How to engage customers--and keep them engaged--is a focal question for organizations across the business-to-consumer (B2C) landscape, where disintermediation by digital platforms continues to erode traditional business models. Engaged customers are more loyal, have more touchpoints with their chosen brands, and deliver greater value over their lifetime. Yet financial institutions have often struggled to secure the deep consumer engagement typical in other mobile app–intermediated services. The average visit to a bank app lasts only half as long as a visit to an online shopping app, and only one-quarter as long as a visit to a gaming app. Hence, customer service offers one of the few opportunities available to transform financial-services interactions into memorable and long-lasting engagements.

Bots are now a key starting point for conversations with customers, so it's vital that companies think through how they use them. Artificial intelligence is a technology that has already transformed how consumers interact with their home devices, with brands, even with their cars. It has shown benefits both for companies and customers, but what's next for virtual agents and their kin? In this webinar, P.V. Kannan, coauthor of "The Future of Customer Service Is AI-Human Collaboration," discusses how virtual agents are proving themselves as a technology and the ways AI-driven customer service will empower contact center agents to provide great customer experiences. Get periodic email updates on upcoming webinars, panel discussions, and other special events.

We humans never stick to the same thing forever. Be it video games, songs, movies, cellphones, we choose something latest and trending over the former. Likewise, businesses are also choosing new and trending ways to provide customer support. The latest way they're shifting towards is AI-powered customer service. But what is the reason they are advancing to this technology?

There is no shortage of data providers pitching database marketers on how great their data source is. Do good database marketers throw away all their existing data sources to use the new and (allegedly) improved data? They run simulation models to see if the new data source produces different results indicating who to market and how to market them, and they test the potential new data source to see if it produces superior response and conversion rates to the existing data source(s). Too bad customer service doesn't do this. Or at least, it doesn't seem like they do this. From what I can tell reading the banking press and blogosphere, customer service departments in banking seem ready and willing to shut down all existing service approaches and rely on AI (artificial intelligence).

One of our neighbours is a company called Rainbird which is building a commercial AI platform. We paid them a visit to learn more about AI and its intersection with design. Artificial Intelligence is a very wide, multi-disciplinary field. This means that there's no single model for how software and hardware come together to create practical applications. Knowledge modelling: This is a way to gather and organise human input to capture a particular area of knowledge.