As advanced human-like algorithms and immersive experiences such as chatbots flood the market, end-users are no longer satisfied with narrow interactions with last-generation bots while using digital products and services.
This dissatisfaction becomes more pronounced when a bot does not deliver or encounters a glitch, and an end-user requires assistance. Previous AI-based chatbots integrated into customer support were very rigid because they lacked the intelligence beyond a rudimentary understanding of user intent and were mainly rule-based and took a much longer time to configure. Because of their lack of understanding of advanced user intent, a large proportion of queries went unaddressed and required escalation to already busy customer service executives, further frustrating the end-user due to the waiting times involved, giving them a poor experience.
The answer then is to interweave the latest generation of bots backed by generative AI into your customer support experiences. This new generation of bots leverages advanced AI/ML capabilities for conversation and model training, so end-users have access to real-time human-like interactions where their specific problem is understood and resolved quickly, and customer service executives benefit from being part of a human-virtual agent team that consistently delivers high levels of service and improves the user experience.
AI and its evolving role in customer support
AI has been integrated into customer service for the past few years to improve the speed of case resolution for customers and reduce the workload for customer service executives. The earlier generation of AI-driven bots that underpinned customer service automation used Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models to deconstruct and understand an end-user query. Once this was done, the bot would find a pre-configured response that was the best fit for the query and provide it to the end-user.
While this technology was able to handle simple queries in large volumes quickly, it ran into a wall when encountered with more complex end-user queries that did not fit into its pre-programmed categories of queries and responses. Given the growing rate of digitization of products and services, customer service agents continued to find themselves handling larger volumes of complex issues than ever before despite automation.
Human innovation, however, has always pushed the frontiers and we now have generative AI that is far more astute about grasping the context, conducting a conversation and learning and upgrading in live environments. Meta’s BlenderBot, Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are examples that have captured both popular and scientific imagination currently.
Best-in-class generative AI transforms customer support
As we are seeing today, a technology like ChatGPT that leverages large language models to generate responses that address complex queries while taking into account context will find numerous applications across diverse areas such as healthcare, education, retail, and etc. In any of these areas, integrating ChatGPT technology into automated customer support will help the company or institution meet the enhanced customer expectations of our technologically advanced times.
The significant advantages of ChatGPT technology include:
- More accurate responses to queries
- Requires fewer data sets, easy to train and deploy
- Intelligent and not conditional
- Scales well in the long run
Bringing together components such as speech-to-text and video with ChatGPT-backed bots in your automated customer service solution will help you consistently deliver highly personalized, fast end-user experiences. ChatGPT models can be trained quickly on customer-specific data sets for a high degree of customization. The technology integrates easily into different environments, can learn and retrain from live data within a few days compared to months for the earlier generation of AI.
With this, end-users rarely encounter waiting times and have many if not most of their concerns addressed in real-time in formats and channels of their preference, enhancing user experience. Escalations are minimized, freeing up customer service executives to resolve complex queries in a thorough and innovative manner to increase customer loyalty. The learning from sorting out these complex queries can be input into the model for retraining, further improving the resolution effectiveness of the solution. Also, since human-virtual agent teams backed by ChatGPT technology can resolve larger volumes of cases quickly irrespective of complexity, they remain highly productive as the business scales and do not need to be augmented frequently, delivering maximum RoI.
Business benefits:
- Improved rate of case resolution
- Higher productivity
- Up to 80% cost savings
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Building a culture of innovation
Conclusion:
Humanity has ushered in a new era with a technology that functions almost like we do. It makes business sense to use this advancement to improve the customer service experience, boost the efficiency of service teams and increase profits.
To build and deploy a customer support solution that effectively leverages ChatGPT technology, you need to identify a technology partner that has strong experience in designing and implementing AI-supported solutions. At Integra, we have extensive experience in developing customized AI-powered solutions for our clients in various domains.
Highly configurable and scalable, capable of context-sensitive interactions tailored to user intent, these solutions have delivered higher efficiencies, driven down costs and helped with end-user retention. As a technology partner, Integra also ensures your customer support solution is regularly upgraded and has minimal downtime, so you empower your service teams to retain customer confidence at all times.
References:
Interview with client SMEs
https://www.faqhub.io/blog/the-power-of-generative-ai-in-revolutionizing-customer-service-and-cx-management
https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2023/48758/ai-customer-support-tools
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-customer-success-how-generative-ai-changing-game-swati-chopra
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/01/05/generative-ai-implications-for-customer-experience/
https://medium.com/dataprophet/ai-taking-the-wheel-how-generative-ai-enhances-customer-support-7a948f81f5b5
https://www.zdnet.com/article/generative-ai/
https://www.customerservicemanager.com/10-ways-generative-ai-is-revolutionizing-the-customer-experience/
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/three-ways-service-impact-generative-ai/
About Author
Dhanvin Sriram
Executive Director, Technology Services
