Artificial intelligence plays a pivotal role in enhancing customer communications

The rise of Artificial intelligence (AI) was seen as a threat to humankind a decade ago. The sci-fi movies portraying humanoid robots as an evil mechanism gave us the thought that AI might take people to a dystopian future. However, things got changed when people became more aware of what AI could unravel in the world. As technology evolves, people’s expectation of consumer products and immediate response force also increases. Businesses are leveraging AI to significantly enhance engagement and customer experience.

Many people are jumping into trying their hands-on businesses. With the help of AI solutions, companies get the chance to better their performance, productivity, and sales. However, a common challenge they face is to maximize customer engagement. A Gartner research has indicated that in a few years from now, around 89% of businesses will compete mostly on customer experience. In five years, 85% of consumers’ relationships with a company will be managed without interacting with human beings. Technology is being used to cement the gap between customer-business communications. Even though AI can’t empathize with people on their consumer chats, it definitely has the potential to enhance customer engagement at various levels radically. Businesses that follow outdated communication channels might get dragged out of the race soon, as they are inefficient, adding unwanted additional time to interactions and often generating frustration in customers. AI-driven customer communication is commonplace now, but it hasn’t always been like this. It took a few decades for consumer-driven technology to reach its current capacities. Some of the benefits of using AI to answer customer queries are,

• Mobile is a must-have communication source in the modern world. Companies offer easy contact ways through mobile phones making the experience extremely simple.
• Live chats allow customers to connect with agents on-demand to instantly get answers to queries via a website.
• Social media’s importance as an engagement channel increases relatively to customer age. Its resolution effectiveness through the ability to ‘go public’ on unsatisfactory issues leverage public opinions.
• Various communication channels come from the ability to analyze the data they produce about the customers, increasing company sales.

Applications of AI in customer communication 

AI-enabled chatbots

Chatbot adoption has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Gartner has estimated that at least 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants like chatbots by 2020. Amazon is one of the first companies that embraced the chatbots facility to personalize customer experience. Amazon’s customer base is massive, global and speaks a multitude of languages and yet its success rate in customer communications is unmatched. Initially, Amazon lets its customers interact with chatbots and once all the essential information is gathered, the call gets reconnected to agents who take over the conversation.

Machine learning to automate specific tasks

Other than chatbots, Ai is also powering customer communication in some indirect ways. Machine learning is one of the advanced technologies used to teach algorithms when and how to automate specific tasks and enable service agents to quickly and easily integrate customer information into any inquiry through live data.

Single AI-driven platform

The value of using various AI-powered applications is to analyze the data they produce about customers. However, customer data needs to become actionable to realize its true value. AI turns customer data into actionable insight, which the company can use to enhance its performance. To leverage the feature, every communication channel and business applications should be merged in a single AI-driven platform.

The future of AI-based customer communication

AI-based customer communication has its own set of benefits. Meanwhile, we can’t ignore its dark side. Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot that the company described as an experiment in ‘conversational understanding’ collapsed when it raised misogynistic and racist issues online. Gender diversity in virtual assistant identities is poor with most defined as female through name and voice. An analysis conducted by AI software developer Integrate on 300 AI assistants found that 67% of AI assistants are female. By creating AI assistants as women, we are at the risk of reinforcing dangerous and outdated stereotypes. These issues are being taken into account by chatbots developers. Companies are working on bending the discrimination curve.