AI Rescues Customer Care

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third excerpt from the Humane Customer Care white paper.

Click this link to download the full white paper.

Conversational AI alone is not enough to rescue customer care from crisis. It must be coupled with automation and presented within a graphical-user-interface.

The Customer Care Crisis has a solution. Indeed, into this bleak cul-de-sac of post-industrial society rides an unlikely hero, a deus ex machina ready for its closeup. I speak, of course, of Artificial Intelligence, A.I. as Steven Spielberg styled it. Not just any AI, but Conversational AI, the highly evolved descendant of yesteryear’s Tinkertoy chatbots. Conversational AI is most significant — and relevant to the customer care crisis de jour — because it enables a conversational interface. And it turns out that a conversational interface is the best way for humans to interact with systems, especially on phones.

Got that point about the impending primacy of conversational interfaces? I think it’s true and so does Gartner, a rare convergence of conviction.

However, conversational AI alone is not enough to rescue customer care from crisis. It must be coupled with automation and presented within a graphical-user-interface. How epochal can the advent of a GUI be? Ask a boomer what it was like when Steve Jobs mic-dropped the Macintosh on a world that had never seen a GUI, let alone clicked a mouse. It was a revelation that triggered a revolution, that’s what it was like.

So follow me now: Delivering conversational AI through a GUI in 2021 is the 21st century reincarnation of the Mac hitting the computing world in 1984, or thereabouts.

Conversational AI that includes automation and is presented within a GUI creates Conversational GUIs. Alternatively, you can call them Superpowered Digital Assistants, Superpowered Chatbots or even Next-gen Conversational AI if you’d like.

Just don’t call them late to the party if you’re running a customer care operation. Woe be it if a competitor beats you to the punch. Your market hangs in the balance, not to mention your job.

Now go to Restoring Care to Customer Care, the fourth and final excerpt from Humane Customer Care.