Customer service is a critical component of customer experience. Research shows that by 2020, 94 percent of websites will likely have a chatbot interacting with their customers on the website[1] & [2]. As artificial intelligence (AI) moves into this important domain, businesses need to understand the potential of technology and how to leverage it for enhanced customer experience. Most executives know that artificial intelligence has the power to change almost everything about the way they do business and could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 per PWC[3], but what many business leaders don’t know is, how to deploy AI, not just in a pilot, but throughout the organization, where it can create maximum value.
“Intelligent Agents will directly influence 10% of all purchase decisions.
- Forrester, Predictions 2018: A year of Reckoning[4]
Research shows how companies are investing in Industry 4.0 to enable digital transformation revealed paradoxes in several areas, including strategy, supply chain, talent, investment which leads to NextGen Customer Service.
“True digital transformation typically has profound implications for an organization—affecting strategy, talent, business models, Customer Service and even the way the company is organized.”
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has both expanded the possibilities of digital transformation and increased its importance to the organization. Industry 4.0 combines and connects digital and physical technologies — artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing, robotics, cloud computing, blockchain and others to drive more flexible, responsive, and interconnected enterprises capable of making more informed decisions and excellent customer service.
“Organizations are largely still finding a path that balances improving current customer relationship management with the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for innovation and business model transformation.”
The Era of Service Experience
What was the biggest pain point in using Chatbots for Customer Service?
You should put customers at the center of a multidisciplinary, agile approach: alignment of strategy, design, and technology around the customer journey, enabling innovation of the product service experience through iterative, incremental activations and deliver continual enterprise transformation at speed and at scale.
Intelligent service management assistance should be a robust, full-featured service management suite. It should be simple, affordable and aided by virtual agents with artificial intelligence. It also seamlessly should integrate with enterprise CRM and security. The solution should leverage untapped sources of information, namely, the voice log of customer complaint calls to support centers and the maintenance records generated by field service agents against those complaints. It then creates an Intelligent Database that can be searched in real-time using AI techniques to retrieve the best possible answer to a new complaint.
Some chatbots interact with customers to resolve issues, conduct transactions and answer queries. The best enterprise chatbots mimic the effectiveness of your top customer service agent, salesperson or support technician. The fact that these chatbots are “bounded,” or operating within a certain context (i.e. mortgages, utilities, wireless) ensures they can better support the conversation. These are also commonly referred to as conversational virtual agents.
For businesses, chatbots need to be smarter to be effective. These chatbots can integrate with enterprise systems, leverage Big Data, and use artificial intelligence to help customers resolve issues or conduct transactions. These chatbots are also referred to as virtual agents or virtual customer assistants and are being used by enterprises to achieve incredible results. If these chatbots make a mistake, the risk for the brand can be high. Example - what would happen if a banking chatbot answered a policy question inaccurately?
The intelligent service should be:
It leads to:
With Benefits such as:
Can intelligent services be the answer to every business?
Yes. When we give our machine-learning algorithm access to historical customer service data, AI begins to identify patterns and learn in a human-like way. This intelligence generates automated-response suggestions to customer queries and will have a profound effect on digital commerce and the future of customer care and marketing. This technology can be deployed across industries like Communications, Travel, Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Utilities, Retail, Manufacturing and Government in the following business units to start with:
What is Next for Service Experience?
Your future best Agent in Customer Engagement is the Chatbot…
You won’t get significant operational savings or big leaps in customer satisfaction with a lightweight, simplistic chatbot but you need an intelligent, enterprise-ready chatbot which will drive digital transformation of the enterprise specifically with automation, digitization.
Intelligent chatbots help customer-care organizations work more efficiently and it should escalate to a live agent immediately when the customer request is not clear, or customer appears to be annoyed or frustrated.
Chatbots and Agents are better together.
References:
1. https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/summits/docs/na/customer-360/C360_2011_brochure_FINAL.pdf
2. https://www.financedigest.com/ai-will-power-95-of-customer-interactions-by-2025.html
3. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/analytics/assets/pwc-ai-analysis-sizing-the-prize-report.pdf
4. https://go.forrester.com/wp-content/uploads/Forrester-2018-Predictions.pdf
5. https://www.chatbots.org/community/buzz_stop/chatbots.org_report_consumers_chatbot_usage_uk_us/
Damodar Sahu
Digital Strategist & Partner – Manufacturing Industries at Wipro Limited.
He is a Thought Leader in the space of IoT, Industry 4.0, blockchain, Supply Chain and Aftermarket Services. An eloquent speaker at multiple forums and conferences like CII, NASSCOM, CeBIT, IoT &AI, Blockchain Global Conference etc., he has written blogs on various Digital Transformation approaches and technology innovations.
A Service Design Consultant and passionate about crafting Digital-led business value propositions, Damodar has the ability to stitch multi-disciplinary "Integrated" stories for customers to realize value. He is also a Digital Advisor to C-level Executives in Manufacturing Industries, helping them drive their Digital Disruption / Transformation.
Currently Damodar plays the role of Manufacturing Digital Solution Evangelist and advises his clients to accelerate business outcomes with focused value modelling, digital readiness, and analysis. He drives sales, BD and Market positioning of Manufacturing Innovation & Digital Themes and opens up hunting accounts / business contacts in existing & new accounts in North America.
Damodar, with over 21 years’ chronicle of success with sound academic credentials, graduated with a B. Tech in Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering with PGDBM in Operational Management from Amity University, MDP on Leadership in the age of Digital Transformation from IIM Calcutta, and a Research Scholar on Computer Science.
He is ranked as the #1 Social Seller Globally for Wipro – by LinkedIn
You can reach out to him at damodar.sahu@wipro.com and connect with him over LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/damodarsahu/
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