What Are The Benefits and Drawbacks of AI Over Human Interaction — When it Comes to Customer Service?

“In order for me to assist you, please tell me what you are calling about.” Have you heard this line before when calling a company to request help for an issue you have encountered? I am sure you have, at least I have, multiple times and each and every time I get more and more annoyed. The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now in our everyday lives and it becomes more and more present as technologies develop.

A Brief History in AI

AI, standing for Artificial Intelligence, is a concept that believe it or not was thought of back in 1956. Starting as a philosophy and the idea of bringing inanimate objects to life, the idea was talked about at a conference at Dartmouth College. With push back from the government and basically turning the idea down, the concept was revisited down the line and began receiving funding by the British government in the 1980’s in efforts to compete with developing technologies in Japan.

From 1987–1993, the field went through another “winter” and picked back up in 1997 with IBM and the first computer that was able to beat a chess champion. “In 2011, the computer giant’s question-answering system Watson won the quiz show “Jeopardy!” by beating reigning champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.” The field of AI may have started out with efforts to create human like interactions, but it has become much broader and bigger that that.

Benefits of AI and Customer Service

Using AI for customer service can be of advantage for multiple reasons.

• 24/7 Customer support: Have you ever tried to call a company and get to the answering machine with a voice telling you to call back during business hours? Chatbots and automated assistance is able to change this. With automated assistance, there is a database warehouse with thousands of answers stored to answer different questions that a customer may have. This is a way for businesses to “always” be available and assist it’s customers. It might not solve more complicated problems, but it’s a good way to assure customers that you are there for basic issues they might have.
• Staff Cost Reduction: It can be of high cost to train someone to answer calls and respond efficiently to customer questions. By having experienced employees train and bring on new ones, you have to reallocate their time, in short reducing staff for a period of time, essentially slowing down performance and reducing call quality.
• Reduction in Waiting: Many times, when customers are calling for basic questions, AI can take care of it and if its more complex, AI has the ability to recognize the phone number and connecting it to a caller. This gives the ability of often redirecting the call and saving time and multiple call transfers, reducing time in the long run as well as irrelevant transfers to the wrong department.

There are many more reasons why AI can be of help when it comes to customer service, but those being the main points, there can also be many issues it.

Drawbacks of AI and Customer Service

Like I mentioned above, there can be advantages to using AI but lets now take a look at what’s not so good about it.

• Improper Escalation: Even though AI has come a great way in it’s development, it can still be limited. Customers that have specific questions with unique solutions may not be helped with generated answers, even with the abundance of solutions that are stored in the AI database.
• Machine Interaction:Similar to the point above, not all questions can be answered by a chatbot or automated system. When a caller can’t get the assistance that they need and is talking to a machine, this can lead to feeling frustrated and angry, especially when the machine is of no help. It’s not the same to talk to an actual human being that can sympathize with your frustration and try to get you help, than talking to an automated voice that could care less if it can’t solve your problem.
• Cost and Maintenance: AI is no simple thing. Implementing it and installing it for a company still requires educated staff that is able to understand what is happing if something goes wrong.

What do I think?

I have always had a love hate relationship with technology. Don’t get me wrong, it’s evolvement has led to miraculous solutions for many things, but it has also tried to replace humans in many instances where in my opinion its just not the same thing. Like I said at the beginning, I can’t count how many times I have made a phone call to a company when I need help and after multiple times of not getting anywhere, I just say agent and 99% of the time, I want to throw my phone out the window because of the frustration. In some instances this kind of technology can be great, but I don’t think that it will ever get to the point where bots can actually simulate and replace humans. At the end of the day, even with AI in place and being the first thing you hear on the other end of the line, more often than not, you are re-directing to a human being that can actually be of assitance.