Customer Service Leaders Need to Invest in AI

Artificial intelligence can improve customer service organizations by providing three key benefits: insights, user experience improvements, and process improvements, according to Gartner, which says service and support leaders should understand these three benefits to thoroughly develop and track the right metrics for evaluating their solutions’ effectiveness and prove business cases for further investment.

“Customer service and support leaders are optimistic about the value AI can provide and plan to substantially increase their adoption of AI capabilities over the next two years,” says Emily Potosky, senior research principal in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice.

Gartner recommends service leaders focus on the following three areas for AI solutions:

Obtaining insights. While many service leaders jump to the cost savings potential of AI, a key benefit of AI is its ability to obtain insights and predictions that generate value. Organizations can use these insights to guide agent and application decisions, ensuring customers receive the best service experience possible.

Ensuring optimal user experiences. AI can help route interactions to the right agents and guide agents’ decisions while serving customers or performing administrative tasks. Simultaneously, AI can make it easier for customers to resolve issues on their own, providing a better customer experience. This can be done with AI-enabled chatbots—also known as conversational assistants—and language sentiment analysis.

Improving processes through automation and augmentation. While this is one of the most commonly pursued AI benefits, leaders often overfocus on the automation and removal of tasks, overlooking the benefits that augmenting existing tasks can have on service operations. Automation and augmentation can reduce costs and improve efficiency and growth potential by freeing up resources to pursue more value-added tasks. This can include intelligent document processing, workforce management, post-call wrap-up, and task and process workflow automation via robotic process automation and process mining.

“Customer service and support leaders seeking to use AI to improve digital and self-service customer service should ensure they have sufficient, accurate, and relevant data to support customer service insights and predictions use cases,” says Bern Elliot, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, in the report. “Successfully deployed AI requires high-quality data.”