How to Accelerate Customer Service Automation with Generative AI

What are the potential benefits of Generative AI in customer service?

The benefits of generative AI depend on how you use/deploy generative AI in your contact center.

In general, the benefits of generative AI in your contact center include:

• Overall higher customer satisfaction, due to faster response/handling times and more relevant, human-like responses
• Improved conversion from answering prospective customer’s questions immediately
• Improved operating efficiency, due to generative AI’s ability to automatically respond to 50-70% of all customer inquiries
• Higher agent satisfaction and lower agent turnover from not needing to handle Level 1 customer inquiries
• Higher customer satisfaction on human handled inquiries, due to contact center agents having more time to focus on complex customer issues
• Better understanding of customers needs, agent coaching opportunities, and gaps in KB knowledge
• Improved profitability streamlined operations and AI-driven efficiency directly reduce costs, turning increased productivity into higher profit margins
• Greater scalability:hiring/retaining contact center agents not an impediment to scaling the business.

What are the potential disadvantages of using Generative AI in customer service?

There are typically 2 perceived disadvantages of generative AI in contact centers:

• Hallucination : many CX leaders are still concerned about generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate, especially in customer-facing use cases
• Lack of empathy / the human touch: CX leaders often believe that empathy/providing the human touch is a critical element to their CX.

How can those potential disadvantages of Generative AI be managed?

Hallucination can be mitigated in 2 ways:

• Building an in-house application that proactively prevents / detects LLM hallucination; or
• Partnering with a commercial generative AI solution that proactively prevents / detects LLM hallucination

Lack of empathy is only a perceived disadvantage. Multiple studies have shown that generative AIs to be just as empathetic (or more so) than human counterparts in a range of industries. Furthermore, a generative AI’s guidelines can be adjusted to increase or decrease the level of empathy in responses as necessary.

What are the alternatives to using Generative AI in my contact center?

Alternatives to using generative AI in your contact center are all tools available prior to 2023, including (but not limited to):

• IVR systems
• Knowledge bases and self-service portals
• BPO providers
• Rule-based chatbots or NLP-based (or “conversational AI”) chatbots
• Live chat support
• Email support

Note: generative AI solutions can be used in conjunction with all of the above alternatives, or in place of rule-based or NLP-based chatbots.

How can Generative AI improve customer satisfaction and experience?

Generative AI improves customer satisfaction in multiple ways.

• Faster initial response time: Generative AI can answer customer inquiries within seconds, 24/7/365. Wait time is one of the most important factors in customer satisfaction
• Better comprehension of customer queries: Generative AI understands customer queries better, leading to less customer frustration and transferring to a live agent the most important factors in customer satisfaction
• Faster resolutions: better comprehension leads to faster resolutions of customer issues. Generative AI can automatically resolve 50%-70% of all customer queries, and this will likely increase over time as brands use generative AI to extend self-serve capabilities
• Support for multiple languages: Generative AI should be able to understand the customer’s primary language and respond in the same language
• Empathetic and courteous responses: Generative AI responses have been shown to be highly empathetic, and a generative AI never becomes impatient with a customer, even after a long day

How will my customer support agents benefit from Generative AI?

Depending on how you deploy generative AI in your customer support, your agents can benefit in multiple ways from generative AI, including:

• Faster knowledge search
• Better understanding of customer issues and customer sentiment
• Faster drafting of responses for customers and/or real-time key talking points during a customer call
• Better training/onboarding
• Freedom/less burnout from needing to respond to 50%-70% of Level 1 customer inquiries
• Having more time to focus on more complex customer issues
• Better coaching

Will Generative AI reduce operating costs in my contact center?

Internally facing generative AI applications will likely improve operational efficiency by 20% - 50%.

Externally facing generative AI applications can automatically resolve anywhere from 50% - 70%.

Chances are, the efficiency gains from generative AI will be much more than the cost of licensing a third party generative AI solution or maintaining an in-house generative AI solution.

Many brands often choose to reinvest these efficiency gains back into perpetually deferred projects.

As such, any reduction in operating costs depends on a brand’s decision to reinvest operating efficiencies.

Can Generative AI improve response times and resolution times?

Absolutely. Generative AI can decrease time to first response to seconds.

Because generative AI can automatically resolve 50%-70% of all customer inquiries, time to resolution can also be dramatically reduced as well.

How does Generative AI impact agent stress levels and retention?

Generative AI can dramatically reduce agent stress and improve agent retention, for 3 reasons.

First, when generative AI is deployed as Agent Assist, agents spend less time searching support knowledge bases and drafting responses. Agents have more time to interact with customers.

Second, when generative AI automates Level 1 support, agents have more time to focus on more complex issues.

Third, Generative AI can also provide better insights into customer issues and agent coaching opportunities.

In general, contact center agents are less likely to turn over if they feel like they have the necessary tools and processes they need to be successful at their jobs.

Continue reading Chapter 3 - Generative AI Applications in Customer Service Automation