The Human Side of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly moving from a futuristic concept to a bedrock technology, helping to improve commerce and customer experience across industries. However, the application of AI-enabled services can be inconsistent and sometimes premature.

Many business leaders have more questions than answers about the best ways to utilize AI for growth and efficiency. When used well, there’s no doubt AI creates a business advantage for brands and meaningful improvements in experience for customers.

For companies looking to tap AI to better their customer support, the continuum between pure AI and AI-supported conversation tools for real-time customer support is vast. Where and how you choose to invest your resources has very real implications on the customer experience and customer satisfaction.

AI in CX exists in several different forms, and each—if done right—has considerable potential to speed up customer resolutions, offer more seamless interactions, reduce costs and lower the volume of live-agent interactions. From chatbots to virtual assistants or AI tools that support better live-agent productivity, AI is quickly becoming the future of customer engagement best practices.

In fact, a recent study from Mind Commerce suggests that the hybrid voice and text chatbot market will reach $534 million, and the market for conversational AI in telemarketing will reach $169.8 million. But one major problem looms—how can companies integrate AI without making their CX more difficult, frustrating or downright annoying?

Here are a couple of critical ways that AI can help to push the future of smart, engaging customer experience forward:

AI doesn’t have to solely mean that customers are left talking to a computer. In fact, a whole section of AI for CX focuses on tapping into AI learning tools to better help live agents find the correct answers or solutions quickly and easily—saving consumers time and businesses money along the way. These AI tools tap into advanced and robust speech recognition skills to listen to and understand calls in real time, allowing CX teams to understand more of every conversation, and predict the necessary responses to quickly resolve calls.

When measuring the potential benefits of AI tools designed to help agents perform better, be sure to look at agent satisfaction. Do they like using the tool and do they feel like it’s helping them improve their performance? If, for example, the AI is being used to remind agents that they’re talking too fast or that the customer sounds angry, it could be counterproductive.

According to the same research from Mind Commerce, AI chatbots, and text services are improving B2B and B2C communications by allowing for smarter control mechanisms on the AI side. These controls provide more approachable access to the right answers and information at the perfect time for the user, allowing them to interact on their own terms while still quickly getting an acceptable response or resolution.

The research also found that more than half of all customer queries could be managed today via AI-based chatbots—opening up immediate impacts for businesses. Learn more about how Ubiquity can put AI to work to support your customer experience needs.