Unveiling the Hidden Power of Artificial Intelligence to Improve Customer Experience

It's a human. No! It's a machine. If you are having a hard time deciphering whether you're talking to a real person or not, you've definitely encountered some form of artificial intelligence. AI isn't science fiction anymore - it's all too real - and it's getting smarter each day.

The last time you probably couldn't tell the difference between a human and a computer should have made you realize the enormous potential that artificial intelligence holds for every industry imaginable. More than ever, AI has been simplifying business processes for companies.

Research estimates that by 2020, AI will be a $5.05 billion market, with over $5.4 billion invested in AI start-ups. Also, By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support according to Gartner. 

If you're a big fan of customer experience at Tesla, you probably already know about AI-powered self driving technology. Apart from cars that drive by themselves, AI can also be used in contact centers as virtual agents to interact with humans seeking customer service. 61% of consumers expect voice-activated smart vehicles to have a major or moderate impact on their daily lives by 2020, according to Statistica.

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Many of us will probably consider voice activated virtual assistants such as Siri a considerably good form of AI implementation. The outlook is pretty positive, with over 57% of consumers expect voice-activated smart assistants to have a major or moderate impact on their daily lives by 2020, according to Salesforce. More over, according to BGR, 15% of Apple phone owners users use Siri’s voice recognition capabilities. 

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the field of computer science that deals with intelligent computer systems that mimic human-like learning, thinking and behaviour for deep insights, predictions, decision-making, problem solving, and analysis.

The term was first used by pioneer computer scientist and inventor John McCarthy, a professor at Stanford University, in 1956. His role in developing the AI computing language - LISP - was instrumental in the development of interactive computing systems. He was also known for playing chess via telegraph with people in Russia!

Artificial Intelligence has been used in all walks of life, from computer-generated visual perception to speech recognition and real-time translation. It's ability to store, analyze and gather insights from large amounts of data makes it an extremely powerful technology to improve customer experience in an organization. According to Narrative Science, 44% of executives believe artificial intelligence’s most important benefit is “automated communications that provide data that can be used to make decisions.” 

Artificial Intelligence: The End of the World, or The Beginning of a New Era?

Do you admire HAL 9000 from the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey? In the sci-fi movie, the computer (HAL 9000) aboard a futuristic spaceship on its way to Jupiter, which is "foolproof and incapable of error", is intelligent enough to realize that the astronauts will eventually disconnect him after a malfunction is reported - following which he attempts eliminate the crew altogether in order to save the mission.

All through this, you were probably wondering whether such an amazingly intelligent computer could ever be invented. And, the answer might surprise you, but many top experts & technology CEOs believe that AI can result in the end of humanity as we know it. Yes! A real-life Independence Day or I-Robot.

Jack Ma recently commented on the possibility of AI being the cause for the next world war: "The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution. You can always make a machine to learn the knowledge. But it is difficult for machines to have a human heart."

Actually, despite his concern, 80% of executives feel AI improves worker performance and creates jobs, according to Narrative Science. Reading these statistics, what is your outlook on artificial intelligence in the future? What about in the next few years? Probably very optimistic, we presume!

This is why using old legacy systems are no longer an option - it is important to rely on modern scalable technologies to power business processes.

Benefits of AI in Call Centers: Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Customer Experience

Using the power of AI to improve CX can prove to be extremely beneficial. Here's how:

• Reduced costs by using virtual agents to chat with customers for customer service. According to Gartner smart agents will manage 40 percent of mobile interactions by 2020. Furthermore, they predict that customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.
• Consistent interactions with chatbots boost loyalty
• Advanced analytics predicts future outcomes and reveals valuable insights for smarter decision-making. In fact, Gartner estimates that customer digital assistance will recognize customers by face and voice across channels and by the end of 2018.
• Complete integration with most CRM & CX systems ensures your data fully supports your business strategy.
• Provides detailed information on specific customers to allow for better interactions
• Analysis of unstructured data reveals previously unknown trends and patterns
• Reduced infrastructure costs with cloud architecture
• Easily scale up with minimal cost addition
• Futuristic personalization with intelligent analytics

Improving Customer Experience in a Contact Center with Artificial Intelligence

In recent times, more enterprises are adopting artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather deep-level insights and make smarter business decisions. Also, AI can be used for social media analysis and social media listening to provide a bird's eye view of customer interactions. Not to mention, it can intelligently recommend products based on various customer personas - making it a very powerful customer engagement tool.

Most importantly, in the case of contact centers, chatbots prove to be extremely useful for automating general queries and saving business expenses. Also, sentiment analysis can reveal how willing a customer is to take an agent's call, and what the best time to call might be to achieve the highest probability of a customer successfully answering the phone.

Conclusion

So, do you expect walking, breathing artificially-intelligent robots helping us with our daily chores - just like in I-Robot? Probably not. But we sure can expect AI to hugely impact the world of customer experience.

If you came here looking for Contact Center Software with Artificial Intelligence, you came to the right place! Ameyo Fusion CX is fully integrated with artificial intelligence to generate smart business intelligence to allow you to take much smarter business decisions!