Let’s talk IT service management and artificial intelligence (AI). We all know the frustrations of fighting our way through the options menu when we call “customer support,” and the tedium of navigating corporate websites and filling in lengthy online forms. Often we encounter these hassles at work as IT help desks have been replaced by complex support websites. Companies increasingly expect employees and customers to “own” much of the workload, based on the assumption that customers know best what they need and want. But there is method to this madness.
It’s called customer self-service
However, this kind of self-service often does not make for a happy user experience. We expect customers to find the right part of an app or website, assess the available options, interact with the system, wait for confirmation, and know when a task is done. Companies expect their customers to do too much of the work in self-service systems. This problem can whack a company’s bottom line, as a positive digital customer experience can be just as important for commercial success as more obvious factors like cost and productivity.
The underlying issue is not so much with the design or user interface, but with what I would call “cognitive load” – the amount of mental effort we need to interpret a complex situation and act on it. After all, most people’s working memory can hold only four to five pieces of information at a time; so the fewer pieces of information we expect customers to process, the quicker and easier it becomes for them to make a decision. Artificial intelligence can help.
Making it easier for the customer with artificial intelligence
Take the success of Uber. If you need a taxi, you don’t have to go online anymore to research routes and cab companies, then quickly get cash to pay, and make a call to request a ride. All that load has been reduced to just a few taps in a smartphone app. The same principle can be applied in other industries. Companies that want to succeed must ask themselves: How can I shift cognitive load away from my customers, to ensure that they have a better, happier experience?
That’s where cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence agents like Amelia come in. Thanks to Amelia’s ability to understand natural language, she offers the most efficient and easy-to-use way of shifting cognitive load away from customers.
To be clear, shifting cognitive load is not a trivial task. Reducing customer-facing complexity requires plenty of thinking and heavy lifting in the background, and that’s why companies will need artificial intelligence solutions to do the job. The best solutions here are not big data recommendation engines, scripted chat bots or – at the high end – the all-purpose AIs being developed in science. Instead, companies need to make use of commercial AIs, cognitive technologies that have been designed for a specific purpose; their success is being measured by whether they can solve a specific business challenge, not whether they can fool people into mistaking them for a human.
These commercial artificial intelligence applications will help companies deal with the high-volume, high-frequency queries they typically receive. They get the job done quickly and efficiently, never losing their cool. At the same time, they free up an organization’s human employees to dedicate more time to complex tasks. And when these AIs encounter a query that goes beyond their knowledge, they can pass it on to human colleagues, who are still more adept than machines when it comes to handling new and unpredictable situations.
Artificial intelligence acting human so you can too
Cognitive technologies are based on linguistic principles and designed to understand natural language. They can extract intention and generate dialogue to clarify missing information before taking action on a customer’s behalf. Customers don’t have to change the way they think or talk to adjust to the limitations of a system. There’s no need for keywords, rigid phrases, or remodelling your thought process to engage with the system. In other words, we can speak to artificial intelligence applications in a normal way.
The self-service approach to customer service has gone too far. It’s OK for simple requests, like checking an account balance. But any company or organization that depends on transactions that place a lot of cognitive load on customers and staff should investigate whether it can shift this burden onto an artificial intelligence system, with its ability to understand natural language and mine huge data-driven systems.
Parit Patal
Parit Patal is the Head of Solution Architecture with IPsoft UK. His project responsibilities cover all solution and design aspects of an Amelia project, as well as ensuring that the delivery of Amelia implementations continue to align with customer business requirements.
Over the last 10 years at IPsoft, Parit has moved from software development, into operational support and is currently running the solutions team in the UK and coordinates with his global colleagues to create a strategic framework for Solution Architects across all locations. Parit has successfully delivered highly complex solutions across multiple sectors and customers, including Bank of America, BP, and the UK public sector amongst others.
Prior to IPsoft, Parit worked as a software developer for Fox, Disney and a number of small start ups.
Parit holds a BSC (Hons) in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from UCL
