Redefining Customer Experience with Hybrid Intelligence
“Brings The Best of Machine and Human Intelligence Together To Elevate Customer Experience For Brand Across The Globe”
2020 was the year no one of us expected.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit all of us and instantly pushed companies all over the world to transform their business. COVID-19 changed the way we connect with our friends, family, colleagues as well as changed how customers and companies communicate to each other. Companies need to work extra hard to find new creative digital solutions out of necessity to keep them connected with their customer in real-time despite offline store closed, social distancing and work from home policy. Boundaries between our online and offline lives dissolved. These trends of communication are here to stay even after the pandemic.
Twilio surveyed over 2,500 businesses globally to better understand the effect of COVID-19 on the company’s digital transformation and communication roadmap. The result is that, COVID-19 accelerated companies’ digital communications strategy by six years (Twilio Report, 2021). In brief, a decade-long digital transformation roadmaps of almost every business all over the globe, got compressed into weeks even days in order to adapt fast because of the COVID-19 effect. Businesses in every industry had to figure out how to reach their customers seamlessly, real-time and across channel.
So, what can we do as a business owner to ensure customer engagement through COVID-19 and even beyond?
Before answering that question, let’s take a look at another important study from NICE inContact (Nasdaq: NICE) found that Millennials and Generation Z (let’s call them Generation Now) are the main force of digital-first future of Customer Experience as they forms the largest part of the global consumer base (Businesswire, 2019). This is also true in Indonesia as the number of Generation Z reaches 75.49 million and the millennial generation reaches 69.90 million (Kurniawan, 2021). Almost half of Indonesia’s population are Generation Now.
Another finding from NICE inContact is that almost 60% of Generation Now have used private social messaging to contact business representatives or customer services. They also want businesses to allow them to interact using social messaging apps (72% and 69%, respectively). It is understandable since the generation now is digital savvy. They were born in the era of smartphones and other high-tech devices with Artificial Intelligence (Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant. In result, they have a much shorter attention span, are impatient, they are extremely comfortable doing multitasking and expect personalized engagement, more importantly, using social media as their main tools to contact business representatives (Alexandra).
Now, we can answer our questions above, the future solutions that business owners must prepare to compete in the era of pandemic and beyond as well as with the digital savvy consumers is redefining how businesses interact with consumers with the implementation of AI and omni-channels platforms including private social messaging are fundamental to deliver seamless, real-time and exceptional customer experiences across channel.
How exactly is the exceptional CX that exceeds the expectations of the digital-savvy customers? The answer is Hybrid Intelligence.
Hybrid Intelligence is a collaborative intelligence between humans and AI that are joining forces (Wilson & Dougherty, 2019). But, many of us will think why not just implement only an AI for our business? Not to mention that we see how AI is depicted in the movies such as Iron Man with its super AI, Jarvis that can understand complex order and can think by itself. Well, up until today, nobody knows how to build Jarvis-like AI. Whether this is even possible in the future is still up to debate.
The current advanced technology of AI is that it is becoming good at many “human” jobs, especially the repetitive and simple ones such as data entry, bookkeeping, providing customer service virtual assistant (voicebot and chatbot), automatically reserve restaurant, ticketing system, hotel booking, even translating language and manufacturing assembly. But, there are still lots of shortcomings that AI cannot yet perform complex tasks alone, such as applying knowledge to decision making or creative tasks.
In particular, current AI technology still has significant difficulties adapting to ever-changing environments and self-adjusting, they lack what we all call common sense (Lake et al., 2017). AI is exceptional at conducting specific, well-defined tasks based on a particular type of data and in a controlled environment, AI is also good at finding complex and subtle patterns in huge sets of data. Not to mention that they don’t get bored and deliver speed and accuracy (Wilson & Dougherty, 2019).
”Humans and machines can enhance each other’s strengths.”
