KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is winning acclaim for a service that uses artificial intelligence not only to send customers booking confirmations,check-in notifications, boarding passes and flight status updates but also to answer their questions.
The service uses a chatbot, a conversational computer program that customers can interact with via a messaging interface like SMS, Facebook Messenger, Apple iMessage, Slack, Kik, Telegram and WeChat. The result: huge time savings for customer service agents, who can instead focus on customers with more pressing or complicated needs. Beyond the airline industry, chatbots are being used in fields such as retail, banking, insurance and health, signaling a sea change in the way customers converse with companies or engage in commerce.
“AI is making the user interface both simple and smart — and setting a high bar for how future interactions will work,” says a recent report from Accenture. “It will act as the face of a company’s digital brand, be a key differentiator — and become a core competency demanding C-level investment and strategy.” Within five years, more than half of customers will select a company’s service based on its AI, the report says.
In the same way that a customer service representative can please or anger a customer, an AI system will represent a company’s brand and leave a lasting impression. In the United States alone, businesses lose an estimated $1.6 trillion annually due to poor customer service, according to the Accenture report. In addition, it says, 68% of consumers say they will not go back to a brand once they have switched.
A Better Brand Experience
But get the customer experience right, and there’s a much larger opportunity, the report notes. Instead of interacting with one person at a time like a human representative does, a bot can interact with an infinite number of people at once — based on the skills built for it — and maintain a powerful, consistent brand experience in every interaction. KLM’s bot uses deep-learning algorithms that enable it to ingest vast volumes of historical customer service data. This history is then integrated with customer service. When a new message comes in via a digital channel such as email, chat, social media or text, the bot takes three actions: it predicts and auto-fills metadata related to the incoming message; it proposes the best response to the incoming message and shows it to the contact center agent for approval or personalization before sending it to the customer; it automatically answers questions that exceed a certain confidence threshold.
Instead of using a website or mobile app, KLM customers can get things done simply by chatting with a bot and asking questions naturally via text like “Can I bring my puppy on the flight?” This helps KLM handle a huge volume of messages. The airline says it has more than 22 million social-media followers, who mention it on various platforms more than 100,000 times a week. KLM’s team of 235 social media service agents engage in 15,000 conversations a week across all its social platforms, offering 24/7 service in 10 languages.
Other companies are also increasingly using bots to help with customer service. For example, Burberry’s Facebook Messenger bot, launched during London Fashion Week last year, shares new collections and doubles as a live customer service portal. The fastfood outlets Burger King and Wingstop show users nearby locations and menu choices, take and confirm orders, estimate when a customer’s order will be ready and enable payments. Credit Agricole’s health insurance offering is represented by a bot named Marc while Allianz has introduced a chatbot called Alli that offers assistance 24/7 to answer questions about a wide range of insurance products.
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