When you’re already slammed running your business day in and day out, the thought of integrating AI (artificial intelligence) into your customer service and customer experience mix can seem too daunting to consider, a real “boy I wish I had some sand nearby to bury my head in” subject.
I definitely understand your predicament. The implications seem massive–from process change to employment considerations–and it’s understandable that, even as a mental exercise, they’d induce paralysis.
But AI is here, and here to stay, in the world of customer service and the customer experience. So, to move your comfort level forward, here are three concepts I'd like to share that I've found help my customer service consulting clients wrap their minds around the role of AI as it applies to serving customers.
1. Customers are already very comfortable with self-service technology (including AI-powered self-service) as long as it’s well designed. It’s only when they think of AI as “other-powered" rather than self-powered that their reaction becomes more of a mixed bag.
It would be hard to ask most modern travelers to do without Kayak, nor would most people buying or selling a house be willing to do without an occasional peek at Zillow. Anything that is essentially self-service, even if its backbone relies on sophisticated AI, feels comfortable to today’s customers. Consider the Google search engine itself, with its autofill suggestions and spot-on results offered, often before you’ve completed your question; there’s almost no customer in our world who would want to do without these. Yet when AI seems clearly other-powered rather than giving the user the illusion that they’re doing everything themselves, customers can grow nervous or hostile.
This is why, for some customers, the most in-your-face applications of AI, such as chatbots, can rub them the wrong way. If this is a concern for your business, consider instead incorporating your AI into formats that almost all customers are already comfortable with. For instance, a dynamic search bar on your website, powered by AI, can offer a dramatic improvement over the traditional, rarely-updated FAQs still found on many sites.
However, you may not need to be as cautious as all that. While some customers are uncomfortable with obvious applications of AI, this is hardly a majority position. And even when AI is not their favorite type of service response, customers overwhelmingly prefer AI-assisted service to no service or slow service. Customers expect immediate responses 24/7 because this is what great brands like American Express have led them to expect. So if you’re dragging your feet on deploying AI and the result is that you only offer service to customers during limited hours when you can have human staffing available, say, Monday through Friday, 8 to 7 Eastern time, you’re going to be frustrating a lot of these customers.
2. AI can be extremely helpful in customer service and customer support while allowing a human being to remain the visible face of your customer interactions.
One of my favorite ways to look at AI in a customer support context is as part of a triangular model: There’s the opportunity for the customer to interact directly with the AI, but there’s also the opportunity for AI to feed a human customer service employee information that can help the customer via this truly superior interface: the human agent. This can be an elevated and wonderful way to work and is a good antidote to the fear that AI is an either/or proposition. AI plus human can be a particularly attractive way to serve customers if you get it right.
3. Anticipatory customer service is the ultimate level of customer service–and the one most likely to boost customer engagement and loyalty. AI can help, or hurt, here.
Satisfactory customer service, in the formulation I use, consists of four elements.
• A perfect product or service (I’m defining “perfect” here as “designed and tested to perform correctly within reasonably foreseeable circumstances").
• Timely delivery of that product or service. (This includes a timely response to related inquiries.)
• An empathetic manner of service delivery.
–and, because any or all of these three elements can go wrong,
• An effective system for problem resolution.
While it’s essential to be able to provide all the elements that make up basic, satisfactory customer service, exceptional customer service moves beyond these four elements by being anticipatory: by serving even unexpressed desires and needs: the questions and wishes that a customer hasn’t put into words.
Anticipatory customer service traditionally is delivered by empathetic, trained, knowledgeable humans who pick up on customer sentiment and desires even when they haven’t been voiced. But it can also be delivered by systems and technology that have been designed in an empathetic manner.
This can be a human being assisted behind the scenes by AI. Or it can be customer-facing AI that’s designed to be anticipatory: to answer questions the customers didn’t think to ask, perhaps because they didn’t know enough about the subject to ask, but whose answers can provide value, possibly dramatic value, to those customers.
AI, however, can also be a negative here, if improperly deployed. How so? By being not-quite-anticipatory and irritating customers as a result. Think back to CLIPPY in Microsoft Office and “his” intrusive interactions at poorly thought-out junctures where they failed to add value. “CLIPPY was high interaction and low value–a terrible combination,” says Ryan J. Lester, Director of Customer Engagement Technologies at LogMeIn, developers of Bold360, an AI-powered customer engagement solution. “CLIPPY’s kind of a litmus test–a low water mark, you might say–for what to avoid when designing AI.” Truly proactive AI, Lester went on to say, may seem like simply a next evolution of CLIPPY, but it actually represents a dramatic advancement in what can be offered to a customer or prospect.
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There’s plenty more to say on the subject, of course, but I hope these three concepts will stimulate your thinking about AI in the context of serving your customers. As long as you remember that it’s the customer who needs to be at the center, not the technology, you should do well, no matter how soon and how deeply you dip your feet into the AI water.
