Beryl Samba, Chief Operating Officer of PAWA IT Solutions, an AI Customer service Solutions company. Photo/courtesy.
Key Takeaways
- AI in customer support automates repetitive tasks, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues.
- Virtual AI agents use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to interact naturally with customers.
- Localized AI systems address language barriers, particularly in diverse markets like Kenya.
- AI technology improves efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances the overall customer experience.
The race to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by businesses is taking shape. However, it’s
still slow owing little knowledge on how to tap into this revolutionary technology which has the
capability to improve efficiency, safety and cutting costs.
Customer support is as old as business itself from the barter trade era to e-commerce. Even so, e-
commerce, digital native companies and generally service companies are at all times required to have the best customer service if at all they need to stay competitive.
AI and Customer Service
With the intent of AI, customer service is undergoing a revolution where AI systems are deployed to undertake repetitive tasks that otherwise would waste the customer service agent’s time. Cloud solutions are proving vital in development of virtual customer agents.
Virtual agent is a software system that uses artificial intelligence to interact with customers in a natural conversational way. With Natural Language Processing (NLP), virtual agents respond to customers queries just as a human customer agent.
Virtual AI Agents in Call Centers
Traditionally, call centers are equipped with automated voice messaging systems that provide customers with a range of solutions to which they have to select the one which address their queries. With AI however, call centers could have an Virtual AI agent who is trained to handle customer queries with precision, without having to customers to listen to automated call message.
Beryl Samba, the Chief Operating Officer at PAWA IT Solutions told JEDCA MEDIA that virtual AI systems is the future of call centers as many companies would outsource repetitive tasks to AI systems to allow humans to tackle challenging customer problems.
“The virtual agent is the first point of contact in connecting with the customers. Research shows that in many call centers the most common questions are repeated several times by different customers. We don’t need human interventions for such tasks. So virtual agents do such tasks and leave human interventions for more complex tasks. When you release human agents from repetitive tasks, the quality of their work increases,” Samba observes.
How AI Customer Support Enhances Efficiency
AI systems like ChatGpt and Gemini (Generative AI) are the most commonly used to answer general questions on wide range of topics. However, call center AI agents are trained on how to answer customer question based on individual company’s services. Samba says that AI, coupled with cloud computing can be deployed to solve wide range of problems, ensuring efficiency and time saving.
“Many people think of AI from the perspective of ChatGpt but AI is more than that. So many organizations are service oriented but are not getting the most out of AI. It can be applied to get data insights from what is happening in the call centers,” she says.
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To efficiently collect information and understand customer’s feedback from a call center, a lot of people have to be deployed to record, analyze and interpret the conversation between an agent and customer. On the other hand, AI tools can be used to do the same faster and efficiently.
Localized AI Customer Support in Kenya
Nelson Amenyo, a senior software engineer at PAWA IT says that there are many customer support AI system but most do not meet the local market demands as most of them uses foreign languages. In Kenya for instance, customers would speak in several languages including slang (sheng), which isn’t easy to analyze with English based AI systems, thus they are developing localized AI system that uses local languages.
“The idea behind the customer support AI is to serve customers in a more efficient manner. The
existing technologies are not taking care of local demands hence the need for local innovation,” he
notes.
Virtual AI customer support agents plays a vital role in analyzing customer’s sentiments, complaints as
well as topics that a customer discusses with a virtual AI agent. It also transcribes the conversation to help human customer assistants to read and understand customer demands. Experts suggests that this technology is likely to revolutionize customer support in credible ways.
