3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature
June 29, 2016
Artificial Intelligence to Transform the Customer Service Experience
By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Social media has had a tremendous impact on all facets of business, and customer service and the contact center are no exception. When artificial intelligence (AI) is added to the mix, the potential exists to completely transform the call center space and bring customer service into its next generation of existence.
Combining AI and social customer service was the topic of a recent conference session from DigitalGenius, a company focused on bringing humans and AI together to automate and improve all aspects of customer service. Mikhail Naumov, chief strategy officer at the company, presented the “Practical Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Social Customer Service” session at the recent Social Media Week event in Los Angeles.
According to Naumov, one of the critical elements of understanding AI is to learn about its various modes. For example, artificial narrow intelligence involves making machines an expert at one specific thing, like online chess, so that they may surpass humans. Artificial general intelligence involves machines being able to complete any function of a human being, a task that is evolving over a long span of time.
The focus of DigitalGenius is to pair an application of artificial narrow intelligence with human expertise to leverage the strengths and advantages of both worlds. The goal of pairing humans and AI in this way is to create massive improvements to customer service.
“When you think of the world of customer service, the thing the human is doing can be quite repetitive, those tasks can be automated with AI and we can have the human and machine working together,” said Naumov in the presentation session. “Years ago, you had one customer service agent who had a phone and was efficient. Then they got a computer and could maybe be 10 times more efficient. Now a person in customer service could have an AI service that would make them even more efficient than that.”
This is where DigitalGenius comes in, with its “Human+AI” Customer Service Platform. The solution offers deep learning algorithms that pull from massive amounts of data including customer service logs and transcripts. Information is then fed to a contact center’s existing platform, providing each customer service agent with a “personal” AI to help them handle specific and unique requests.
When social media enters the picture, with myriad ways to communicate and more apps coming to market each day, the need to leverage historical data and intelligence becomes critical. According to Naumov, AI is set to have a transformative effect on contact centers and customer service moving forward. By combining AI tools with skilled human agents, call centers can offer tremendous value to their customers while improving their own operations though greater efficiencies and cost savings.