Customer Service and AI — 9 Trends for 2024
As we approach the end of 2023, our year summary would have to be Generative AI.
Open AI’s historic release of ChatGPT has changed AI forever. The traction, uptake, and excitement generated, has been extraordinary. Not even Open AI predicted such an uptake from outside the traditional AI sphere. Major players in the AI space, including Google, are left urgently reviewing how to stay at the forefront of the AI game.
Who can now claim that Open AI isn’t innovating? I’ve advocated for cutting edge technology, and a while back responded to an MIT Technology Review article which was surprisingly negative about the achievements of OpenAI.
Open AI cleverly packaged the technology that’s been years in the making to make it accessible to all. The simplicity of the solution is genius, as it allows broad applications with zero effort.
Generative AI has also generated warnings, debates, and prominent figures such as AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton resigning over ‘the future and threat that AI is about to bring’. Culminating in the EU AI Act, US AIRIA Bill, and AI Safety Summit 2023 organised by the UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, to raise awareness of safety to the top of everyone’s agenda.
Generative AI, Safety and Declining Customer Service
Back in the customer service world, we’ve seen another type of milestone. Companies using outdated or pretend AI to avoid solving their customer queries, by either making it really difficult to get in touch (through unfriendly self-service or outmoded chatbot with pre-defined canned responses), or letting their customers go through a pain of talking to a voice bot that hasn’t’ quite followed the upgrades that AI has given in the recent months or even years. As customer experience downgrades on a global scale, 48% of consumers are willing to pay more for quality customer service and 74% of consumers would relate their loyalty to the customer service.
As customer experience declines, and the costs of running a call centre increases, the issue of staff attrition rates now range between 20% and 200%. This perhaps isn’t surprising, as the legacy of the call centre industry is that it has been seen primarily as the ‘cost’ to businesses, rather than an opportunity to really engage and impress your customers and find growth opportunities. There are exceptions of course, but the economic crisis and cost pressures at the time of inflation, has only made transforming any call centre without real AI that more difficult.
The customer ends up investing a lot of time to discuss or query anything. In my recent attempt to talk to HMRC, they hung up on me 3 times, until I figured out what exactly I should say to their ‘voicebot,’ so that it lets me through to a human for a simple answer to a simple question. But the pain I had to go through was about 3 hours of attempting to call, and press or say something, until finally being told to wait 30 mins to speak to someone.
The Solution: Where real AI is making breakthrough after breakthrough?
One reason for customer service still being on the back foot, is that it doesn’t really suit many businesses, especially big players in the call centre industry to optimise it. If you are charging per call or per seat — where’s your incentive? If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it — but for the customer it is totally broken.
Advanced real AI technology like Sentient Machines allows board members to see exactly what is going on with their outsourcing call centre providers. This transparency, and the knowledge you can get just from understanding your customers is so enormous it might actually require immediate and transformative action to take advantage of it. This includes assessing the performance of an outsourcing company, or an in house tech department who might resist any change from the norm.
ChatGPT has made such a strong point about AI in 2023 that no one can now pretend it doesn’t exist or disbelieve it. Everyone now realises the AI future has landed, or at least in the business parts of our life that need immediate transformation to stay competitive. Useless chatbots are now, well useless, and customers know it, and will churn. I keep quoting one of the findings from the study we did where 60% of chat opening intents were to ‘speak to a human’. AI is the step change businesses needs to embrace in 2024 to optimise productivity and growth.
9 Trends for Customer Service and AI in 2024
- Summaries. This has taken the world by storm already, but I have to include it for the future too, because we’re still at the beginning of this journey. From cutting the wrap up time, to allowing more accurate analysis of pressing issues and opportunities, summaries and identification of key points in each conversation will increasingly be part of everyday use of AI in call centres.
- Change of KPIs. With the emergence of generative AI, automated topic discovery will become a norm, opening new horizons for improvements and transformation that we haven’t seen before — because the data wasn’t analysed in that way. Behaviour and Emotion KPIs will come to the top of the list when it comes to improving your bottom line.
- Real time take up of AI to super power agents. While we have seen a lot of resistance for real time, 2024 is going to be the year of humans and AI working together. One obvious application is AI working as a copilot, assisting agents and supervisors in real time to improve productivity, customer satisfaction and reduce customer effort.
- Safety and regulation. Private clouds maintained by specialist companies, or managing your AI in your own cloud will become more and more popular. New strategies to manage data in use, in transit and at rest will reflect this trend.
- The recognition of the quality human touch. While AI has had a big leap, and it will continue to develop, we still have many challenges to solve, including the truthfulness of responses that come out of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Human expertise that can recognise what is real from not will be highly valued. Many mundane tasks can be given to the AI, and even some sophisticated ones, but a human can add another level of sophistication.
- Transferring soft skills to ROI. We’ve finally got to the point where we have enough data points to not be able to ignore soft skills and behaviours any more. The demand for sentiment analysis has gone through the roof, and sentiment analysis alone doesn’t actually do much or to put it differently, doesn’t give you anything useful unless it’s applied and measured in a specific context. So behaviours, and emotions will gain more traction as we see more and more data to prove that soft skills are critical to productivity.
- Empathy. Empathy can be overused, and the fine line here is between enough empathy and disrespect that your customers will feel if you overuse it but do nothing about solving their problems. AI will allow us to identify when something works and when it doesn’t, and this will lead to more genuine human interactions and less script reading and template copy pasting, as those methods do not produce results and the data is finally here to tell us exactly that. The detection of Empathy and other behaviours will be a key driver of AI investment in 2024.
- The end of an era called Too many false positives. AI will never be 100% accurate across the board mainly because the accuracy is relative and guided by humans who are not on the 100% accuracy level. The expectations of any technology, especially those that have a power to integrate an outstanding AI, will increase as all users become more literate in their use of AI.
- Desperate Need to Upgrade Because AI is Everywhere. We’ve seen with Covid how suddenly the cloud has become a new normal. ChatGPT AI has become the new normal. Many companies will rush to embrace AI buying suboptimal solutions using outmoded tech sold as state of the art. This is because there is a hype, and it’s quite hard to distinguish what comes out of the real AI vs. a set of APIs bundled together that will have a limited use. The solution is trialling technology before committing, and checking the results, then removing blocks from the organisation that have no interest in real AI transformation.
While we are wrapping up this year, and hoping for a transformational 2024, I remain very optimistic that we will see an increased adoption of real AI. Those who are already using genuine AI in the right way, are steaming ahead of the competition as they are already at an advantage, not only from the ‘toolbox’ point of view, but because their culture has already adapted. Their employees have already embraced tech and AI, and they will be at ease navigating the new normal.
My Christmas Gift
If you are curious about where to start on your AI journey or if you’ve already started and you’d like to discuss what else you could do for your business with AI, I’d be happy to chat.
