This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 14, 2024 - October 20, 2024

Many companies are now incorporating generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) into their customer service operations, transforming how they design and implement customer experience strategies.

“One of the big things we see is, today, 80% of queries that come into the contact centre are handled by humans, and 20% is AI. We see that transforming to 80% AI and 20% humans in the next five to eight years,” says Rashid Khan, co-founder and chief product officer of Yellow.ai.

Yellow.ai, headquartered in California, provides an AI platform for automating customer support experiences across chat and voice.

Rashid says that Level 1 queries, such as asking to track orders or finding a store’s location, are being automated with AI to give customers faster responses.

iCar Asia, Carsome’s ecosystem company, is among the companies that Yellow.ai has helped with its customer interaction by increasing its customer satisfaction score by 40%. This has been largely due to the swift and accurate responses from its AI.

Logistics companies like DHL too have saved costs from having more automation within the business.

Rashid explains that for instances where a human agent may not possess the full understanding of the trends or landscape surrounding a product, an AI can step in and fill the gap with its existing trove of information.

To address the more complex queries that come in, Rashid expresses that while AI will continue to be used for higher-level queries, its role will be an assistant for the human agent.

Rather than having Gen AI perform a one-man show, queries above Level 2 will be responded to by human agents, but AI will be helping the agent gather and consolidate data at fast speeds.

One aspect people are sceptical about having AI in customer service is due to the choppy handovers between AI and human agents, but Yellow.ai is pioneering a solution for this issue.

Previously, when a conversation with an AI chatbot requires human intervention, the message logs would be transferred to an agent but the assigned worker might not have the full context of the customer’s situation, resulting in a repeat of information.

What has widely been done is for the systems to hand off the current ticket to the human agent, but Yellow.ai is looking into having the AI send tasks to the agent who will hold the power of making the final decision.

“Instead of assigning the ticket to a human, it will just assign a task to a human. Let’s say the agent approves [a request] but documentation is needed; the bot will orchestrate that on behalf of the agent and give that response back to the consumer,” Rashid explains.

With such drastic advancements to technology within the past few years, the cost of not bridging this technological gap will be much larger than before. The failure to adapt to these changes could result in disinterest from consumers, which could in turn see a decline in market share.

As AI continues to develop, a trend Rashid sees in upcoming customer experience strategies involves the launch of a digital AI avatar to be the face of a brand and he equates this to the phenomenon demonstrated by K-Pop idols.

“If more consumers are feeling that they need a one-to-one connection with a brand and they can connect better with the brand if there is a persona to it, then I definitely think there would be companies that will help in solving for that demand.”

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