Customer service has become even more critical during the Covid-19 pandemic, as businesses strive to keep up with the increase in demand.
This has led to the acceleration of a number of trends, such as automation within customer service, often in the form of chatbots or voicebots.
In times of crisis, of course, customers also crave empathy, meaning businesses need to strike the right balance between automation and human communication. This is something that I recently discussed with Pranay Jain, the CEO of Enterprise Bot, “a natural language processing-focused company, working with large enterprises to automate their contact centres.”
Unsurprisingly, Enterprise Bot has had a busy few months, due to its own clients seeing a huge spike in customer service requests.
“We work with a lot of insurance companies (including health insurance), which has obviously seen big demand in relation to coronavirus. Then there’s travel insurance, for claims and cancellations,” Jain explains. “Of course, it depends on the sector – restaurants have seen a huge dip – but most of the companies that we are working with have seen a 30 to 40% increase in traffic.”
Customers crave solutions, not information
Artificial intelligence has enabled automated customer service to become far more sophisticated than it used to be. However, not all companies have invested in the right technology, which can often mean customers are still using outdated (and ineffective) chatbots. Jain recognises this frustration.
“We sometimes ask people to raise their hands if they’ve had a good experience with a chatbot and you’ll often see two out of ten people do so,” Jain says. “The biggest problem in the market today is that most people are doing FAQ bots, where all it is doing is giving information.”
Instead, Jain suggests that chatbots should be more solution-focused, rather than delivering information that the customer could simply Google or find elsewhere on a brand website.
“We think of bots or any kind of automation as an ATM service. So, you know how people used to go to a teller? They used to wait in line, talk to a human, and get their withdrawal or whatever they wanted. Today you automatically go to an ATM – it is probably the most-used aspect of banking.”
“The biggest reason is that the ATM is actually delivering what you are looking for, and that is essentially what bots (or automation) needs to do. If you are doing FAQ’s then you’re not really solving the customer’s problems. Our tool is built from conversation to action rather than just conversation and response.”
Conversational AI to increase empathy
So, what about the need for empathy in customer service? Do customers crave human communication rather than a bot? A recent survey by CGS suggest that a large percentage do, with 38% of US respondents and 39% of UK respondents stating that having an opportunity to speak to a human agent is a make or break factor in ensuring a satisfactory interaction. Covid could have accelerated this of course. In the same survey, more than one quarter of US and UK respondents who were disappointed by a brand in the past year attribute this to not being able to talk to a human agent.
Jain insists, however, that this is not always the case – as long as the bot gets the job done.
“Just yesterday morning, I had a flight and I needed to change it, so I had no option but to call customer support,” he explains. “With the spike in requests (due to Covid), I had to wait about 25 minutes to make that change, even though you might assume something like this would be automated already.”
“This just shows that what people are looking for are solutions,” Jain says. “There is no question about the fact that people are looking for empathy, too. I think that is one of the biggest things we will see happening over the next few years.”
Jain suggests that tools like sentiment analysis is the key to this, enabling the AI to understand the emotion behind the customer’s request, rather than just the words. “A chatbot is going to evolve into what we call ‘conversational AI’, where it is not a robotic answer, but it is about properly understanding the customer’s answer, and being able to deal with it effectively.”
For many companies, there are still big barriers to automation beyond budget, with many simply not having the IT infrastructure to support it. At the same time, Jain suggests that another big factor is the belief that automation will reduce empathy with the customer, and therefore reduce a company’s NPS (net promoter score).
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks ‘hey I want to talk to a chatbot’, but at the same time, all they want is a resolution, and if a bot is able to provide that, then you are going to see customer satisfaction,” he says.
“As conversational AI keeping improving, enterprises will understand that it is not missing the empathy, and actually it can help to improve NPS. That, I believe, is the learning curve of the software.”
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AI will become a necessity for every organisation
While Covid has highlighted the need for better and more sophisticated customer service technology (meaning it is likely that companies will want to invest), Jain suggests that it is not merely due to the need to meet demand, but rather, the growing recognition of the impact that good customer service can have on wider metrics, such as customer loyalty and retention.
“I very strongly believe that AI is going to become an essential part of every customer service organisation,” he says. “The reason is very simple – just think about the last email you sent to an organisation or the last time you called. The wait times are long, but it’s not just that.”
“What AI really brings is the ability to understand the customer, and not just provide them with what they are looking for right now, but to also predict what their needs are, and to provide a better experience. Right now it’s passive, when the customer engages and asks a question, but we will see it becoming more and more predictive, where AI will play a more active role in the support channel.”
Finally, Jain cites ‘buy now pay later’ company Afterpay as a great example of what AI can do in the context of a contact centre.
“They have one of the highest NPS scores, based on excellent customer support levels, as well as one of the highest rates of client satisfaction (with Enterprise Bot). Crucially Afterpay are doing the end-to-end process automation, which means not responding with a ‘this is how you can solve the problem’, but rather, actually solving it for them.”
With demand on customer service teams likely to ramp up once again, due to both Covid and the Christmas period, we could see companies reap the benefits of this solution-focused strategy come 2021.
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