Damodar Sahu
Digital Strategist & Partner Manufacturing Industries
Wipro Ltd.

Customer service is a critical component of customer experience. Research shows that by 2020, 94 percent of websites will likely have a chatbot interacting with their customers on the website. As artificial intelligence (AI) moves into this important domain, businesses need to understand the potential of technology and how to leverage it for enhanced customer experience. Most executives know that artificial intelligence has the power to change almost everything about the way they do business and could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 per PWC[3], but what many business leaders don’t know is, how to deploy AI, not just in a pilot, but throughout the organization, where it can create maximum value.

Research shows how companies are investing in Industry 4.0 to enable digital transformation revealed paradoxes in several areas, including strategy, supply chain, talent, investment which leads to NextGen Customer Service.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has both expanded the possibilities of digital transformation and increased its importance to the organization. Industry 4.0 combines and connects digital and physical technologies — artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing, robotics, cloud computing, blockchain and others to drive more flexible, responsive, and interconnected enterprises capable of making more informed decisions and excellent customer service. 

The Era of Service Experience 
What was the biggest pain point in using Chatbots for Customer Service?
They are not intelligent enough
They get stuck and don’t know what to do next
When they transfer a customer to a human agent, that agent asks the customer to repeat all the information I given to the virtual assistant

You should put customers at the center of a multidisciplinary, agile approach: alignment of strategy, design, and technology around the customer journey, enabling innovation of the product service experience through iterative, incremental activations and deliver continual enterprise transformation at speed and at scale.

Intelligent service management assistance should be a robust, full-featured service management suite. It should be simple, affordable and aided by virtual agents with artificial intelligence. It also seamlessly should integrate with enterprise CRM and security. The solution should leverage untapped sources of information, namely, the voice log of customer complaint calls to support centers and the maintenance records generated by field service agents against those complaints. It then creates an Intelligent Database that can be searched in real-time using AI techniques to retrieve the best possible answer to a new complaint.

Some chatbots interact with customers to resolve issues, conduct transactions and answer queries. The best enterprise chatbots mimic the effectiveness of your top customer service agent, salesperson or support technician. The fact that these chatbots are “bounded,” or operating within a certain context (i.e. mortgages, utilities, wireless) ensures they can better support the conversation. These are also commonly referred to as conversational virtual agents.

For businesses, chatbots need to be smarter to be effective. These chatbots can integrate with enterprise systems, leverage Big Data, and use artificial intelligence to help customers resolve issues or conduct transactions. These chatbots are also referred to as virtual agents or virtual customer assistants and are being used by enterprises to achieve incredible results. If these chatbots make a mistake, the risk for the brand can be high. Example - what would happen if a banking chatbot answered a policy question inaccurately?

The intelligent service should be:

•    Ready intelligence engine on service and claims/warranty management
•        Combination of pre-processing, post-processing and intuitive usage of NLP and ML algorithms
•    Smart and multi-modal (voice, chat, sense (touch) conversation leveraging derived intelligence)
•    Assured business continuity and automated concierge via command center
•    Easy and seamless integration with enterprise CRM and security
•    Templatized deployment on public/private/edge Cloud and on-premises systems

It leads to:

•    Seamless interaction on mobile and portal
•    Frictionless customer experience
•    One-stop issue resolution
•    ‘Zero-touch service’ as the goal
•    ‘Nudge’ to (assisted) self-serve
•    Empowered agents for exception handling

With Benefits such as:

•    Security and Authentication
•        Motivate self-service
•    Win customer loyalty and retention
•    Focus on agent experience and productivity
•    Reduce cycle time, cost to serve
•    Scalability and reliability
•    Compliance
•    Guided learning

Can intelligent services be the answer to every business?

Yes. When we give our machine-learning algorithm access to historical customer service data, AI begins to identify patterns and learn in a human-like way. This intelligence generates automated-response suggestions to customer queries and will have a profound effect on digital commerce and the future of customer care and marketing. This technology can be deployed across industries like Communications, Travel, Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Utilities, Retail, Manufacturing and Government in the following business units to start with:

•    Sales and Marketing
•    Customer Service and Support
•    Partner Programs
•    Employee Assistance
•    Customer Insight

What is Next for Service Experience?
Your future best Agent in Customer Engagement is the Chatbot…

You won’t get significant operational savings or big leaps in customer satisfaction with a lightweight, simplistic chatbot but you need an intelligent, enterprise-ready chatbot which will drive digital transformation of the enterprise specifically with automation, digitization.

Intelligent chatbots help customer-care organizations work more efficiently and it should escalate to a live agent immediately when the customer request is not clear, or customer appears to be annoyed or frustrated. 
Chatbots and Agents are better together.