experience that ever again.
Improve Customer Experience vs. Customer life situation. Long waiting times affect all of us. People avoid contact centres, but if your query is important you will have to find the time and patience. In the pandemic situation, it could be a life situation, and there might not always be that luxury of time? Pandemic has highlighted the need for your customers to get instant access. There is no technical excuse. The new paradigm is that exceptional Customer Experience will become a must, and where 247 access to answer any customer queries will become a new normal. Embrace it or fail.
Front line fundamental to the business. Front line is not only about costs. Next to your product or service teams that should be working hard to build your remarkable business, you should have your front line delivering as remarkable customer service, as this is how you talk to your customers. This is how your business flourishes in the post-pandemic time. Do you know how your customer feels and what are they telling you in your every day interactions? Have you discovered the unknown unknowns? If not, your competitors might leave you behind.
Chatbots revolution. Chatbots are by far the most popular AI application in contact centres. Popularity comes from cutting costs and cutting waiting times. Automating responses to customer queries can cut overheads while keeping the customers happy. In the pandemic situation chatbots have enabled business continuity. All businesses will now be looking into automation as the way to get them through the pandemic and beyond, while reaping the benefits of it long-term, on the quest to becoming future-proof.
Root cause analysis in contact centres has been popular largely due to the ability to cut costs. It has also been largely done manually using agents or a keyword-assisted search over transcription. More sophisticated businesses use AI-driven automated root-cause analysis. But what about an emergency situation when you have many times more customer requests than usual? Understanding root causes and grouping them in real time, would quickly enable companies to answer people's requests in bulk. Even in the absence of a fully personalised response, customers would feel supported rather than abandoned.
Real-time customer feedback. Most companies collect customer feedback after the interaction. The more advanced analyse the Voice of the Customer to learn from it. What about real time AI analysis? Feedback that might otherwise be too late to transform your response? To keep customers and reduce costly churn? Sentient Machines, believe in real-time customer feedback as a transformative tool to drive competitive advantage, and to collect as much information as possible from your valuable customers. The Covid-19 situation emphasised the importance of understanding how your customers feel in real-time, way beyond just adjusting your future roadmap, but to help them now?
Real-time emotion analytics. Understanding emotions in contact centres has mainly been used to derive customer preferences from post-interaction feedback, or social media. Utilising cutting edge AI speech analytics now transforms churn reduction, revenue increase, and monitoring regulations in real time. Businesses can save costs, increase revenue, whilst simultaneously improving customer experience. The pandemic has challenged old attitudes towards the environment, people's emotions and what is really important to them as customers. There is now urgency to considering that the consumers who give you money, also need to feel appreciated. Whatever you can do, it will go a long way if 100% of your customers feel that you care.
Conclusion
Post-pandemic, there is a New Era of Emphatic and Ethical Human Machine Collaboration, and Customer Experience is emotion-centric. AI used to positively assist humans is stronger than AI and humans working independently. Pandemic has emphasised the use of AI to our advantage, the advantage to humanity. As consumers we will see a drastic impact as CX turns into an emotion-centric experience.
We are all witnessing an unusual situation that we now need to turn into an opportunity to learn and come out of it stronger. This is the time to reassess everything we've been doing. I believe that we will see a transformation that we have never experienced before, and that we will never go back to the lives we had previously. This time will teach us about the importance of human connection, care for the others, and for our environment. The pandemic will be transformative to how we think about work and private life in the future. And there is an opportunity to come out much stronger and much wiser. I'm looking forward to seeing the changes. Positive transformation is coming.
*Header image by Lovefreund