As marketers increasingly turn to look at the road to recovery, Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada, shares his thoughts on how AI will play a prominent role in doing so.
The colossal impact of COVID-19 is causing every organization to rethink how it works. Most companies are facing dramatic shifts in their sales patterns while their customer service groups deal with a flood of inquiries and demands. Customers are reaching out in skyrocketing numbers to reschedule flights, seek refunds, defer payments, cancel services, and more.
For example, my company, Ada, which is a leader in automated customer service, has seen up to four times the typical amount of customer inquiries during the pandemic. This volume creates significant problems for companies as they balance the costs of scaling with the value of maintaining customer satisfaction.
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The questions loom large: how can companies keep their customers happy when they don’t have the capital to invest in an army of human customer service reps? What happens if the demand dies down in a few months and now companies have too many people? Simply adding more people is not a realistic financial option for most businesses. And it shouldn’t have to be.
The Answer Is Clearer Than Ever: Artificial Intelligence-Driven Customer Service
Automating processes through AI solves the resource challenges that many companies face in today’s wild market, all while making it easier to hire, train, scale, and retain top-flight customer service teams.
As businesses shift from survival to recovery, the conversation about AI actively rebuilding the customer experience is more relevant than ever. If a company is in the customer service business – and we all are, in one form or another – AI is a must-have for engaging with customers.
Here’s how AI will help lead customer service organizations out of the pandemic and into recovery.
Believe It: Automation Can Create Satisfied Customers
A long-held notion about AI is that vital satisfaction scores will drop as companies deploy chatbotsOpens a new window and other AI-driven tools, because robots can’t replicate the human touch. In March 2020, Ada probed this assumption and sought to better understand how companies balance customer satisfaction with cost optimizationOpens a new window by commissioning a study by Forrester Consulting across customer support teams.
We found that nearly half of the respondents were using chatbots to help manage their customer experience, with 65% automating more processes to manage inquiry spikes. Over three-quarters of those companies reported customer satisfaction improvements, with around half noting decreased operational costs.
About three-quarters of responding companies said that improving satisfaction was their top goal for their customer service organizations this year. Yet a similar number of respondents expected difficulty in improving customer satisfaction without raising costs over the next two years. More than half said funding was scarce for staff and technology, even though their inquiries were up compared to just a year ago.
Lower satisfaction paired with fewer resources is a recipe for disaster. As the economy recovers, consumers and businesses beginning to spend their suddenly-more-precious resources will focus on necessary expenses – and spending that gives them the greatest satisfaction related to cost.
AI Can Scale Empathy Through Actions and Tone
AI can help organizations uncover new insights from customer conversations that inform the core company strategy. This begins with the basic understanding that a good company will know its customers and can empathize with their challenges. With AI, the knowledge gained from millions of previous exchanges can create successful interactions that improve customer satisfaction.
The first way a company can use AI to scale empathy is by taking proactive actions on behalf of customers. Anticipating needs by offering refunds, generating and emailing return labels, or saving a place in a queue and calling when their turn is up are AI-driven behaviors that provide a better customer experience than what is feasible today.
AI can also demonstrate empathy in the tone it uses to address customers. When flights are being canceled or financial stability is wavering, for example, the chatbot can change its language and greetings to be considerate of those circumstances. Goodbye, heartless robots; hello warmth and care – and we need that now more than ever.
As the COVID-19 recovery takes hold, companies are already making headway here by broadly acknowledging the reality of circumstances and proactively communicating continuity plans. New AI tools can scale appropriate and empathetic responses on a personal level, coming online in weeks, and learning from feedback to meet rapidly changing market conditions. It’s a massive difference that goes a long way with customers. Proactive action combined with a thoughtful tone is the right recipe to boost customer satisfaction and deepen connections with customers.
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The AI North Star
The potential value of AI means that every company of any size should seek to access its benefits. The next generations of AI platforms are accessible out-of-the-box, without forcing organizations to invest millions of dollars and years on IT development. They come online in weeks, not months; some don’t even require coding knowledge.
Putting the power of AI in the hands of business stakeholders will be instrumental in helping businesses weather the pandemic and build toward recovery.