Customer care now involves a complex web of often not-very-well-integrated systems that make up the omni-channel customer experience. Disconnects arise between what’s happening in the call centre, via social channels or over the internet. Each of these channels is mature with well understood technologies to support them but it’s the omni aspect that presents the challenge.
The ideal outcome is to have tools that can automatically track customers across channels, ensure consistent experiences and instantly provide agents with the right info, in the right format at the right time. Critically, this functionality has to be enabled at scale so organisations are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) as a means to scan for the right information across all the channels and collate and present that to customer care agents near-instantly.
AI reduces effort required
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Jeff Epstein[/caption]
“AI is the one tool that can bridge the gaps between visibility and knowledge,” explains Jeff Epstein, the vice president of product at Comm100. “Less sophisticated organisations are struggling to follow and keep track of the customer across social, email and ticketing but AI is going to reduce the effort required by customer teams to understand customers’ motivations.”
Epstein is confident that technology exists that solve organisations’ omni-channel issues but he warns that customer expectations of care have changed, along with the practices enabled by new technologies. “The limitations we’re seeing in the market are not based on the technology but on reluctance and caution,” he says. “The technical building blocks of data science and algorithms are all there and enable practical applications, it’s simply a matter of having the expertise in-house to use them, the data is all in the cloud.”
