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Optimizing and re-enchanting commercial relationships seems contradictory, as automated support can generate frustration. However, artificial intelligence improves many situations through sentiment analysis, needs forecasting, and the automation of interactions. Despite real advancements, human empathy remains essential for handling complex situations and providing genuine emotional support, suggesting an optimal combination of AI and human interaction to maximize the customer experience.
E. Krieger
Optimizing and simultaneously re-enchanting the customer relationship seems like a contradictory injunction. One only needs to have experienced the tribulations of a call center to understand this.
Sometimes, the charm works thanks to an attentive and competent advisor who handles your requests diligently. But we still too often experience great moments of solitude when, after an endless wait with elevator music in the background, we end up with an employee working in a noisy environment who makes us realize we’ve fallen into a call center that’s Taylorized to the core.
The discomfort is then palpable on both sides. On the customer side, we feel like we are intruding, while your interlocutor, sometimes poorly trained and moderately empathetic, tries to get rid of you using formulas from a script scrolling on their screen.
Kafka could have been inspired by contemporary hotlines, but we are promised that everything will change thanks to artificial intelligence. It’s better to remain cautious about the promises of techno-solutionist sirens who extol the virtues of voice bots to replace human operators.
Mass Personalization: An Irresistible Trend
Faced with a multitude of consumers, large companies have no choice but to implement technical and commercial processes to prevent support costs from spiraling out of control.
« Mass personalization » is a major challenge, which has been the glory days of management computing. The phenomenon has continued to progress to efficiently handle « small orders » and optimize transaction costs dear to economists in the Oliver Williamson movement.
Customer relations are an essential component of consumer satisfaction, provided a real value proposition has been developed and one is genuinely empathetic.
This challenge of trust and empathy was already expressed by Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901 to 1909: “People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care”.
The Prospects Offered by AI to Optimize Customer Relations
AI improves customer relations in several ways:
- Forecasting Needs: Through detailed analysis of customer data, AI can anticipate customer demand and offer personalized solutions.
- Sentiment Analysis: By continuously analyzing digital communication channels, AI helps understand consumer opinions and anticipate problems.
- Automating Interactions: AI-powered virtual assistants can quickly resolve the most common customer issues at any time.
An Opportunity for Startups?
AI represents a significant opportunity for startups as they can leverage the latest technological advances to offer solutions to needs that are unmet or poorly met by existing players. Many AI tools accessible via cloud platforms also reduce the costs of developing and deploying new services.
Among the startups working on improving customer relations through AI, we can mention:
- Gorgias provides an AI-based support platform to automate responses to customer inquiries via various channels such as live chat and email.
- Sairen.io eliminates background noise around the agent and customer and converts an offshore agent’s accent in real-time while preserving their vocal identity.
- Zendesk offers cloud-based customer service solutions with AI features like chatbots automating interactions with your prospects and customers.
We are witnessing the creation and development of tech companies and startups using these same technologies to optimize customer relations. The selection will be ruthless and will mainly focus on the value proposition and execution quality. Beyond the robustness of your information system architecture, ergonomics and interaction design will also make a difference.
Emulating Empathy: A Heresy?
However, can an AI show enough empathy to effectively respond to customer requests who often expect more than just a factually correct answer?
Some artificial intelligence techniques already allow for simulating a semblance of empathy. While they can be programmed to analyze the tone of interactions, detect and respond to certain emotions such as frustration or satisfaction, current AIs do not possess the ability to empathize in the human sense of the term.
Hybridization is Probably the Solution
Despite recent advances, human empathy remains irreplaceable in many situations. AI can provide first-level support, but it remains necessary to have human agents to handle complex requests and delicate situations where customers need emotional support beyond an anxiety-inducing journey through a decision-making labyrinth.
In the end, we can posit that a subtle combination of AI and human interaction will increasingly offer the best customer experience in (almost) all circumstances. The challenge is thus to define in which situations AI should make way for a human.
A customer treated with respect will remain loyal to your brand for a long time, while a « mistreated » customer will actively disparage you. The optimization of Customer Lifetime Value relative to the acquisition and processing costs of a given customer can clearly be improved by efficient algorithms, provided there are real people at the end of the line when the situation becomes inextricable.
