Cognitive/AI-Powered Customer Service: Use-Cases and Real-World Examples

Cognitive/AI technologies for customer engagement are white hot. No wonder professionals, who had removed AI from their resumes, are scrambling to add it back in!

As a pioneer in cognitive/AI solutions for customer service and engagement, eGain has not only developed cutting-edge technology but also proven use-cases and best practices over the last two decades. In this article, we discuss four use-cases that have already enabled blue-chip companies to transform—not just improve—customer service and engagement.

1. Understand and answer
Virtual assistants (VAs) help businesses wow customers with natural language understanding and distinctive self-service, while helping them cut costs and build brand equity. The best VAs are also multilingual and communicate in multiple modes—text-to-text, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech. Importantly, they know what they don’t know. When unable to answer the customer’s question, they escalate to human-assisted customer service with full context from the self-service interaction. For the VA to be able to do this out of the box without integration work, it needs to be an integral part of an omnichannel customer engagement hub which consolidates omnichannel interactions, knowledge, AI, analytics, and administration into one platform.

eGain AI clients understand and answer:

A large government organization in the UK uses the natural language capabilities of eGain Virtual Assistant™ to understand and answer questions from taxpayers, with intelligent and seamless escalation to live chat when necessary. Deployed in time to support the critical tax returns period, eGain Virtual Assistant and eGain Chat™ helped deflect 77% of their phone calls within the first six weeks of the ?deployment!

2. Guide search and processes
While VAs are good at answering questions of low-to-medium complexity, AI reasoning technologies can guide customers and contact center advisors through interactions of higher complexity. Reasoning can guide users to the next best steps in their search for the correct answer or in-service processes such as troubleshooting and advice. This conversational, dialog-driven guidance is based on intelligent understanding of the problems faced by the customers as well as customer service expertise drawn from the best agents.

AI reasoning applies learnings from past cases to find solutions for new ones. Learning should be derived through a curated model rather than a fully automatic one, especially when the stakes are high, to ensure the best outcomes and process adherence. Watch out for pretenders like rigid scripting and rule-based systems—they tend to put agents and customers in conversation cul-de-sacs and dead ends, especially when the customer goes off-script (which is quite common). Moreover, such legacy systems are difficult and expensive to maintain.

eGain AI clients guide:

• A global bank uses eGain’s patented AI reasoning technology to guide a largely novice agent pool through best-practice interactions across 11 countries, while reducing training requirements by half.
• A leading telco guides 10,000 contact center advisors and associates in 550 retail stores with eGain AI for a 37% improvement in First-Contact Resolution (FCR), 50% improvement in advisor speed to competency, and a 20% boost to their NPS (Net Promoter Score).
• A multi-play CSP reduces unwarranted “No Fault Found” handset returns and exchanges by 38% with AI-guided problem resolution in the contact center.
• A white goods giant saved $50M per year by reducing unnecessary truck rolls through AI-guided problem resolution in the contact center.

3. Help decide

According to an executive survey by Grove Critical Thinking, when presented with the proposition “bad decisions cost my organization time and money,” 70% of survey respondents either agreed or strongly agreed. Moreover, 82% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Bad decisions harm my organization’s reputation in the marketplace.” Decision-making for customer engagement is business-critical—it could spell the difference between boom and doom!

Again, unlike rule-based systems that start breaking down as decisions become more complex, AI reasoning helps make decisions with a flexible approach, working with incomplete or ambiguous information and by comparing similar decision-making scenarios from the past. The output could be the final decision or be one of the decisions in a larger customer engagement and contact center management process.

eGain AI clients decide:

• An insurance giant decides how to precisely route customer queries to the right agent, with decision-making powered by eGain AI.
• A global media and legal services giant makes decisions on whether to take on malpractice lawsuits based on multiple factors like the amount of damages, win rates in the past for any given topic, tendencies of specific courts/judges.

4. Comply with regulations

Enforcing compliance amidst ever-changing industry regulations, whether it is for content, access, or actual customer interactions makes customer engagement challenging for companies, particularly in highly-regulated industries. In fact, 70% of compliance professionals expect increased regulations, 59% expect increased personal liability, and 69% expect compliance staffing costs to rise, per Thomson Reuters. This is where AI can add immense value by guiding agents through the compliance maze.

eGain AI clients comply:

• A marquee global bank uses eGain AI to guide advisors through a step-by-step dialog, and industry-compliant questions, to qualify and onboard small business clients.
• Another bank serves wholesale clients in multiple countries with a single eGain-powered AI system that incorporates the global parent’s best practices, while considering local regulations in those countries.
• Utilities clients use AI guidance not only to resolve customer problems but also to help them avert safety hazards such as gas leaks, while complying with regulations on who asks and does what and when. This is not just mission-critical customer service—it is life-critical!

Next steps

The best way to pilot AI is through a real-world trial in a production setting. That’s exactly what eGain Try+Buy for AI offers, along with no-charge guidance to quick value and no obligation to buy! Contact us at info@eGain.com to learn more.