Hal on the Line: AI and Automating the Customer Service Experience

Introduction: The Customer Service Dilemma for Companies - and All of Us - Today

Let’s face it. All of us share a common experience - and a common modern problem. We fear, we dread, we lament, and yes, most of us literally hate having to call for customer service for anything! Of course, this is only if our cable company, our wireless carrier, our airline, or our health insurer even provides - let alone publishes somewhere - the actual phone number one should use to reach a real live customer service agent to speak with about whatever our problem - billing, technical, health, etc. might be of concern to us. As you no doubt have experienced, many companies today seem to go to great lengths to bury that 800 number that one could use to actually reach out to speak with a company representative about your issue under webpage after webpage. If you do manage to find the customer service information, often, you will be directed not to a phone number, but instead, you will see offerings to use their chatbot, their email, or their text-based customer service.

And, of course, in a global economy and a fiber-linked world, once you do traverse the digital phalanx of barriers and invest the time - minutes, and in many cases, hours - on hold to wait to actually speak to a real, live human being, that company representative with whom you are speaking is today likely to perhaps not even be located in the United States - or the Western Hemisphere - or even work for the company in question. Rather, all too often, companies today choose to do their “Customer Support as a Service,” working with third-party providers located around the globe who provide this all-important function. And as all of us have experienced, the gentleman on the phone who says that you are speaking with “Josh” is almost guaranteed not to really be named Josh!

But alas, there is hope today that we are moving closer - and maybe moving fast - to resolving the customer service dilemma facing both companies and their customers! And yes, kids, even corporate leaders - if given the opportunity to vent privately - know that today’s customer service - at least from the perspective of being able to get immediate, personalized support that actually resolves a customer’s issues and leads the customer to be more satisfied with their experience with the company and its products and/or services overall - know that what they are doing today is not good enough!

Trust me, as a seasoned strategic management consultant and professor, executives at all consumer-facing organizations - including governments and non-profits - look at statistic after statistic, both internally generated and across their and other industries - to see that the state of customer satisfaction is not good - not good at all - today!

And younger, more tech-savvy Americans are even less satisfied with the state of customer service than their older counterparts. As you can see in Figure 1 (Customer Satisfaction Among Gen Z Consumers versus All Ages in Interactions with Companies from Various Sectors), today’s 18-24-year-olds are considerably less satisfied in their interactions with companies of all types. And yes, customer service inquiries - with companies in areas like streaming media, utilities, car rental companies, airlines, and investment firms, and even the federal government, are the most common reason that we interact with these organizations.

Figure 1: Customer Satisfaction Among Gen Z Consumers versus All Ages in Interactions with Companies from Various Sectors

Source: MarketingCharts, “Youth Seem Hard to Please in Their Customer Interactions,” February 25, 2022 (Used with permission)

And so if these poor - and even unpleasant - interactions could be made better - perhaps even pleasant, this would go a long, long way to helping organizations across the board improve their overall customer satisfaction and, with it, their spending with, their loyalty to, and their positive “word of mouth“ - in-person and increasingly online - about their experiences with companies. In short, anything that can improve the customer service experience (CSX) will go a long way toward improving the overall customer experience (CX) - and investments in these areas can pay off big if done smartly.

Artificial Intelligence and the Customer Service Experience

Unless you’ve been living “off the grid” in a cabin deep in the woods without a cell signal or WiFi (that might sound pretty good right now, eh?), you know that artificial intelligence (AI) - “a machine's ability to perform the cognitive functions we usually associate with human minds” - is proving to be nothing less than a game changer in seemingly everything from journalism to education to health care to yes, marketing.

Today, companies are very much still in the “feeling out” process when it comes to AI. They are exploring just how - and how much - artificial intelligence can - and perhaps should - be used in everything from creating content of all types - from text to graphics and even audio - to solving problems - from handling basic calculations to trying to solve strategic, even life-saving issues!

And today, the marketing arms of organizations are likewise in the exploratory stages of examining and testing just how - and how much - AI can be utilized to improve the customer experience. As Figure 2 (Top Technology Trends in the Realm of Enhancing the Customer Experience) shows, artificial intelligence is on the radar screens of marketing executives. However, AI is - surprisingly - not at the top of these executives’ priority lists currently (as of the mid-2023 date of this study) when it comes to CX technology.

