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AI Increasingly "Understands" Customer Dissatisfaction and Frustration
Increasingly, customer-to-business communications are happening outside normal business hours. Customers today expect service whenever they choose to interact with a company. For this reason, many companies are adopting automated AI-based virtual assistants to help answer routine questions and direct more complex issues to human agents. This trend toward a guided customer experience, or “guided CX,” is true not only for retail, in which customers expect 24/7 service, for but for services such as the property and casualty insurance services sector.
According to a recent CRN article authored by Rajeev Batra, Managing Director, Insurance Practice for Synechron and Nilesh Tambe, Senior Director of Technology for Synechron, the global COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the move to customer self-service, a trend that was already on the upswing. But a greater share of customers now expects the availability of 24/7 servicing and access to products. Customers who do not have their expectations met may take their business elsewhere.
“With the help of today’s sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, digital chat platforms/interactions, intelligent chatbots, third-party messenger apps, and voice assistants have become a critical communications channel,” wrote Batra and Tambe. “Artificial intelligence, machine learning solutions, and advanced natural language processing tools have successfully been leveraged by big organizations and smaller, digital-first InsurTechs for conversational interfaces.”
Artificial intelligence driven platforms can position companies – including insurance companies – to better ascertain the sentiment, intent, context, and highly specific requests contained in customer queries, regardless of which channel they arrive by.
“Granular data collected can be deeply analyzed and an exact pre-determination made as to what best response to offer based upon the query,” wrote Batra and Tambe. “Moreover, forward-thinking organizations can not only more appropriately respond with greatly tailored answers, highly specific next step directions and the best possible assistance, but also allow conversational bots to detect a strong dissatisfaction, problem, or concern from the ‘tone’ of a customer’s dialog and language.”
This allows non-human virtual assistants to better “understand” when issues need to be escalated directly to a human agent to avoid providing customers with a poor customer experience.
Edited by Luke Bellos