Leverage AI To Remove Friction From The Customer Service Experience

Post written by

Puneet Mehta

Founder / CEO of msg.ai, an Artificial Intelligence platform for customer support.


Customer service could pose the biggest threat to companies in today’s consumer-centric culture.

Your younger self would think that we’re living in a strange time: Our meals are delivered to our doorsteps with precisely the amount of spices we need, we hire people to do simple tasks like hang pictures around our house, we hail and pay for rides with a few taps, and we can accomplish almost anything from a phone that is glued to our hands. Our razors arrive in the mail without us having to think about it, and we can order a pizza by simply saying it out loud to our home assistant.  

There’s been a common thread coming out of the innovation hubs over the last few years -- removing friction. As a society, we’ve largely come to expect everything to be easy, instant and meaningful. Having to wait for things is jarring. Even Amazon’s two-day delivery can seem long. Having to go out of our way to accomplish something can feel obtrusive and painful.

Both emerging and enterprise companies have made strides in removing friction from their customer journey, from subscriptions and curbside pickup to automatic payments and hyper-personalized recommendations. As the founder and CEO of an artificial intelligence (AI) customer-service company, I've noticed that customer service has not been given the same attention. It’s still quite an arduous task that can muster up the same feelings that your former self could relate to: frustration, irritation and inconvenience. When a person has to reach out to a company today with a question or issue, the experience could be a shock to their system if they experience friction like delayed email responses, long hold times or companies that fail to answer emailed questions.

Thanks to customer-obsessed companies like Amazon, Trader Joes and Zappos, companies are no longer regarded simply as a provider of good and services: satisfaction is not based solely on the quality of the product but of the entire experience leading up to and well after the purchase. Companies need to offer convenience and pay personal attention to customers. In a 2012 study, Walker found that 43% of companies ranked experience as the most important element of their business strategies (compared to the 20% who chose price), while a 2018 PwC report said that 73% of all respondents indicated customer experience was an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Price and quality have long been regarded as the key differentiators, so this is astounding.

At the same time that customer expectations are evolving at a rapid pace, so is the number of channels available to contact a company, making it harder and more expensive than ever for companies to keep up -- but creating plenty of opportunities for technology innovators to help them do so.

How Can Companies Use AI To Close The Gap?

According to Forrester, “customers just want an accurate, relevant, and complete answer to their question upon first contact so they can get back to what they were doing before the issue arose.” 

I believe one of the most tangible opportunities for companies to use AI today is with customer service, but without taking the right steps to set up a truly frictionless AI experience, it could do more harm than good. Here are a few things to consider when you're creating an AI solution for customer service to ensure it fits in with our customer-centric society:

• Include integrations: Ensure the AI agent you create can access customer and product-specific information by linking to other core business systems. For instance, your AI should have access to an order management system to be able to tell a customer where their package is, or tap into an inventory management system to alert someone when the sweater they want is back in stock. You want your AI to have the authority to solve issues, and playing into what Forrester found, provide a complete answer without the need for further follow-up.

• Offer human escalation: Your AI will probably not be able to automate the right response for every scenario. Human agents need to manage the more complex, emotionally-charged and unique situations. The human should be prepared to step into the same conversation to eliminate disruption on the customer’s side, whether that’s through a chat window, email exchange or voice conversation.

• Include customer 'outs': Some customers will always prefer to engage with a human, even if you create an AI that can do its job perfectly. In other situations, an AI might get confused about how a person is asking a question. Always make sure that the consumer knows how to get in touch with a human, whether that’s through a keyword or menu item. You might also want to think about what rules make sense. If a person asks the same question two times in a row, that might indicate that the response did not provide the information they needed and a human should get involved.  

• Understand and communicate AI’s abilities: If your AI agent engages with your customers first, be clear with your customers on what the AI is good at and can help them with and provide brief guidelines about how they should communicate with it, such as by using shorter sentences or not speaking in obscure slang. This sets up the AI for success, and despite how some companies perceive this might look, I've found that consumers are receptive to this. 

I believe automating customer support is the next frictionless frontier for the customer experience, which is more important than ever for a company’s bottom line and brand loyalty. If implemented correctly, your AI solution could empower brands to provide the personal touch, immediacy and convenience that customers expect.


Founder / CEO of Netomi, an artificial intelligence platform for customer support.