Artificial intelligence in the service sector has moved beyond the hype stage, with many businesses already enhancing the customer experience, lowering costs, and even transforming customer service from a cost center into a profit center. With most software providers now offering optional AI capabilities integrated into their solutions, it can be easy to think of AI as something you just license and turn on for your service department. But without proper preparation, AI investments fail to meet their expectations. Following are six steps the leaders in adopting AI have followed to prepare their businesses for the upcoming change:
Step 1: Define Success.
You need to have a clear vision of your destination to know when you've reached it! Spend time to write down the goals of your AI project. Some possible outcomes (both quantifiable and subjective) to think about might include the following:
- Customer satisfaction;
- Time to resolution;
- Customer loyalty/retention;
- Incidents resolved per rep per day;
- Total orders taken;
- Cross-sells per order;
- Employee satisfaction;
- Employee retention (Early adopters of AI are finding that employees don't want to leave once they understand the value of AI); and
- Strategic differentiation (Can you use AI to strategically differentiate your service offering from your competitors, perhaps even transforming from a cost center to a profit center?
Step 2: Assess Your Team, Your Systems, Your Data.
AI can lead to significant changes in your customer service center, such as new roles, skills, and tasks. It also depends on the design of your systems and the data quality in those systems. You need to check your team's readiness and willingness to adopt and use AI and how ready your systems are to supply the data that AI systems need. Think about evaluations in all these areas, including the following:
- Asking your team members about their hopes, worries, and opinions.
- Finding the current and future skills and competencies that your customer service center needs.
- Using behavior modeling to recognize change management difficulties and possibilities.
- Evaluating the quality of your data. Customer service systems often have 55 percent or more bad data (see Step 5). The intelligence in AI is only as good as the data to which it has access.
- Reviewing your data structure. How is your knowledge base organized? Where is your customer data stored? Can modern AI solutions access these or do you need to rethink your information structure to be ready?
Once you understand the gaps, create an AI preparedness roadmap.
Step 3: Select Your AI Provider.
You have many choices when it comes to AI providers, each with their own features, capabilities, and pricing. You need to assess your needs, goals, and budget and match them with the possible options. Some of the factors to consider are the following:
- Generative AI (such as ChatGPT) is getting all the press lately. But remember that there are many types of AI that you might need. Determine the type and scope of AI solutions, such as chatbots, voice assistants, sentiment analysis, document automation, object recognition, and statistical modeling, that you might need.
- Integration: How well can the AI provider work with your current platforms and systems? Customer data and digital content are your most valuable data sources, so make sure your selected AI platform can use this information and, if not, consider moving data to the same platform as your AI provider.
- Security and Privacy: Think about how to protect your data and customer information, the dependability and capacityof the AI provider's service and support, and the expense and profit of the AI provider's solution.
Step 4: Consolidate and Integrate Sales, Service and Marketing Platforms.
AI can help you create a seamless and consistent customer experience across your sales, service, and marketing channels. But for this, you need a unified and connected platform that can collect, store, and analyze data from all your interactions. Your single CRM platform should also be well integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) operational, e-commerce, internal collaboration, and other systems that have customer data or that are used by employees who contact customers. This will enable you to do the following:
- Provide a personalized and relevant experience to your customers based on their preferences, behavior, and history, further enhanced by personalized solutions generated by AI.
- Improve your efficiency and productivity by automating and streamlining your workflows and processes and positioning your personnel as instant experts able to more quickly and completely resolve customer issues.
- Gain a holistic and comprehensive view of your customers and your performance.
Step 5: Routinely Reduce ROTII.
ROTII is an acronym for data that is redundant, outdated, trivial, inaccurate, or incomplete. This kind of data can harm your AI's performance, accuracy, and reliability. Therefore, you need to frequently check, clean, and refresh your data to make sure it is high-quality and relevant. Some of the good practices to lower ROTII data are as follows:
- Define and enforce data quality standards and policies.
- Implement data validation and verification mechanisms.
- Eliminate data duplication and inconsistency.
- Enrich and augment your data with external sources.
- Archive or delete data that is no longer needed or useful.
Step 6: Plan for Continuous Learning, Adoption, and Improvement.
AI is evolving rapidly. And your teams' skills and knowledge in AI will not be the same in a year. You need to keep up with both of these. Help your teams with the planning, training, support, and ongoing improvement they need. Here are some ideas to make this happen:
- Leverage early adopters. These are the team members who are excited, interested, and ready to test new technologies and solutions.
- Create a champions program. Recognize the early adopters, provide them with special training, make them their departmental stewards, and give them access to special internal support groups and forums.
- Deliver an onboarding program and training portal. Deploy a drip training program to help everyone absorb change at their own pace. Don't burden the agility of AI adoption with an archaic learning management system. Deploy learning snacks and just-in-time learning through an internal learning portal so everyone can learn at their own pace.
- Establish a yearly planning cycle for AI. Use what you learn in the first year to inform your strategies for the second and third years.
AI might be the highest-impact technology since the advent of the personal computer. It can transform your customer service center. However, it also needs thorough planning, coordination, and training to make sure it works well. By following the six steps explained in this article, you can prepare for AI and fully leverage it.
Geoff Ables is managing partner of C5 Insight. He can be reached at geoff.ables@c5insight.com or www.c5insight.com.