On the contrary, humans outperformed machines in creative tasks, complex problems that need complex decision making and dynamic social interaction tasks. Not to mention that humans can learn from only a few examples (while AI needs to be trained with a massive amount of datasets) and work efficiently even when there is noise and uncertainty (unpredictable environments). This is why humans and AI need to work together and join forces as hybrid intelligence.
The Future of Customer Experience with Hybrid Intelligence
Businesses must innovate their services into hybrid intelligence and handle issues, complaints, booking, payments and other digital services seamlessly, real-time and personalized every customer engagement with speed and accuracy while maintaining the human touch. Let’s take a look at one of the example below on how the hybrid intelligence works:
In the picture above, AI become the center but do not forget that behind the screen, live agent orchestrate everything, from preparing the knowledge base to answer the query that the AI cannot respond ‘yet’ meaning that it needs to be train again and input the result into the knowledge base so in the future when the similar question being asked again, now the bot can answer it.
This process shows that AI amplifies our cognitive strengths, interacting with customers and employees with accuracy to free the live agent to do higher-level tasks while still embodying human capabilities. With AI delivering services with an all-important empathetic “human touch”, the role of live agents is becoming the key in the future of Customer Experience.
“Human and AI, preserves the “human touch” that personalizes every customer interaction with speed and accuracy.”
Another important reason why hybrid intelligence is important to deliver exceptional Customer Experience in the pandemic era and beyond is that businesses must avoid making complicated customer journeys. The most common pain point are the brand owner customer service not always available at 24/7, brand owner cannot follow all the queries that come from customers in different channels (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter) all at once, customers’ issues hardly resolved in one interaction and forced to repeat themselves each time they communicate to the customer service, brand owner customer service get repetitive questions and transactions or use cases.
We can see from the picture above that initially customers had difficulty contacting the brand owner due to limited channels, long processing time, not completed in one contact and channels that were not integrated. Now, customers have easy access to brand owners quickly, seamlessly and integrated this all due to the collaborative intelligence between humans and machines.
Conclusion
Avoiding the impact of the AI revolution in the workplace is no longer an option. Everyone across the organization, be it fresh-level employees or senior managers, management and executives as well as C-level, should embrace AI as an essential tool that will improve business productivity, employee well-being and recruitment processes. We will be working alongside AI, organizations that use AI only to replace humans through the automation process will miss the full potential of AI capabilities. Such strategy is erroneous from the get-go.
The future of Customer Experience is bright, when we have the right capabilities to be prepared for a world of Hybrid Intelligence.
Tomorrow’s leaders will instead be those that embrace collaborative intelligence, transforming their operations, their markets, their industries, and — no less important — their workforces. — H. James Wilson*
*Accenture Global Managing Director of Information Technology and Business Research
References:
Alexandra. CQ Net Online. The future of work is Hybrid Intelligence: How Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence support each other. https://www.ckju.net/en/blog/future-work-hybrid-intelligence-how-artificial-intelligence-and-human-intelligence-support-each-other/59482
Businesswire. (2019). Millennials and Generation Z Are Driving the Digital-first Future of Customer Experience. https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2019-12-03/millennials-and-generation-z-are-driving-the-digital-first-future-of-customer-experience
Kurniawan, D. (2021). VOI Online. BPS: Indonesia’s Population Is Dominated By Humans Born In 1997–2012 And 1981–1996. https://voi.id/en/news/28251/bps-indonesias-population-is-dominated-by-humans-born-in-1997-2012-and-1981-1996
Lake B. M., Ullman T. D., Tenenbaum J. B., and Gershman S. J. (2017). Building Machines that Learn and Think Like People. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 40.
Twilio Report. (2021). Twilio Covid 19 Digital Engagement Report. https://www.twilio.com/covid-19-digital-engagement-report
Wilson, J & Daugherty, P. (2018). Collaborative Intelligence: Humans and AI Are Joining Forces. From the Magazine (July–August 2018). https://hbr.org/2018/07/collaborative-intelligence-humans-and-ai-are-joining-forces
