Whether you are part of a multi-national corporation or a small local shop, customer care is an extremely important part of your business. It is what brings you and your customers closer together. Here we will show you how Artificial Intelligence, especially Natural Language Processing, can become part of your customer care landscape.

What makes customer care successful?

In general, companies that excel in customer care have a better awareness of their client’s questions and complaints and therefore have a better retention rate. These companies have learned that for succeeding in their customer care, they needed to:

  • Enable a variety of communication channels to communicate with customers where they are.
  • Reply promptly to show customers you are ready for them.
  • Understand what they are looking for, what questions, concerns, and complaints they have to truly solve their problem.
  • Handle interactions effectively, by having processes organized and streamlined

How does Artificial Intelligence fit in customer care?

While customer care can happen in a variety of ways, natural language communication is the predominant way that companies interact with their customers. These can be an e-mail exchange, a text message conversation, a call, a letter with instructions, an online review, a social media post, a company newsletter, a document with information, etc. All of these activities generate natural language data in the form of either text or audio, and thankfully, there are machine learning techniques available to reap the benefits out of this unstructured data and support you in your customer care journey.

E-MAIL ROUTING CASE

Aevitae’s customer service receives hundreds, if not thousands of e-mails per day.  With our expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we developed an AI tool that automatically forwards 90% of the incoming e-mails to the right department.

CHECK CASE

Four steps of NLP in customer care

Here are the typical steps that any company can take to leverage Natural Language Processing to improve their customer care:

Step 1: Understand what your clients are telling you

It is important to know what matters to your customers and be able to answer questions such as: how are they contacting us? When are they contacting us? What are they contacting us about? For this, techniques such as topic detection and machine translation can help you get a better grasp of what customers are telling you.

Step 2: Provide quick wins for customers and agents

Once you identified the main issues from your customers, many quick wins may pop up. Often, very small changes can lead to big improvements in your customer care. Small improvements such as creating forms for common problems, or improving your website layout or FAQs section, or improving your search functionality by making it semantic agnostic will already empower you and your clients to have more efficient communication.

Step 3: Automate or optimize communication processes

Regardless of how empowered your customer is, or how much information you make available, people will always contact you. So, it is up to you to make sure that these interactions are as positive as possible. There are many ways to do this, and natural language processing opens possibilities, for example, advanced e-mail routing so that e-mails reach the right department quickly. It also allows for social media monitoring, so important posts and tweets get flagged. It enables support for your customer center agents, such as providing them with the right information they need to solve issues. Digital agents turn out to be a natural possibility, and suddenly your customer care becomes 24/7.

Step 4: Enable proper monitoring

Customers will always have issues and these issues might evolve, therefore, it is important to keep your customer care an active investigation loop. The same exercise performed in Step 1, can now become part of an ongoing monitoring process, where new questions and topics are spotted. The implemented solutions should also be monitored and the quality of interactions evaluated. Such evaluation metrics should be put in perspective since you might be able to solve a lot of issues in the beginning, but as your progress and customers can solve their own issues, you might be left with only the more difficult cases, which could lead to a dip of satisfaction in certain channels. Therefore a concrete evaluation strategy is needed to show you the real gains of improving your customer care processes.

Should you integrate Artificial Intelligence into your customer care?

Yes! The four steps are a gradual process that any company can take. The first step is easy, it requires low investment and it already guides you into a compelling business case. In the second step, you already start reaping the benefits. The third and fourth step brings your customer care game to a level you maybe never even thought about. In any case. At Mediaan, we have a team of data scientists and AI engineers who are ready to collaborate with you and make your customer care even more successful.

Happen to miss the other relevant NLP blogs? Don’t worry! You can check them out here:

This blog is written by Bruno Lubascher – Data Scientist & Business Line Manager at Mediaan.