As I’m writing this, chances are that you’ve already integrated some AI-features in your department. Whether it comes to co-pilot purposes for your customer service team or other forms, genAI is here: and most of the times it’s even embedded in major omni-channel platforms. That being said, while as a manager you may be focussed on AI outcomes, is your support team using AI as they should?
“Great AI features, but we don’t have time…”
In the last few months I’ve heard customer support agents saying it. It’s occurred after delivering quality checks on a sample of Digital Customer Service conversations over email, whatsapp, and live chat. In fact upon reviewing them, it has arisen that more than one agent had not used (properly) AI. And that led to these negative consequences:
- Poor customer experiences → e.g. Mark (support agent) had a phone conversation with the customer and after that AI produced a written recap of the call. Later on the same day, a second agent (Laura) had a Whatsapp conversation with the same customer. Unfortunately, as she did not read the AI-summary of the call, so that she asked a couple of questions that the customer had already answered to during the phone call. Consequently, the customer got nervous and went “why are you asking that again?!”. At the end of the Whatsapp conversation, the customer filled out the post-conversation survey with a disappointing ‘2 out of 5’ rating.
- Missed sales opportunities → this case occurred to a sales team equipped with a new AI co-pilot solutions that they have to use to increase their conversation rate. Specifically, during outbound calls they receive inputs about customer’s sentiment and accordingly, real-time written suggested responses. These are surely excellent features, however some agents of the sales team were ‘silently reluctant’ to use them. That emerged during a meeting when the manager got to know that most of the team said that “their sound sales experience was enough to sell…” However, that was not the case because not using AI featured had generated a sales decrease (-3% in just one month).
Over to you
The above case examples shows that if customer service or sales teams fail to use AI properly, they price is high for any organization. Therefore as a manager deploying AI-solutions is key, however make sure that your team will use them consistently and properly!
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