Figure 2: Top Technology Trends in the Realm of Enhancing the Customer Experience

Source: MarketingCharts, “Enterprise CX Practitioners to Up Their Use of Text, Journey Analytics,” June 2, 2023 (Used with permission)

However, early experiments in applying AI to our common “national nightmare” that is customer service phone calls show just how powerful a tool artificial intelligence may be in reshaping - and bettering - the customer experience both for customers and for those who strive to provide service to them.

Recently, CBS Sunday Morning aired a story entitled “Your Call is Very Important to Us." Is It, Really?,” reported by correspondent David Pogue. The story is so well reported that I will let it speak for itself in terms of how it captures our collective frustration with the calls we have to make for customer service for seemingly anything (with the endless holds, the confusing voice prompts, and in general, the frustrations in trying to get our points across via this non-rich communications medium that dates back to Alexander Graham Bell!) and with the frustrating - and stressful - jobs that customer service representatives in trying to handle what can be very weary - and sometimes very agitated - customers on the phone!

The story goes on to profile a groundbreaking AI-based technology that is being developed by a startup called Gridspace, whose AI assistant, “Grace” (what a good name choice!), is already handling customer service calls - well, triaging them - helping out customers who can be assisted without real, live human intervention for their problems, concerns, inquiries, and screening calls to the point where they are best directed to the right human representative for them to handle!

This story is well worth the watch - and it should be required viewing for all in customer-facing organizations of any size and type! Pogue concludes the story with the hopeful note that Gridspace is just one of the many companies that are exploring how we can best make use of artificial intelligence to improve the customer service experience.

Analysis

Okay, I’m falling for the hype and “drinking the Kool-Aid” that AI can quickly solve the age-old and universal “modern problem” of us seemingly having to wait on hold for hours on end when we have a simple customer service need! In short, artificial intelligence can revamp - and revamp quickly - how we interact with companies and organizations when we need assistance via the phone. In fact, AI can make the telephone once again the preferred channel for contact with organizations, both on the part of customers and companies themselves, as it wil present significant advantages.

Think of the math and architecture of all of this. Harkening back to the CBS Sunday Morning story, “Grace” has so many positives over the ways in which we interact with companies and their call centers today:

• Handling as many phone inquiries simultaneously as an organization’s phone system will allow - hundreds, even thousands of inquiries simultaneously;
• Eliminating wait times for customers to begin engaging with the AI assistant to try and get their problem/issue resolved;
• Processing many - perhaps even most - customer service inquiries without human intervention, and over time with the power of machine learning, the automated system will be able to “learn” how to handle more such inquiries - and handle them better and faster;
• With the ability of service providers in this area to gain experience across companies and even across industries, artificial intelligence can help the entire customer service industry develop new and innovative ways to handle phone inquiries to get customers’ issues resolved far more quickly and efficiently than firms working alone without the benefit of AI;

• Screening customer inquiries in a far more efficient manner than what is being done presently through “select the appropriate number” and/or voice prompts to route your call in a manner so that if you do need human interaction with your inquiry, issue, question, or even complaint, you are routed far more quickly to a person with the capacity to actually help you!; and
• Making the work of call center employees (and yes, the hundreds of thousands - likely millions - of individuals who handle customer service calls working remotely) far less stressful and far more satisfying. In doing so, companies will see turnover rates and absence rates fall dramatically - both in their dedicated workforces and in those of their contracted third-party customer service providers. Likewise, retention rates will increase among these employees, making customer service cost less to organizations.

And so, the AI equation in customer service is simple - and for the most part, simply positive - when it comes to enabling companies to better handle telephone-based inquiries. The only significant downside to all of this is that yes, there will be less need for today’s armies of call center employees and remote workers handling customer service phone calls. However, as the CBS News story explains, the remaining workers - and no, AI will not eliminate likely even the majority of such jobs - will be addressing higher order concerns from customers and be doing more valuable - and likely higher paying work as they become more “specialists” in specific areas, rather than just doing customer triage on the front-lines of organizations.

In time, speaking as a management expert, I would expect that we would see widespread adoption of AI-based customer service across many industries and even government agencies and non-profits. In short, Gridspace’s “Grace” will likely be joined by other “AI-based” customer service profiles to handle customer inquiries - say “Patience” and Prudence” for starters!

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About David Wyld

David C. Wyld is a Professor of Strategic Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, publisher, executive educator, and experienced expert witness. You can view all of his work at https://authory.com/DavidWyld. You can subscribe to his Medium article feed at: https://davidwyld.medium.com/subscribe.

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