Artificial intelligence tomorrow

What’s next: proactive and, eventually, virtual reality engagement

As AI continues to expand its influence in customer care, and as the technology gets increasingly better at recognizing human emotions, we’ll see many more tasks getting automated and an accompanying rise in the quality of work and customer care overall. But even more exciting things are on the horizon: a shift from reactive interactions to proactive engagement. Imagine the impact when AI bundles highly relevant offers and recommendations that anticipate what customers need based on buying patterns and personas. 

In retail, AI could provide personalized gift recommendations or, using what it knows about customers and their preferences, curate an ongoing list of goods and services from across industries that specific customers would be interested in. 

Travel is another area where AI offers huge potential to help customers, serving as a personal travel agent of sorts. AI can cross-reference the extensive data it has on a traveler with all the data available on hotels, flights, destinations, and attractions, and offer suggestions for trips people would find enticing. And it can book the entire trip for them if they choose.

Healthcare will similarly benefit. AI will be able to crunch a wide range of patient and other data to continually give patients suggestions for improving wellness to prevent disease. And just as AI is increasingly helping customer care agents find the right solution, AI supports physicians in their treatment of patients. The technology gathers and presents the right data and information on each patient’s health profile, the latest treatments for their conditions, and how conditions could manifest themselves over time based on patients’ demographics and lifestyle.  

With all this at their fingertips, doctors can quickly and easily personalize treatment options and other recommendations for each patient, at scale—leading to far better healthcare outcomes for patients. AI has the medical industry on the cusp of truly huge leaps in not just the patient experience, but also how long—and well—patients can live.

Driving all this will be an explosion in cloud-native development of AI-ML applications, thanks to the myriad tools available on different public clouds that will effectively democratize the use of AI across the business. These tools are taking AI out of the realm of labs and making it possible for anyone to quickly create useful AI applications that solve business problems.

Artificial Intelligence transforms customer care

AI-driven customer care transformation in action 

Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) is a good example of such tools. CCAI helps companies improve customer service with AI that understands, interacts, and talks. It enables companies to create in minutes advanced virtual agents that seamlessly switch between topics, handle supplemental questions, and operate across multiple channels 24/7 to minimize live agent interventions. CCAI Insights uses natural language processing to identify call drivers and sentiment that helps contact center managers learn about customer interactions to improve call outcomes.

A major retailer is using CCAI to transform its legacy switchboard-based, human-operated contact center into an AI-driven one. Prior to the deployment of CCAI, the retailer had a cadre of agents whose primary role was to identify customer issues and manually route 150,000 calls weekly to the right team. The result was an inconsistent experience and potential lost sales opportunities. 

Now, the CCAI’s voice automation solution handles these calls, directing customers to the appropriate service point, and providing self-service to get relevant store information. Not only does the solution accurately identify customer intentions in 95% of the calls, it gives the retailer rich data on and insights into its business it could never get with humans manually answering and transferring calls. Plus, the retailer was able to redeploy 130 switchboard employees to highly valuable customer-facing, in-store roles and generate significant operational cost savings.

This retailer’s experience is just one example of how AI can help companies reinvent the way they care for customers—and how cloud-based AI platforms can accelerate the adoption of transformative AI tools.