How AI and automation drive better customer service
Summary
Firms in all industries see artificial intelligence (AI) and automation as a means to improve operational quality and customer experience (CX), reduce costs and increase margins. For instance, conversational AI or chatbots are appealing to organisations looking to offer customer service outside of business hours without requiring extra staff. This is how hotel chain Hyatt uses a virtual assistant for parts of its reservations journey, taking away the “mindless” draining tasks – such as authenticating customers or gathering their travel dates and destination – before transferring the call with all the relevant context to an agent who can focus on the emotional component of the selling. The terms cover such a broad range of capabilities that the help of a subject matter expert might be needed to define what’s right for a particular company, depending on its existing systems and use cases. Dutch telco KPN, for instance, used speech recognition to reduce its average hold time by 30 seconds per call and increased its net promoter score by 17 points.