AI built in to the heart of user interfaces

Within a few short years, some companies and organisations will have adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) in at least one part of their work: interfacing with their customers.  (I’m using customers in the widest sense of the word: it could be students in education, or patients in healthcare for example).

Imagine the following:

• Instead of having to log in to a website or an application, the application simply recognises the user’s face or voice
• Instead of having to click on a menu to navigate the app, the user can just talk to it, either by speaking or using a chatbot type interface.
• Instead of calling customer service (and being told “you are currently number two in a queue” or “Our business hours are 0900 to 1700 Monday to Friday, please call back during those times” ), they can get an immediate response (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) from a chatbot.

If customers have a choice between interacting with one organisation in that way, or another in the more traditional way, I think they will vote with their feet.

It’s a straightforward matter of economics

Organisations that invest in AI are also likely to be able to operate faster and more cheaply than those who don’t.  Which is likely to be cheaper:

• invest in training a chatbot that once developed can be scaled up and down with demand with no additional training to provide the same service,
• using support centre/call centre staff, each of whom needs to be trained.

If your business expands, it will take time to recruit and train new support staff. If you have invested in a chatbot, then you can simply scale it up in the cloud. (See note * below).

Of course, that is just one area where #AI can make the experience easier. It can also be used (with deep learning and other data analytics algorithms) to help the organisation develop new products, identify new leads, cross sell to existing customers, provide better service (e.g. by identifying faults in internet connected devices earlier), and probably in many ways that we can’t yet imagine.

If your current roadmap envisages your company or organisation still providing goods and services without significant input from #AI, now is the time to have a rethink. By 2020 at the latest you are likely to face competitors who will have an #AI enabled enhanced offering.

The end of the line for call/support centres

It will soon be the end of the line for call centres – make sure that it is not the end of the line for your organisation too.

Note *: of course I do not believe that there is no need at all for human support staff.  But I believe chatbots are likely to replace humans for all but the most complex queries.  Why? Simple economics: chatbots can provide routine support far more efficiently and productively than humans can.

If you are thinking of developing a chatbot for your organisation and want to know more, we can help you just get started, or all the way to full implementation. Contact us now!