How Can AI Be Used To Improve The Customer Experience?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been all over the news throughout 2023. The catalyst was the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI at the end of 2022. Although AI has been an area of active research for decades now, this particular tool was free to use and just caught the imagination of people who would never usually explore new technology.

ChatGPT use grew so fast that it was compared to popular social media apps like TikTok and Instagram. Even a year later, it still has over 100 million active users every week.

AI has also been creating a wave of change inside the customer experience (CX) for many companies. Some companies have dramatically improved their chatbots by using AI rather than the traditional, more frustrating, bots.

But AI can get things wrong sometimes. It’s called AI Hallucination, where the system isn’t quite sure of the correct answer and it makes assumptions. This can lead to incorrect answers to customer questions and therefore companies that want to use this technology need to think carefully about where it is safe to be applied.

The best answer for customer service processes is to help the agent perform their job more effectively. This creates efficiency and enables the agent to do a better job, without the risk of an AI bot giving incorrect information directly to a customer.

Our team has created a tool called AI Assist. It can be used by all our clients to offer assistance to the customer service agents. AI Assist uses AI to create a digital assistant for every agent, improving the quality of customer interactions and improving the customer experience.

It does this in two ways:

1. Checklist and Guide. Each client can define a checklist of actions or interactions they expect on every call. This could be as simple as ensuring the customer is greeted when the call begins. The AI can monitor the call and point out to the agent when a specificaction needs to be taken.

2. Training and Coaching. Supervisors in contact centers typically listen to a random sample of calls to check the expected quality of customer interactions. They cannot listen to everything and may only get to sample one or two percent of calls. AI Assist can take on this task and listen to every single call and notify the supervisor if there is anything about a call that is unusual - so they can review it and create guidance or a coaching session for the agent. This creates an environment that can constantly improve because all issues are reviewed.

AI Assist is already available. It is not just a promise that we will embrace innovation in the future - this is a production system now.

We strongly believe that AI can be used to help the agents - this is great news for the agents. It really allows the agent to offer a far better service to more customers. Most of all, it ensures that the customer receives an even better experience.