How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Redefining Self-Service

Today’s most sophisticated companies are investing in technology to understand what makes customer interactions more successful. Users are taking control of their preferred digital tools creating millions (or billions) of asynchronous conversations with organizations.

Companies are challenged to meet these growing demands and are increasingly aware that every customer touch point generates valuable data to better serve their needs. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools can share information beyond the call center across departments, help agents in real time, and ultimately redefine self-service.

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Redefining Self-Service?

1) Conversational AI Gives Customers More Control

Companies are putting into practice conversation analytics, natural language understanding (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to improve customer experience (CX) across the full range of channels and modalities.

2) The Customer Experience (CX) no longer Resides Exclusively in Contact Centers

The same AI that understands and derives the intent of each customer from their own words can analyze the content of millions of conversations and extract valuable information for the entire company.

Thus, thousands of cases describing defects or deficiencies in newly launched products or service interruptions can be detected, thanks to the tone of the conversations that are then shared with the product development or customer service personnel to solve problems.

3) Everything Happens in “Real Time”

This means that the understanding of the expressions and the recognition of the intention are carried out in the course of a conversation between agent and client.

Call center agent workspaces and dashboards now routinely highlight customer intent and recommend the best action for an agent or intelligent virtual assistant (voicebot or chatbot) to take at the right time.

4) It Has Become both Predictive and Proactive

AI is great at pattern matching. It can quickly identify who is calling, process customer history, display conversational content (past and present), recognize user intent and match it to the resource that can resolve their query.

From a customer perspective, it lays the groundwork for AI to trigger outbound calls or messages when a business deems it necessary to initiate an action on a user’s behalf, such as rebooking a flight when a traveler’s plans fall through have been interrupted.

5) Facilitates Omnichannel

In the world of digital CX and self-service, it is vitally important to offer customers and agents access to omnichannel. Companies are literally putting the customer in charge of every interaction. It often feels like you’re browsing a website or collaborating in real time. Therefore, both the agent and the user benefit when conversational AI informs their actions.

These five pillars are representative of a host of attributes that make conversational AI a necessity, especially amid the accelerated migration of IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Whether in public or private clouds, AI-infused resources can more quickly:

• Recognize callers and determine the intent of their calls.
• Inform intelligent routing systems so customers are quickly connected to the right agent.
• Provide live information to both live and automated virtual agents to resolve customer issues.
• Detect trends and extract information that can be shared with the entire company to improve products, services and customer satisfaction.

These are the measurable changes in metrics that describe the customer and employee (EX) experience, as well as the bottom line for each company.

Today, customer experience (CXi) interactions take place across a multitude of devices and channels. Successful brands encourage their customers to communicate with them when they want, using any device and through their preferred channel.