Transforming customer service: How generative AI is changing the game

Whether or not putting an order, requesting a product change or asking a couple of billing concern, in the present day’s buyer calls for an distinctive expertise that features fast, thorough solutions to their inquiries. Additionally they anticipate service to be delivered 24/7 throughout a number of channels.

Whereas conventional AI approaches present clients with fast service, they’ve their limitations. At the moment chat bots are counting on rule-based methods or conventional machine studying algorithms (or fashions) to automate duties and supply predefined responses to buyer inquiries.

Generative AI has the potential to considerably disrupt buyer care, leveraging giant language fashions (LLMs) and deep studying strategies designed to know advanced inquiries and supply to generate extra human-like conversational responses. Enterprise organizations (lots of whom have already launched into their AI journeys) are desperate to harness the facility of generative AI for customer support. Generative AI fashions perceive context, generate coherent and contextually acceptable responses, and deal with buyer inquiries and situations extra successfully. They will comprehend advanced buyer queries, together with nuanced intent, sentiment and context, resulting in extra correct and related responses. Generative AI can even leverage buyer knowledge to offer customized solutions and proposals and supply tailor-made strategies and options to reinforce the client expertise.

How generative AI is disrupting customer support

Generative AI represents a strong alternative for companies to extend productiveness, enhance customized help and encourage progress. Listed below are 5 thrilling use instances the place generative AI is altering the sport in customer support:

Conversational search: Prospects can discover the solutions they’re searching for rapidly, with human-like responses which might be generated from finely tuned language fashions based mostly on firm information bases. What’s totally different is that generative AI can present related info for the search question within the customers’ language of selection, minimizing effort for translation companies.

Agent help – search and summarization: Buyer help brokers can use generative AI to enhance productiveness, empowering them to instantly reply buyer questions with robotically generated responses within the customers’ channel of selection based mostly on the dialog. Generative AI auto-summarization creates summaries that staff can simply discuss with and use of their conversations to offer product, service or suggestions (and it could additionally categorize and monitor tendencies).

Construct help: Workers who create chatbots and different customer support instruments can use generative AI for content material creation and construct help to help service requests, getting generated responses and strategies based mostly on current firm and buyer knowledge.

Name heart operational and knowledge optimization: Generative AI enhances the suggestions loop, as it could summarize and analyze complaints, buyer journeys, agent efficiency and extra, changing a pricey name heart right into a income generator by evaluating efficiency enhancements for enhanced companies.

Customized suggestions: Generative AI considers the historical past of a buyer’s interplay with the model throughout platforms and help companies to offer them with info that’s particular to them (and delivered of their most popular tone and format).

Reworking the contact heart with AI

With a collection of AI options powered by IBM Consulting™, your enterprise can harness the facility of generative AI for buyer care. For instance, companies can automate customer support solutions with a excessive diploma of accuracy with Watson Assistant, a conversational AI platform designed to assist corporations overcome the friction of conventional help to be able to ship distinctive buyer care. Mixed with Watson Orchestrate™, which automates and streamlines workflows, Watson Assistant helps handle and resolve buyer questions whereas integrating name heart tech to create seamless assist experiences.

With the current launch of watsonx, IBM’s next-generation AI and knowledge platform, AI is being taken to the subsequent stage with three highly effective parts: watsonx.ai, watsonx.knowledge and watsonx.governance. Watsonx.ai is a studio to coach, validate, tune and deploy machine studying (ML) and basis fashions for Generative AI. Watsonx.knowledge permits scaling of AI workloads utilizing buyer knowledge. Watsonx.governance is offering an end-to-end resolution to allow accountable, clear and explainable AI workflows.

To ship the very best generative AI options for contact facilities, IBM Consulting works carefully with ecosystem companions together with Salesforce, Amazon, Genesys, Five9 and NICE to assist guarantee shoppers profit from open supply and different applied sciences.

Generative AI for customer support in motion

As a part of a multi-phase engagement, Bouygues Telecom has been working with IBM Consulting to rework its name heart operations with enterprise-ready generative AI capabilities. Previous to this part, the European telco engaged with IBM to scale its first 4 cloud-native AI apps throughout Amazon Net Providers (AWS) cloud, an IBM ecosystem accomplice.

Regardless of having 8 million customer-agent conversations stuffed with insights, the telco’s human brokers may solely seize a part of the data in buyer relationship administration (CRM) methods. What’s extra, they didn’t have time to completely learn computerized transcriptions from earlier calls. IBM Consulting used basis fashions to perform computerized name summarization and matter extraction and replace the CRM with prompt, correct and actionable insights. This innovation has resulted in over $5 million saved in operational enhancements and a 30% discount in pre- and post-call operations.

In one other occasion, Lloyds Banking Group was struggling to satisfy buyer wants with their current internet and cell utility. Inside weeks, the IBM group of information scientists, UX consultants and technique consultants constructed a proof of idea (POC) to show that LLMs radically improved the digital assistant  expertise by decreasing unsuccessful searches, enhancing digital assistant efficiency and personalizing search efficiency for its clients. The LLM resolution has resulted in an 80% discount in guide effort and in 90% accuracy of automated duties.

Navigating the challenges of generative AI

In a 2023 research carried out by the IBM Institute of Enterprise Worth, 75% of CEOs surveyed consider the group with probably the most superior generative AI could have a aggressive benefit. Nonetheless, executives are additionally involved about navigating dangers reminiscent of bias, ethics and safety.

To assist shoppers succeed with their generative AI implementation, IBM Consulting lately launched its Middle of Excellence (CoE) for generative AI. The CoE encompasses an intensive community of over 21,000 expert knowledge and AI consultants who’ve accomplished over 40,000 enterprise engagements and specialise in serving to organizations throughout each trade undertake and scale AI safely, detect and mitigate dangers, and supply schooling and steerage.

Regardless of the place you might be in your journey of customer support transformation, IBM Consulting is uniquely positioned that will help you harness generative AI’s potential in a trusted, open and focused means constructed for enterprise.

Join our webinar: AI for customer support