Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Experts Offer AI Best Practices, Forecasts

September 17, 2018

Artificial intelligence may seem futuristic and, in the future, AI will indeed be a large part of our lives. But, this technology is present today in some environments and expectations for additional adoption in the near term are bright.

Consider Siri. It’s on more than half a billion devices today. Straight-up customer service solutions sometimes rely on AI as well. Of course, these are just a couple examples of what’s possible with AI and McKinsey says AI has the most potential in retail marketing and sales. It can be used to improve upon customer service, personalization, pricing, and promotion.


“Our use cases show that using customer data to personalize promotions, for example, including tailoring individual offers every day, can lead to a one to two percent increase in incremental sales for brick-and-mortar retailers alone,” the firm says. It estimates AI has the potential to create between $3.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries.

Meanwhile, IDC estimates that by 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services. It's forecasting that by 2021, 75 percent of enterprise applications will use AI.

“From predictions, recommendations, and advice to automated customer service agents and intelligent process automation, AI is changing the face of how we interact with computer systems,” the research firm notes.


For organizations to get the most value from AI-based solutions, Ryan Lester of LogMeIn suggests, they need to make sure they can listen and respond appropriately, deliver personalized service, and pass off the interaction to a human when it makes sense to do so. Natural language processing can help AI to listen and become more adept at understanding, he suggests.

“AI is emerging as a powerful way for companies to provide highly personalized 24/7 service [for] customers without overtaxing support teams. By delivering on an omnichannel customer service approach – including AI – customers get the best of both worlds. Quick self-service when they want it and an empathetic human agent when they need it,” writes Ryan Lester, director of customer engagement technologies at LogMeIn.

Peter Zeinoun, director of support product at of LogMeIn, will be giving the address “Reimagining the Employee Experience in an Age of AI” at The Future of Work Expo Jan. 30 in Fort Lauderdale. For more information about this event and presentation, click here.




Edited by Erik Linask



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