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Artificial Intelligence Could Change the World of Customer Service

2 Jul

What if a customer service representative always knew the solution to almost any problem? What if they could absorb hours of material in a matter of minutes? Well, that rep may be fast coming.

Meet Amelia, she is a customer service agent. She’s not your typical customer rep, however. Amelia is a robot. IPsoft, a business automation company, has created an artificial intelligence platform that has the potential to drastically renovate the customer service industry.

A screenshot of Amelia, an AI platform
Hello Amelia

Cable, phone, credit card, utility, and any other kind of company you can think of, need almost constant support staff to answer the flood of calls for support of complaints and inquires. Many times though, customers are left in utter frustration from their experience. A major complaint is that these customer service reps simply read off boilerplates and feed customers lines that don’t solve their problem.

Amelia is a much different experience. Amelia can sense certain emotional signals and can better respond to customer attitudes. This is unlike the simple word recognition automation software that many companies use now to direct you to the correct department.

The real question: will Amelia, and software like her, replace human reps? Not entirely. If Amelia doesn’t know the answer to your inquiry she escalates the problem to a human agent. However, Amelia learns. If there is a problem she’s not familiar with, you can have her learn the answer so she can solve the problem next time.

But is customer service automation really a good thing? Many argue that having to “Press 1 for this” or “Press 7 for that” hasn’t made things easier. In fact, most people would prefer to speak to a human being.

The problem is that people who call the service or support department aren’t calling to rain sunshine upon the company; they’re most often disgruntled or frustrated. The representatives then begin to resent customers, dislike their job, and become indifferent about the company mission.

Having an artificially intelligent robot performing the more mundane tasks, like updating records and adding bill credits, allows the human customer service reps to save time for more pressing issues.

Even with the benefits that Amelia, and platforms like her, bring to the table, it is difficult to replace the human touch. Talking to a human is like nothing else that technology can replicate. But with some savvy innovation and some strategic thinking, we can take artificial intelligence like Amelia and IBM’s Watson, and turn them into technological forces for change and innovation to broken systems.