Suppose you’re looking to increase efficiency with artificial intelligence (AI). If so, you might hope to cut labor costs by offering better service with fewer representatives. On the other hand, if you are skeptical about AI, you may dismiss its potential to improve the customer experience. That’s especially true if you only trust your staff to provide genuine care for your customers. But the truth is you can be efficient and connect better with customers if you choose human and AI integration.

Here’s the thing… 

AI has a limited capacity to understand customers’ needs and provide effective solutions. When you leave machine intelligence to handle all your queries and complaints, you will only frustrate your customers. 

No matter how efficient your business may be, situations will arise when only a live agent can help resolve a customer’s problem. 

Yet if you want to sell your product at scale without AI, you won’t use your customer service agents efficiently. They will be stuck with drudge work that machines can do better. Plus, they may even struggle to keep up with the orders, queries, and returns. 

Either way, customers won’t enjoy the best possible experience. You may also lose customers because they aren’t happy with the speed or quality of your service. 

In previous blogs, we looked at how AI is changing digital marketing and what to learn from those who embrace it. In this blog, we discuss how to combine AI with the human touch to transform your connection with your customers. 

To understand this better, let’s start by recapping the different benefits that AI and live customer service agents offer.

A Look at the Benefits of AI and What It Does Best

Here are some ways AI can augment human customer service through personalization and improved efficiency:

• Engaging customers in basic conversations and answering questions that sound natural
• Learning from customers’ buying habits and their questions to personalize the experience
• Analyzing data to determine why a shopper abandoned their shopping cart without completing a purchase and then retargeting with better solutions

• Scaling up to serve multiple customers simultaneously more efficiently
• Personalizing messaging by analyzing prospect and customer data to segment the audience more finely

Why Human Intelligence Is Still Essential

Humans have innate social skills such as empathy and emotional intelligence that AI could only dream of (if it could dream). We learn our social skills from infancy, and our survival depends on it. 

• Emotional Intelligence and Empathy: Human intelligence can interpret emotions and meaning from nuances in body language, voice, and even silence. We automatically adjust how we engage with people depending on the relationship, mood, and personality of who we are chatting with. 

These soft skills are essential for customer service agents to clock a caller’s disposition and treat them appropriately.

Empathy is critical when dealing with a frustrated or angry customer. Strong emotions can quickly get in the way of even the simplest solution.

Showing that you understand a customer’s dilemma is the first step to helping them solve their problem. 

• Intuitive Decision-Making: Human cognition is innately intuitive, using life experiences to make rapid decisions. We don’t just use the facts in front of us to make judgments and draw conclusions. We draw on experience and knowledge accumulated over a lifetime. 

• Creative Thinking: Humans are creative thinkers, seeing connections between things that might not seem at all related. We can often see obscure links to find solutions to seemingly impossible problems. 

These characteristics make every interaction between customers and company representatives a personal one. Unlike AI, humans intuitively know how to respond to others to get the best possible outcome from each interaction. 

What to Look Forward to with Human and AI Integration 

But the truth is that when it comes to providing the perfect experience to your customers, both human and machine intelligence have their limitations. 

Even though AI can crunch massive amounts of data at lightning speed, it doesn’t reflect the incredibly complex world people navigate every day. Machine learning uses a narrow data set and specific algorithms that programmers judge as relevant to the task at hand. AI systems can’t know everything that humans experience.

In addition, they lack the innate social skills and executive functioning that customer service representatives use in every interaction with the public. 

That said, humans, for their part, have faulty memories, low boredom thresholds, and a limited capacity to process data. 

The magic happens through human and AI integration, building the customer experience from the strengths that each brings to the table.

A study by the UK firm Forrester Consulting found that human and AI integration significantly improves both customer satisfaction and performance. Companies that responded to their survey reported the following benefits:

• Improved customer satisfaction: 61% 
• Increased customer retention: 59% 
• Efficiency improved: 68%
• Higher productivity: 66%.

When customers are satisfied, they are more likely to return to buy products and services and recommend your brand to other shoppers. 

It should be noted that when AI and humans collaborate, customers will also benefit from the improved morale and productivity of the staff they interact with. When relieved from repetitive, monotonous tasks, customer service agents get to tackle more interesting challenges. They can also enjoy the innate satisfaction of helping people solve complex problems.

How to Apply Human and AI Integration

Customer Service

Businesses depend on customer loyalty. Ideally, customers should be so satisfied with the product and customer service that they become brand advocates. 

When AI systems and customer service agents integrate seamlessly, the customer benefits from having problems resolved faster and with less hassle. 

An AI chatbot can efficiently handle basic questions for multiple callers simultaneously. But when it’s unable to answer a problem, it has to know when to hand a customer over to a live representative before they get frustrated. 

During the initial interaction, a chatbot can collect relevant information for the live operator to know everything the customer asked and was told previously. That not only saves time but also saves customers from having to repeat their issues.

Live agents use their social skills, intuition, and judgment to interpret and solve problems quicker. This helps diffuse any built-up frustration because questions weren’t answered immediately. 

When agents focus on resolving more complex problems or making decisions, they contribute to the area of the customer journey where they are most effective.

Data-Led Decision-Making

AI can also do the mundane task of collecting data to improve services in the future, with customer profiles built from insights on demographics, preferences, and buying habits.

Humans can use that information to make informed decisions on improving every aspect of the customer journey. That includes…

• Providing more personal recommendations
• Using feedback to solve common issues with products and services
• Better anticipating problems to respond to complaints more effectively
• Identifying trends that could affect customer demand
• Uncovering demand for new products
• Making the customer interface with the company more intuitive and streamlined between every channel

Training 

Training is an essential part of machine learning, and customer service agents are ideal instructors for teaching AI to handle calls. 

Chatbots can monitor live agents’ conversations to learn how to best answer customers’ questions. 

Training should continue even when the chatbot is fully deployed and serving customers. When a chatbot can’t answer a question, it would hand over the call to a live agent and then learn by monitoring the exchange with the customer. Over time, more and more calls can be handled by AI, improving efficiency.

The Future of Human and AI Integration for Customer Experience

As AI technology develops, the future potential to augment human customer service will accelerate. AI algorithms will become more powerful, linking more concepts for increasingly sophisticated interactions with the customer.

For example, significant advances are being made by companies like Kik to get chatbots to show empathy, removing a critical obstacle for machine intelligence taking a bigger role. Chatbots and customer assistants will be able to deal with more of the day-to-day interactions. 

Currently, AI can choose the ideal responses at lightning speed from what it has learned. In the future, deep learning will evolve to engage in real conversations and make more autonomous decisions. 

But that doesn’t mean that humans will no longer be needed for customer service. As AI evolves, businesses will need to retrain agents to take up higher-level work. That includes improving the AI experience, refining interactions, and solving complex problems. 

“Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers through automation will miss the full potential of AI. Such a strategy is misguided from the get-go. Tomorrow’s leaders will instead be those that embrace collaborative intelligence, transforming their operations, their markets, their industries, and—no less important—their workforces.”

— James Manyika, chair and director, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI)

Final Thoughts

While AI and humans have strengths and weaknesses, they also complement each other in many ways. Businesses can improve the customer experience through human and AI integration. 

When you implement AI to work with humans, you can personalize each experience to better connect with your customers. A faster service tailored to every individual’s need will drive customer satisfaction. 

The sooner you embrace the benefits of AI to augment your customer experience, the better prepared you’ll be for an AI-driven future.

If you are looking to improve the customer experience by adding AI, Viral Solutions can help. Get started with a FREE 50-Point Marketing Audit!