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AI and Bots in Customer Support

by Anand Janefalkar

Artificial Intelligence, otherwise referred to as AI, is grabbing a lot of headlines these days. The concept of intelligent, data, or pattern-driven automation is very exciting. Particularly, when it comes to AI and customer support, it’s (often) deemed the next big thing. If we look through the current implementations, however, about 91% of customers claim that live agent telephony is still their preferred communication channel.

So what exactly does this mean for the agents in call centers?

To set it straight, this is not a replacement play. With context-based AI, it will actually equip agents with the tools and information they need to help customers better. Whether it’s having chatbots answer high-level, common questions from a knowledge-base or being able to highlight trends on issues to an agent, chatbots and AI will effectively change the way agents multi-task and resolve problems.

As the customer support industry sees a shift occurring, some are embracing it without fully realizing the necessary steps that are needed along the way. For example, solving problems via a chat without the multimodality of sending photos and videos – no matter how intelligent the AI is – would still be suboptimal in comparison. Even with AI making voice prompts more intelligent, the real-time experience is nowhere as close to the efficiency of problem-solving with photos, videos, screenshots, and more, as if the agent was face-to-face with the customer.

Being a multimodal omnichannel platform, UJET provides the ecosystem for AI or bots to be the most successful.

Imagine a customer visiting your website, spending a few seconds looking at your product, and then having a question that will hopefully lead to a purchase. With the UJET WebSDK, the customer can start a chat with the agent that can then be selectively converted to a phone call, better helping them through the process and completing the sale without switching to a different solution.

In the case of helping customers with their problems, the contact center utilizes the deep integration UJET provides so their team can seamlessly tackle any requests without having to ask information like their name or purchase history because it’s all already there. And with APIs that provide the knowledge of a) whether that call or chat was transferred, or b) tell us how long the handle time was, or c), if the customer rated the experience with high satisfaction, it all collectively adds up to a positive feedback loop that in turn makes AI or ML smarter for future communications. UJET is the only platform that’s uniquely positioned to make this a reality and we’re just getting started. It’s truly time to hang up happy!