Transforming Customer Service with AI and Knowledge Management
BENEFITS ENTERPRISE AI BRINGS TO CUSTOMER SERVICE
For years, AI-powered chatbots have been instrumental in shortening the time it takes customer service agents to answer customer inquiries, resolve customer support issues, and gain customer loyalty. In tandem with KM, GenAI is raising the bar for the entire realm of customer–agent interactions.
Benefits from AI in productivity and efficiency lead to cost savings and happier customers. In the area of productivity, AI has a track record of making agents more productive, mainly due to increased and quicker access to information. No more putting a customer on hold for what seems to them like an interminable amount of time while the agent scans through multiple possibilities to hopefully find the appropriate answer.
Efficiency is closely tied to productivity. Customer support dashboards that visually display customer history, potentially relevant knowledge articles, preformatted answers (without human-created typos), and suggestions for experts to consult make agents much more efficient in their dealings with customers.
Customer loyalty results from positive interactions with enterprises. AI plays a role here. Beyond the benefits stemming from increased efficiency, the personalization aspects of those interactions appeal to customers. No one enjoys entering data on a form or telling it to an agent only to be transferred and having to repeat it all over again since the two systems don’t talk to one another. AI can short-circuit all that. It can greet the customer by name in the customer’s preferred language, understand previous interactions with the customer, and initiate a conversation based on that personal information.
Going a step beyond using AI for the immediate reason the customer has contacted the enterprise, AI can look to the future, suggesting upcoming deadlines, events, or alternative products or services. It could alert customers that a subscription or a warranty is about to expire, suggest a webinar or conference that might interest them, warn them that the shoes they ordered last year are about to be discontinued so they might want to stock up, advise them that the hotel they normally stay at is sold out and provide details on an alternative, or inform them that a warehouse from which they order office supplies is relocating, which could affect delivery times.
AI can also provide benefits when analyzing customer feedback. In an August 2023 Forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2023/08/16/what-impactwill-ai-have-on-customer-service), Blake Morgan suggests that GenAI could be used to better understand and learn from customer feedback by summarizing and classifying the content, then analyzing the sentiment behind it. He also sees a role for GenAI in improving customer satisfaction with automated responses.
Sentiment analysis is another area where AI has proven to have many positive effects. GenAI is adept at sensing whether a customer is angry, frustrated, concerned, or emotional. It then flags the sentiment so that agents can alter their approach on-the-fly.
Agents who can be productive and efficient thanks to AI are also happier. Becoming mired in repetitive, routine tasks is not conducive to job satisfaction. Being called upon for creative solutions, enhanced problem solving, and joyful customer interactions results in improved morale and less burnout. When AI is used to make customer service/support agents feel that they are truly helping people, they feel fulfilled at work. To put it somewhat simplistically, happy agents encourage happiness in their customers.
KM AND AI WORKING TOGETHER
The reliance of AI on KM and the need for KM to maximize the value of AI will continue to grow. This is both a natural evolution as needs and expectations change and a truly transformational change as enterprises move toward digital transformation in customer service and support and
GenAI allows for greater understanding of and access to vast amounts of data that affect customer relations. AI in the form of intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots enables 24/7 access for customer inquiries. Conversational search using NLP and machine learning contribute to a better understanding of those inquiries. Personalization and predictive analytics based on knowledge gleaned about customers lead to enhanced satisfaction and greater loyalty. AI can uncover information previously hidden in knowledgebases, surfacing valuable data the enterprise didn’t know it had, while adding new information as changes occur and as interactions with customers are captured and analyzed. Customer service will continue to be transformed by AI and KM as they work together to build upon the strengths of each discipline.
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