How AI benefits customer service

The use of advanced analytics techniques for customer care is finally moving out from the lab and into production. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can be used to find context in the tons of data that flow in and out of customer-facing organisations every day. These techniques allow a contact centre manager or agent to enrich (beyond basic caller or chat ID) who exactly is on the other end of the interaction, what that person's relative value is, anticipate why this person is interacting with the contact centre, and then both optimally route or escalate the interaction and provide the receiving agent with the right context and breadth of longitudinal data to better serve that customer. This has been a while coming. Analyst firm Forrester has been talking up "the age of the customer" - a period during which "technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics would emerge to challenge core notions of what it means to be a company, what it means to build human capital, and what it means to compete and win" - since at least 2010.