🤔 Is AI for customer service going in the right direction

“It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success. “ — George Washington Carver
 

Carver has me wondering if technology is running customer service. Unfortunately, I think it just might be. Here’s why…

In today’s newsletter:

• Is AI for customer service going in the right direction

• AI news roundup

• Papers

• Learn

Pense

Serving mankind has been the foundation of society since the beginning of everything. Businesses that serve the needs of a community and serve them well, grow.

But customer service at least in the US has gotten more frustrating over the years.

• automated systems that can’t understand accented English,

• unclear redirects when you call a hotline

• outsourced call centers where no one has power to solve problems,

• oh and this tipping culture where tip screens pop up everywhere even when you walking and checkout with no service provide,

Tech has broken service.

Here’s a few stats from Forbes and Gartner:

• 63% of customers are frustrated by self-service options, such as ChatGPT and similar technologies.

• 68% of the customers surveyed said they had not successfully resolved a customer service issue using AI or ChatGPT-type technologies

• Customer retention drops 38% when a customer is directed to 3 or more channels.

While I haven’t checked out how these ‘stats’ were created, I do understand the sentiment that they convey.

*Caution: one cuss word used in video below.

@rorydouglasofficial

Are we really eliminating customer service in the name of technology and artificial intelligence? Whatever happened to "Hello sir, have a ... See more

Whether or not it’s corporate greed, I don’t know. I don’t run a corporation. But I do know that as the sentiment spreads, pressure will be put on technologist to develop solutions. How can AI decrease the cost of the customer service experience without ruining the experience?

It’s time we rethought some of the implementations we’re suggesting and dig into the customer experience implementations. AI needs to have better conversations with business.

Weekly AI news round up

• Alibaba’s ModelScope community launches an English edition. We think of hyperscalers, we often only think of the big US players( AWS, GCP, Azure). But Alibaba is also a force to be reckon with. At their recent conference, they announced an English version of their open source AI model community. Read more here. Check it out here.

• Over in the UK, The Centre for Long-Term Resilience wants an comprehensive AI incident reporting system put into place. This would have a wide reaching impact on AI regulation if implemented. Read more here.

Papers

• Missed the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference? Find a roundup of papers submitted by Amazon here.

• Researchers North Carolina State University at propose a new approach, Multi-View Attentive Contextualization (MvACon), to mapping a 3D space using 2D cameras. Read more here.

Learn

On the ethics of AI and Vision

On AI for contact centers

Updates to AI for vision