What customers want in 2023
1. Technology only works if it’s easy
2. Stop focusing on channels and use the consumer perspective instead
3. Time matters to consumers – but can you bend their perceptions?
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t ready to dominate customer service
AI is back at the top of the hype cycle again – with generative AI able to have convincing conversations with customers. This makes it extremely attractive to the contact industry because it can act as an always-available triage tool and can potentially solve customer problems before there’s a need for human intervention.
However, this technology has often been deployed badly – in the wrong part of the customer journey, on the wrong tasks and separated from the contact centre. Bad bots can be extremely damaging for brands, with 70% of customers saying that bad chatbots damage brand reputation.
Large language models have now become much better at having coherent conversations, but they don’t work by magic. They need good data, otherwise they tend to make things up. The key to effective deployment is a stable and accurate data set – but the multiplicity of systems in the contact space can hold this back.
Bots also need to work with the contact centre. As with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, there needs to be a rapid path to a human agent if the bot fails, as well as a seamless transfer of knowledge between the bot and the human so that the conversation can flow without the customer having to repeat themselves.
