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The role of AI in providing a ‘channel-less’ approach to customer service

In today’s world, unpredictable incidents surface every so often and this demands higher adaptation capabilities on the part of organizations. Companies, small or large, must consider how to provide uninterrupted customer services even during times of crisis. What many enterprises fail to understand is that, although a crisis situation has negative consequences, it could also be an opportunity to scale up their customer service operations. Organizations must accept the fact that regardless of the changes, their clients and customers would still expect timely and satisfactory services from them.

Keeping pace with the demands of the present is the biggest challenge that companies generally face. Many organizations are struggling to find a way out of the outdated systems and processes to cope up with the new changes. There are primarily two issues that companies face, and those are:

  • Incorrect approach in dealing with the demands of the situation
  • Lack of the right technological solution

A quick analysis would reveal that many of the organizations that claimed to be customer-centric have challenges when it comes to adapting with changes. It is so, because in their attempt to be customer focused, they became more of a channel focused organization. While these organizations had the right objective, what went wrong for them was the execution. 

Before we move further, let’s understand what channel centric approach means. It simply means, trying to plug in the experience and logic from one channel to derive similar outcomes from another. For example, taking the logic from your voice channel and approximating the same in the web chat, SMS, IVR, social media, etc. This might sound familiar to our readers who are experienced in handling customer operations, because at some point in their career, they’d have come across a similar approach. However, there’s a better solution to this.

To be a customer-focused organization, we must first move to a channel-less approach as it centralizes the necessary logic and eliminates the need to create new systems and processes for individual channels. This way, you provide a consistent customer experience regardless of the number of channels you engage in. With this method, you connect the logic to the customer journey instead of the channel itself which makes it easier for customers to move across channels.

The technological advancements underscoring Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become crucial for enabling the latest demands of customer service. AI provides you the capability to apply the necessary logic across channels while continuously learning from each interaction. In the days ahead, AI and automation will be the most important technologies to power a channel-less approach if you focus on building a mechanism that puts customer service at the forefront. To know about the five key steps to a customer-centric service transformation, click here: Transforming Customer Service with AI 

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