Carrie Ramskill, chief operating officer at HGS UK
By Carrie Ramskill, chief operating officer at HGS UK
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly rising in popularity across the business world, encouraging heavy investment into its services. This investment is not expected to deteriorate any time soon – recent predictions indicate that its market size will grow by a staggering 39.6 percent annually from 2024 ($67.18 billion) until 2032 ($967.65 billion).
The implementation of this technology has become increasingly widespread across various sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare, fundamentally transforming the manner in which businesses engage with their customers and other stakeholders.
Customer service is the latest industry to integrate generative AI widely into its systems. For instance, the technology is becoming an integral tool in combatting customer dissatisfaction, with its ability to streamline internal processes, which frees up contact agents’ workloads, making it invaluable in enhancing the customer experience (CX).
The strengths of generative AI
ChatGPT is arguably the most successful and renowned generative AI solution in the world, as exemplified by its 180 million users worldwide. Its ability to create human-like responses to questions and queries is a key reason for its astronomical success in the customer service industry, with 49 percent of organisations currently using the platform.
The benefits that tools like this provide, especially for businesses with poor customer service, are groundbreaking. It enables organisations to reduce wait times, provide data analysis, improve consistency, and create boutique-like personalised experiences for each individual customer – differentiating themselves from their competitors. What’s more, as these tools continue to evolve, the list of market-altering opportunities is likely to grow, as we are yet to scratch the surface of what generative AI is truly capable of.
As generative AI is integrated more within organisations CX systems, its overall performance is likely to improve, both internally and externally. Internally, the efficiency of aiding and responding to consumers will drastically improve, as it can streamline how contact agents handle their workloads. Externally, organisations are able to create a personalised consumer interaction, tailoring recommendations distinctly for each specific customer, enhancing overall satisfaction.
Organisations can also augment both their creative and analytical activities – the technology nurtures the development of new ideas, designs, and campaigns, while simultaneously sifting through large data sets, interpreting it, and translating it into manageable observations.
Why labour-intensive solutions are still necessary
While generative AI has a comprehensive list of benefits and attributes it brings to the customer service industry, the role that contact agents play in customer services cannot be understated or overlooked.
Technology can only go so far when replicating or imitating the work that a contact agent can produce. For example, AI struggles to provide empathy and compassion when responding to customers, whereas agents are specifically trained to deal with a magnitude of scenarios and know how to be flexible in accordance with the situation they are faced with.
This is a shortfall of AI as some situations may differ or deviate from the handbook and therefore require real-life experience to produce the correct adjustments when responding to a customer. Agents are also more likely to continue to help until the issue at hand is resolved, regardless of if all the standard measures have been exercised. This isn’t a guarantee with tools like generative AI.
As social beings, people like to interact and conversate with one another. Although applications like ChatGPT can produce the next best alternative, they cannot authentically replicate the human experience. People like to talk with different personalities and relate to character traits. In fact, according to recent Gartner research, 64 percent of the public prefer organisations that do not use AI, with fears of it becoming too difficult to reach a person as the top reason why (60 percent).
Agents also have the ability to yield strategic customer engagement. Although AI-fuelled chatbots can produce faster responses than a typical agent, it cannot provide a comprehensive understanding into the relative severity of the situation. Agents may take more steps in a slower fashion when resolving a significant query, however, this strategy is not echoed when approaching issues of a different size and nature, meaning that an agent can adjust how they resolve an issue depending on the issue or customer.
The case for generative AI and human expertise collaboration
When new technologies are integrated across organisations, it is important to strike a balance between technology and labour in the workforce. Generative AI is a casing example – it should be used to enhance the skillsets that an employee possesses, rather than replace them. In the scope of the customer service industry, generative AI ought to aid and enhance how a contact agent performs, nurturing better business performance.
Generative AI will undoubtedly shape the future of the CX industry, with its wide array of game-changing benefits. However, if an organisation is solely dependent on AI tools, the CX can be incomplete, with key elements like emotion and understanding sacrificed for improved efficiency.
The stats don’t lie – people still prefer the human touch of an agent. As such, a collaboration is required, in which the best elements of both are utilised in conjunction with one another, building a rapport and boosting customer loyalty in a timely and effective manner.
