Leverage AI To Remove Friction From The Customer Service Experience

Customer service could pose the biggest threat to companies in today’s consumer-centric culture.

Your younger self would think that we’re living in a strange time: Our meals are delivered to our doorsteps with precisely the amount of spices we need, we hire people to do simple tasks like hang pictures around our house, we hail and pay for rides with a few taps, and we can accomplish almost anything from a phone that is glued to our hands. Our razors arrive in the mail without us having to think about it, and we can order a pizza by simply saying it out loud to our home assistant.

There’s been a common thread coming out of the innovation hubs over the last few years — removing friction. As a society, we’ve largely come to expect everything to be easy, instant and meaningful. Having to wait for things is jarring. Even Amazon’s two-day delivery can seem long. Having to go out of our way to accomplish something can feel obtrusive and painful.

Both emerging and enterprise companies have made strides in removing friction from their customer journey, from subscriptions and curbside pickup to automatic payments and hyper-personalized recommendations. As the founder and CEO of an artificial intelligence (AI) customer-service company, I’ve noticed that customer service has not been given the same attention. It’s still quite an arduous task that can muster up the same feelings that your former self could relate to: frustration, irritation and inconvenience. When a person has to reach out to a company today with a question or issue, the experience could be a shock to their system if they experience friction like delayed email responses, long hold times or companies that fail to answer emailed questions.

Thanks to customer-obsessed companies like Amazon, Trader Joes and Zappos, companies are no longer regarded simply as a provider of good and services: satisfaction is not based solely on the quality of the product but of the entire experience leading up to and well after the purchase. Companies need to offer convenience and pay personal attention to customers. In a 2012 study, Walker found that 43% of companies ranked experience as the most important element of their business strategies (compared to the 20% who chose price), while a 2018 PwC report said that 73% of all respondents indicated customer experience was an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Price and quality have long been regarded as the key differentiators, so this is astounding.

At the same time that customer expectations are evolving at a rapid pace, so is the number of channels available to contact a company, making it harde r and more expensive than ever for companies to keep up — but creating plenty of opportunities for technology innovators to help them do so.