Explore & Thrive with AI AI customer service
How will Customer Service change with AI?
Understanding how Customer Service will evolve in the AI-era.
And how startups can use this as an opportunity.
Understanding how Customer Service will evolve in the AI-era.
And how startups can use this as an opportunity.
The aim of Customer Service as a business component is to ensure satisfaction. Businesses realize that things are not always perfect, and problems may arise at any step of the business. To handle customer complaints and ensure that customers are satisfied, Businesses employ empathetic listeners, and empower them to actually be able to solve the issue.
Customer service is often thought of as a cost center - a department that is considered necessary for the business, but does not directly generate revenue - instead, it incurs costs. The costs it incurs are that of personnel, technology, and facilities.
It is notable that Customer Service is already one of the most outsourced processes - Functions such as call centers, chat support, and email management are often outsourced to provide 24/7 support, handle high call volumes, and reduce operational costs.
Also notable is another fact - the kind of people hired in customer service. Most companies hire recent graduates with minimal work experience for customer service roles for several reasons: cost, easy trainability, empathy due to fresh attitude and morality.
We have already discussed that the kind of jobs AI will automate first are those which require minimal training. Customer Service business process will attract more and more automation over the coming years.
Today Customer Service is done by humans = costly and non-scalable. So today, focus is on empowering Agents - so that lesser number of agents are able to handle all the tickets.
But AI disrupts this completely. AI is essentially free, and scalable. So focus will shift to making AI systems able enough to be handle tickets all by itself, with escalation to humans only as a last resort.
Customer Service used to be in-person, via face-to-face interactions. Personal skills, relationship building used to be important skills in this field. Problem was that human time spent in personal interaction is not scalable.
With increasing technology, better automation started to be used. Telephone and mails started to be replaced with live chat and email, both of which could include elements of automation using IVR and ticketing.
But automation in Customer Service was still limited, since pre-AI technology was not able to provide proper intelligent and personalized solutions. But with AI, you can expect a disruption in customer service, with bots becoming powerful enough to be able to solve many more cases now, which were not possible earlier. The technology that has changed is in being able to communicate personally with customers at a scale AND being able to understand their problems in detail and take actions specific to each one.
Customer Service is considered a cost center, and ripe for complete automation by AI.
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