ServiceNow BrandVoice: How To Put The “I” In AI

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Organizations are leaning in hard to technologies like AI to facilitate faster, more productive operations. But in a recent meeting with a large company to discuss how AI can improve their customer and support experience, I was reminded there’s more to the story than zeros and ones.

After my presentation, one of their AI experts started peppering me with questions on model recommendations for different situations in the customer support journey. Valid questions, all—but she was missing a crucial part of the conversation: people.

I asked her, “What behavior are you trying to change? More productive agents? Site stickiness? And how do you plan to measure it? Case deflection? Improved NPS?”

Or the bigger question: Where do people fit into the AI equation?

There seems to be a growing trend of organizations becoming so enamored with AI tech that they miss the point of its implementation. AI solves problems using automation—but those problems involve people.

To successfully apply AI, you start with the problem and the specific change you want, then measure its impact. For example, if your goal is to increase case deflection for low-priority issues, the action may be to implement an AI-powered chatbot so that customers can self-serve answers from all your support platforms. Low-priority case deflections and customer satisfaction scores improve. Once that happens, you look for new opportunities to apply AI.

By applying AI to the potholes, then to the cracks, and watching the metrics for any unexpected impact, you put people first.

AI is integral to any digital transformation. It enhances the customer experience by improving agent productivity and efficiency. Even better, AI can help organizations scale their operations.

Automated agent routing uses AI to assign the right agent to the case the first time, avoiding case transfers. An AI-generated workflow can auto-close cases when customers stop responding to calls, freeing up agents to focus on other things. A chatbot can give customers information from a wide array of data sources, learn from these requests, and improve its knowledge for the future.

In these cases, issues are solved without human intervention. But their ultimate impact is on people: customers, agents, partners, and other employees.

Delivering atruly personalized customer experience is one of the most exciting possibilities of AI. By using AI to collect and analyze information about a customer’s interests and preferences, we can deliver custom-tailored support.

Imagine that a long-time customer just placed a large order and it's your job to support their product adoption. At this point, you already know the customer is partial to self-service because they are active on the customer support website and visit community forums to ask and answer questions.

After the order, you notice that the customer’s support portal engagement has dropped, meaning their adoption is slowing. They’ve run into a hurdle.

You can use this information to deploy AI to help them revive their adoption activities. First, you proactively deliver relevant content to a particular persona. In other words, use AI to automatically:

From there, you can use AI to personalize the digital experience even further. Which agent does the IT manager prefer talking to? What is the best time to contact them? What is their preferred medium for communication: phone, email, instant messenger? Conversely, AI can identify a customer who wasn’t satisfied with their experience, then take another set of steps to improve it.

To see if AI is driving the desired behavior changes, circle back to metrics like NPS scores and engagement rates. Are customers spending more time using support resources? Have satisfaction scores increased?

AI technologies can turn a good experience into an exceptional one, but only if we start in the right place—its impact on people.

For a deeper dive into the power of AI, register for “Now on Now: How AI is bringing our 80% automated customer support vision to life” (SES1263) at theKnowledge Digital Experience, starting May 11.