TRENDS: AI in Customer Support
In the past few years, we are living the dream of every science fiction fan — the rise of Artificial Intelligence. It’s one of these hot topics that are no longer talk between tech geeks, but a reality. Google push the revolution forward with a variety of projects, but they are far from being the only one.
Top 3 areas of AI right now
There are a lot of areas where we can see attempts to make AI works but it’s a long journey from technology to real economic use. But a lot of experiments make us excited and inspired.
1) Self-driving cars — This is one of the most popular industries where we can see technology. It is in the news all the time with all its good and bad sides. But one thing is sure, there is a place for AI either in professional driving in logistics or everyday urban lifestyle.
2) E-commerce — there are so many processes in digital marketing that can be easily done my machine that is a crime not to try. The main idea is that AI will not replace the creative work of human beings but replace the manual work like — tagging, organizing of searching for content. Right now image recognition is advanced enough to improve dramatically the user experience while looking in a product catalogue or match the search with customer’s needs.
3) Customer support — Of course, the main topic for us, in the industry is what, how and where AI can fit in our work. There are a lot of options which will talk about in this article but long story short — Chatbots are here to stay and increase the productivity of support teams!
How AI fit in customer support?
to deal with the rising number of customers queries and the optimization of processes.
Our statistics show that most (~50%) of customers queries are an L1 type or as it is called “How to” questions. This means that they can be handled with straight forward, short answers which can be found in the FAQ section. If these simple but time-consuming queries are solved by a chatbot, humans will have more time to deal with more complicated cases. That’s the moral of the story — People and their creativity are not replaceable by machines (not yet)!
Steps to implement AI?
Good customer support with chatbots is not a one-day project. There are some fundamental steps:
1. Organization of content — in day to day work no support team has the time to polish the Knowledgebase so much to be ready for such challenge. Additional time is needed to put every article in order and be sure that the path from “question” to “answer” is clear. This will optimize the work of the chatbot as well as your own team
“AI is only as good as the data it can learn from”
2. Training the chatbot — We will not lie to you it is a journey to teach the bot. You need to provide the right infrastructure from your support agents, knowledge base experts and the product team. You need to set up experiments and test the reactions of the bot. Map the input and the output correctly and see where are the gaps. Then to go back and write new articles or make easier paths to the answers. Supervise this process.
3. Choose the right channels to use it — Customer support is not only answering the questions it is a matter of relationship. It makes you closer to your clients and this feeling of understanding should be passed to the bot. Your experiments should be careful and well designed.
Why use AI?
The biggest benefit is the efficient use of resources. Imagine if your team is free to solve the complicated case and come up with new ideas for optimization. This will boost growth and customer’s satisfaction. Ai is here not to replace your team but to boost its productivity.
Lessons learned
1. Customers were asking the same question in different ways — set the right path from “question” to “answer” and train the bot to find it
2. Like with any human — You need to focus on content creation and nurturing the bot and training is the key for the bot to understand your business.
3. AI is still not going to come up with new solutions but it will deal with tons of work
