Using AI for customer support service
There is a huge pressure right now to convert a normal company into a company that has AI in their product. That's what becomes a selling point in the modern trend and even many service-based companies have now started exploring AI and AI tools that can help them offer AI services to their customers. In my day job, there was also a few inquiries from clients asking about AI integration. As the term becomes very fancy and popular these days customers also want this AI element in their products. There is nothing wrong with it but I believe we still need some more time before we can give some advanced use cases to the customers. But it is true that there has to be some start somewhere.
When big companies want to use AI in their company they first get started with a customer support Bot using AI. For any company, this is the low-hanging fruit. It is easy to build a chatbot that will interact with customers and answer their queries.
Data collection
Any AI works on data. Data plays a very important role in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Data models are created with the help of huge amounts of data and they are trained specific to the requirement. Data collection plays a very important role here. Some of the companies that are selling us some projects are basically a data company. Their main intention is to collect customer data and do analytics on that. In the front end, they will appear like a company selling food or delivering something to customers.
It is identified that the food delivery business and package delivery business are having the delivery part as the secondary thing. The primary thing for them is the collect the data from customers and do analytics on them.
Customer support service
The idea to get more AI-driven customer support is the reduce the headcount in the customer support department. Even before AI was a factor, there were automations done where in some customer support the IVR itself is capable enough to reduce the number of calls they get and it becomes convenient for the users to get what they need. Even today many software companies have good chat bots and the best IVR options. The only frustration here is that we have to wait and hear all the IVR options to navigate and find out what we need. This is consuming a lot of time for the customers.
This is where AI helps. People have to feed the necessary support data and KB articles and when the customer is interacting with the AI bot, it is good enough to understand the questions asked by the customers and provide the necessary responses. It is very impressive that in some cases the customers may not even have a feeling that they are talking to an AI bot. But overall it can never replace the intelligence of humans but I agree that we will have some of the best working AI and ML in the coming years as it is the era of AI and ML. The future is moving in that direction.