Your Customers Want to Speak to a Human
When the option is available, your customers will always opt for the sense of empathy and security you get from interacting with a human agent. It’s easy to understand why; every customer has a strategic incentive to secure the best possible quality of service. Every customer believes their issues to be the most important. The problem is, they’re not. AI chatbots let you automate customer interactions in a way that cuts costs and streamlines the most common, simplest interactions. Not every customer needs human support, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be enthused about speaking to an AI.
The best AI use cases then, don’t try to replace the human element. Take the human away and you’re not providing customer service, so much as customer obfuscation. The best AI use cases enhance human agents to deliver outstanding CX; they help humans help humans.
The AI-Powered Agent
Over the next decade, the key competitive differentiator between businesses will be this: which businesses care for customers, and which palm their CX off to automated chatbots. The businesses that offer a true human experience will build a reputation for quality, care, and reliability. But how do you make human-centric CX cost-effective? The answer is in the AI-powered agent.
AI excels at information management tasks; providing human users with relevant and concise data, updating systems of record with new details, and automating the painful admin that takes up so much of the human agent’s time. Humans, on the other hand, excel at dealing with humans. They can respond flexibly, independently, and empathetically, but they tend to find admin and data management mind-numbingly boring.
Let AI do what AI does best. Let humans do what humans to best.
AI Interaction Transcription: The Case of Serco & Restart
Serco works with the British Department for Work and Pensions to deliver the ‘Restart’ scheme; an initiative to support jobseekers in finding work, by connecting them with expert advisors and helping them prepare up-to-date CVs.
The scheme arranges 1-to-1 meetings between jobseekers and advisors, following which the advisor draws up a professional CV that the jobseeker can take to potential employers. These meetings have to be quick, there’s no time for delays, but there’s also a need to take accurate notes, to ensure that the jobseeker receives the highest quality CV. The note-taking process was adding upwards of 30 minutes to every advisor meeting. On top of that, it’s essential to offer an empathetic experience; giving job seekers the motivation to continue the search is just as important as giving them the resources.
Serco deployed generative AI to transcribe and summarize these interactions in real time. The advisor records the meeting and that recording is transcribed through Natural Language Processing, those transcripts are subjected to generative AI to summarize content, and automatically generate a CV that the advisor can then review and approve.
