Gauging the degree of satisfaction or discontent your customers are experiencing with your products or services is a critical factor in preserving your bottom line. Statistics have shown that more than 90 percent of consumers will never complain if they’re unhappy with your services – they’ll just leave. Your best defense against negative customer experiences leading to increased attrition is to combine two of the most powerful assets available to your business: human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Never Underestimate the Value of the Human Factor
One of your greatest resources lies in the emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills of the team that responds directly to your incoming client calls. The members of your client-response team are your front-line defenders in maintaining your customers’ loyalty and minimizing attrition. Their ability to consistently deliver a highly-personalized and positive experience when responding to your customers’ requests, questions and complaints can make or break your company’s competitive advantage.
A Seemingly Incongruous Pairing That Finds the Customer-Experience Sweet Spot
To pair valuable and irreplaceable human skills with artificial intelligence in a call center or customer service department may appear to be counterintuitive at first. AI is, after all, also used to describe machine intelligence, and humans are most certainly not machines. When used properly, however, AI is a powerful tool that can effectively refine and make available huge amounts of untapped raw data, such as the extremely useful customer-experience information that can be mined from your company’s phone interactions. Through the power of AI, that mountain of data can be transformed into easily-accessed and concise information that will enable your company to deliver outstanding customer service and personalized experiences.
Combining effective human intelligence with a powerful AI system realizes a goal sought by every consumer-based business: a source of quantitative and qualitative information that can help build a loyal customer following and encourage repeat sales. Data that was once untapped becomes a source of high-performance fuel that increases profitability and helps you find and lock into the customer-service sweet spot.
The Cost and Scale Factors of Maintaining Positive Customer Experiences
Effectively integrating AI into an existing human intelligence network may have once appeared to be beyond the budgetary means of many companies, but recent advances in the field and the new-found accessibility of big data through cloud computing became a game-changer for the artificial intelligence business. It’s no longer a budget-stretcher to maintain a positive and highly-personalized customer front-end experience with the assistance of the right AI system.
The cost and scale factors involved in maintaining an AI-enhanced customer service presence are now less than what would be required to implement an in-house customer-interaction analysis team. The enormous amount of customer-transaction data that an analysis team would need to review, collate and distill would reflect a cost in time, effort and labor that exceeds what can now be accomplished for the significantly lesser cost of a well-suited artificial intelligence and big data system. AI software should not, however, be viewed as a way of replacing personalized and human client interactions – the effect could be highly counter-productive – AI should instead do what it does best, which is to serve as a highly effective analytic tool.
How It Works
The way AI successfully compliments and helps perfect a reliably consistent approach to positive customer interactions is somewhat holistic in its overall process. The AI system monitors all customer-agent interactions and collects and stores the word-for-word data from the calls. The spoken data is converted to text which can be scanned and matched with trends, solutions, and outcomes. This determines what customer issues are coming up and how often, what solutions bring about the best possible outcomes and how well the customer-service agents are performing.
The issue-and-outcome information and detected patterns presented through the AI analysis provide valuable insight into what can be done to improve or maintain positive customer experiences. Insight can be gained from all types of calls – good, bad and average. System improvements, customer needs awareness, conversion factors and agent coaching are just some of the benefits that would be otherwise out of reach in the absence of an AI-enhanced customer-service system.
Choose the Right AI Partner Instead of Going DIY
A successful integration of human intelligence and AI will most likely not be a realistic DIY project for many companies. The go-it-alone approach can bog a company down in trial runs, project-scope determinations and system-design issues. Meanwhile, your competitors could be soaring ahead and providing the front-end customer presence that you’re still dreaming of. Rather than getting stuck in a project-planning and decision-analysis conundrum, your best interests can be better served by working with a trusted partner who can provide the AI performance and capabilities you need.
When choosing an AI partner, choose one that can be relied upon to provide thorough and insightful evaluations of customer-service agent performance. The combination of data relating to both the agent and the customer side of your front-end interactions can lead to improved best-practice approaches and proactive strategies to bring your company the repeat business and customer loyalty it deserves.
