Board Member and Head of Expansion and Compliance at Assiduus Global Inc.
The rapid advancement and use of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our way of life. Every day new tools are introduced with the aim of helping enhance processes to improve work efficiency, services and product.
Ultimately, this article is the first in a planned series focusing on the strategic benefits and pain points that implementing AI into your business may encounter. Here, particularly, I would like to focus on how you can employ AI tools in customer communication.
Man Versus Machine
Before evaluating all of the available AI tools, I believe you should always consider the alternative: people. Though technology continues to pervade and impact our lives, we are still crucially reliant on human intervention for numerous reasons.
Moreover, the increase of technology in our lives has made us so dependent that a system malfunction, disruption, failure or loss of control can cause an instant full-stop on activities. We can all relate to the classic “I have no Wi-Fi” situation. It’s often so integral that the loss is like a workforce on strike. Ensuring your employees can still work independently and are correctly trained remains essential.
Benefits Of AI
The new era of AI especially caught the attention of the masses with the introduction of Chat GPT, which showed the world how effective this technology can be in easing the daily workload. It introduced to many the most favorable aspect of AI: Efficiency.
In the past, specialized technology like AI was mainly confined to tasks involving repetition and precision. However, going forward, it is essential to recognize the potential that AI has in enhancing efficiency and elevating KPIs across your business.
When it comes to customer communication, the first thing to recognize is how fast these tools are becoming. Average response times are significantly improving, leading to better customer satisfaction and completed actions.
AI tools are also increasingly able to handle a much larger volume of customer interactions without the need to train and hire personnel. As a part of this, they can adapt to multiple languages, improving companies’ scaling ability.
You can also use AI communication tools to ensure consistency and avoid spelling mistakes—as well as avoid any defiant behavior from employees. These tools are accessible 24/7, meaning greater efficiency as they can fulfill required global demand at any time.
Another factor some may not consider is how being a first mover in AI can be advantageous in and of itself, allowing you to evolve alongside the technology as it continues to move into new tasks and employment brackets. Early adopters can gain an advantageous digital transformation experience.
Ultimately, in communication-related jobs, AI can help calculate KPIs when it comes to average response rate, first-time response, customer satisfaction, response quality, request volumes, cost-saving and conversions (if applicable).
Hurdles With AI
Besides the fact that this technology may soon replace people’s jobs and become a macroeconomic issue down the road, a major area of critique is that AI lacks creativity. But with the likes of Midjourney and the AI capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, the issue of creativity may soon belong to the history books.
Still, there are still a few drawbacks to AI that will need to be addressed over the next decade or so. First, the initial implementation of these tools can be time-consuming, complex and expensive. Therefore, I recommend you figure out what tools should be prioritized; hiring an expert in AI implementation or digital transformation may be a good investment when considering this.
Also, as AI is driven by data, poor data points can also lead to poor performance. If your company has inaccurate or weak data points, you should focus on optimizing your data sourcing before entertaining AI implementation.
Particularly with communication, a limited contextual understanding can also occur with AI communication tools, which can lead to inappropriate or inaccurate results. Consequently, additional obstacles regarding privacy, data security, lack of empathy, loss of personalization, ethical concerns, etc., are also relevant issues to consider when implementing AI tools into your communication channels.
Valuable AI Tools
Now that the benefits and hurdles have been addressed, here is a list of some of the available tools that I see as having the most significant impact within the area of customer/client communication.
Chatbots. These are conversational tools that work well in customer service or support. They are beneficial to quickly handle routine queries/FAQs and guide customers through troubleshooting processes.
Sentiment analysis AI and translation AI. These are both within the field of natural language processing tools (NLPs). Sentiment analysis AI can help analyze general feedback and comments about a company’s service, product or brand, while NLPs can help translate and distinguish different types of languages based on various audiences, purposes and contexts. NLPs may be favorable for companies heavily into content creation and feedback and deal with multi-language material or customer segments.
Customer journey mapping AI. This is a data analytics and visualization tool. It analyzes a customer’s brand interactions to process positive and negative touchpoints to help optimize the customer journey. This process can be time-consuming and is typically used in quality management, business development and sales. It can also be useful in marketing departments for retail, e-commerce and hospitality.
In addition, there are also many other powerful applications for AI in communication, like virtual assistants, virtual agents, AI-powered customer feedback and feedback analysis, AI-powered training, AI-powered customer segmentation, etc.
Embrace Disruption
AI’s integration into office workspaces, particularly in the communication landscape, looks likely to revolutionize business operations. I believe that companies that want to thrive in a competitive landscape should consider embracing and/or implementing AI innovations—whether as a tool for workforce replacement entirely or to improve employee performance.
Consequently, it is essential to consider striking the right balance between automation and human intervention to ensure that AI enhances, rather than replaces, expertise and quality. By leveraging the right AI tools while strategically considering the context and reasoning for their implementation, businesses can unlock new opportunities and drive significant success in terms of customer communication.
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