Beyond the hype. Transform your customer support with AI

With an ever-growing diversity of digital channels, it should be easier than ever for your customers to interact with you. But as you try to support more digital touchpoints, is it affecting the quality of the experience you’re delivering? Or holding you back from considering and supporting new digital support channels? If it is – then you’re not alone. Less than one third of companies currently offer self-service options, according to recent research. And that’s despite the fact that 69% of consumers prefer – and try – to resolve their issue themselves.

 

This is where AI – more specifically Semantic AI – can help. 

 

But what is Semantic AI? Simply put, Semantic AI allows you to tag and classify your content in a way that makes it easy for customers to find content and answers. It’s more than just machine learning, it’s the next generation of AI and can help you build a truly unique experience – using all the data within your organization. Not only will customers be able to find what they need, but you can also support smart virtual assistant applications, and transform the ability of your customer support agents to serve customers more efficiently with the right information. So what should you have in place to transform customer support in this way?

It all starts with a foundation for managing knowledge across your organization. You can then make it easy for customers to navigate through your customer support channels, and locate relevant content. Remove voluminous search results – only show customers the information they’re looking for. Avoid confusion - don't share duplicated, or out-of-date content.

 

If someone is looking for content relating to a product, for example, you might want to include classifications such as country, audience, language, content type, subject, and the type of offering. But simply providing this information is useless without adding context to their search – and this is where Semantic AI can enrich the experience, enabling the right content to be reliably found, and making human conversations ‘understandable’ to machines. This includes capturing synonyms for concepts, relating concepts to one another, and further describing concepts and their attributes.

 

To build this level of a knowledge management foundation information needs to flow between legacy content management systems, next-generation component content management systems, digital asset management systems, business intelligence systems, and any other system feeding into your customer support channel.

A component content management system (CCMS) structures content into small modules, often called ‘topics’. Authoring, managing and delivering content from a CCMS allows for much more agile management and reuse of content. When you combine a CCMS with Semantic AI you create ‘intelligent content,’ and you’re able to deliver contextual information to customers.

 

With intelligent content you can dynamically deliver accurate, relevant, and specific content to portals, mobile devices, tools, and systems across your organization to help customer support agents, service technicians and channel partners to solve customer problems more efficiently.

 

As an example. A field engineer who has encountered an error message when repairing a washing machine must typically look up the error message in a PDF document that contains 300+ error messages, then refer to a separate document containing all the repair procedures to find the correct one. Referencing two different documents is time-consuming and subject to error, especially with the engineer using a mobile device.

 

Imagine if the agent could simply access the error message on any device along with a link to the repair procedure. Multiply this kind of transformation across your customer support functions, and you can improve the time it takes to repair equipment and troubleshoot problems. It can also make your chatbots – or any other customer service channel – easy and more interactive to use.

 

Considering that 90% of Americans use customer service to decide whether to do business with a company – it’s absolutely critical that you get your customer service right. That’s where the combination of Semantic AI and a CCMS can really help, and transform one-off customers into life-long loyal fans.

 

If you would like to learn more about Semantic AI and how it can power your customer support strategies, click here.