Understanding AI Conversational Tone to Improve Customer Service - Avaya & Intel Team Up!
Evan Kirstel
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by Evan Kirstel (Linkedin) & @evankirstel (Twitter)
When customers call a company, sometimes they are not in a good mood. Years ago, I did a project advising a governmental tax agency (yes, that one) on improving customer service to citizens. My proposal was simple: give agents more freedom to be offline whenever they needed to be. Agents would be able to take breaks at any time. Once adopted, this proved to be empowering.
Flexibility in managing and being managed is key to understanding agent performance. AI is moving to a contact/call center model, in which customers generally respond well to a conciliatory approach. Empathy, compassion, and sympathy can diffuse customer anger and frustration, leading to productive calls and greater customer satisfaction.
Understanding tone is something that AI can help with, as people can lack the self-awareness to realize how they come across during telephone conversations. Intel is working with Avaya to develop "optimized AI frameworks, streamlining and strengthening inference processes and deep learning operations." AI isn't just a tool to perform tasks such as transcribing speech to text, or analyzing word count, call volume, and call duration. As pointed out in MindMeld, a critically acclaimed book on AI, "each function has unique and often very complex communications patterns or the term I use is comscan — communications scan. That is each person in a conversation is doing both an internal to themselves scan of the terms and scanning the other persons’ words in order to understand what they are saying. Starting with language, if you don’t speak the same language, people automatically scan the terms the other person would understand in order to accomplish the task. At the CEO level it gets even more complex as people are not just scanning the words they use but also likeability, trust, language skills, empathy, facial expression, body language, fashion, sex and more. You don’t do business with people you don’t trust no matter the contract.”
One challenge is not to overanalyze, which leads to micromanaging agents, putting pressure on them and managers in ways that add stress to already difficult situations. Sometimes, using a counterintuitive approach can lead to reducing stress throughout the group. Contact/call customer centers are only going to increase in number in this new, virus-driven virtual world, and AI can help us all adopt a more suitable tone for customer interactions.
Summary: Avaya is a member of the Intel? AI Builders program, an ecosystem that strives to accelerate the adoption of AI by addressing challenges, as well as bringing together hardware and software ingredients for building solutions. By working with companies like Intel, you will find that key elements of your business are optimized and maximized. I would like to thank Intel for the opportunity to share my insights on AI use cases.
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