AI-powered Services: How to Build AI Solutions for the Future

12Jul

State-of-the-art digital, automation, and AI solutions offer exceptional CX at a low cost. The real hurdle, however, is building services that take full advantage of these new technologies.

There shouldn't be any lingering doubt that CX is a huge growth factor. When IntellyLabs performed financial analyses of the performance of 85 consumer-facing organizations between 2010 and 2023, we concluded that organizations with the highest CX ratings achieved more than 75% of the revenue growth of their competitors.

This is not mere magic! Organizations that keep CX as their priority tend to increase their customer base, sell more of their products & services, and have a stronger customer retention rate than their peers.

Nor is it a piece of cake. The factors that enhance the CX of any organization—such as quick & personalized service—have always been costlier. The service depends on a huge number of motivated and motivated employees, supported by leaders and experts, combined with large-scale technical resources that continuously analyze trends related to CX.

Currently, only top companies are in a position to make sizable investments to enhance CX. After 2 years of rising inflation and high IRs, many organizations are looking for cost-effective AI solutions across their workflows. Business leaders are not optimistic about consumer demand, which makes them wary about new technical investments. And even organizations that want to upscale their AI solutions teams are finding it cumbersome to hire and retain the desired staff.

AI Solutions Is The Answer

In this scenario, many organizations are looking for AI solutions to solve their cost and CX issues. Modern developments in AI-enabled customer service promise outstanding improvements in productivity at the same time enabling the kind of personalization that can turn a normal customer service interaction into an unforgettable experience.

Gen AI solutions are helping organizations craft human-like communications based on customized preferences and history. Interactive gen-AI-powered bots or interactive-voice-recognition (IVR) systems can drive complex conversations in a fast and user-friendly way. As IVR and chatbot technologies move forward, CX will eventually evolve to a multi-channel AI-based support. At the back end, digital management systems can help companies adjust the schedules of the customer service team to meet the ever-increasing demand, while customer service agents using AI solutions can provide customers with quicker, more human-like answers.

As organizations race to implement AI solutions, they should avoid the perils that have hindered previous digital transformation efforts. In a 2022 McKinsey survey of world business leaders, 9 out of 10 said that their companies had planned at least one large-scale digital transformation in the previous three years. Overwhelmingly, those digital- -transformation efforts didn't go as planned, generating only 28% of expected ROIs & only 25% of expected cost savings.

Building an Organization With Exceptional AI Solutions

In the forthcoming wave of AI solutions, companies can jump over these hurdles by getting 3 essential things right:

Implementing the appropriate technologies at the optimal time.
Integrating the use of technology and applications of proven business improvement services.
Equipping the employees with the skills they require to embrace the technology.

The Right Technologies. The Right Time. The Right Way

Effective AI solutions shouldn't be built based on a single technology but rather put together from different technological components. Users need to choose the right component for each task. Gen AI solutions have given organizations powerful new ways to summarize and process interactions and inputs in different languages. When traditional tasks involve processing structured data, automating these tasks with AI solutions makes them quicker, more cost-effective, and more reliable. Integrating AI solutions amplifies their impact significantly.

Fix & Reimagine Digitized Workflows

Technology will not be able to fix problems caused by broken customer service workflows. It’s useless to create a quick, streamlined, and efficient workflow that still provides unsatisfactory customer service. This is the reason why top tech organizations need seamless integration of tech and traditional processes.

The 1st step is to understand and simplify current workflows in the organization. This involves managing the demand of customers and doing away with futile tasks using data mining, discovery, and documentation tools. By creating an example for the current state of workflows & streamlining policies, inputs, exceptions, & services, complexity can be significantly reduced.

Equipping Employees With the Right Capabilities & Skills

Skilled employees are crucial for any digital transformation. McKinsey's research on successful digital transformation in companies has found that top employees were 1.8 times more likely than others to have achieved their customer-related goals.

As technology moves forward, the importance of employee & skill management rises. Companies that have already made strides in the implementation of AI solutions expect to reskill huge chunks of their workforce over the coming years, with 79 percent aiming to boost the skills of more than 50 percent of their employees in that time.

So What Happens Now…

The journey to build AI solutions is fraught with hurdles. To make it a success, organizations should select the right technologies, implement them at the right phase of the digital transformation, and utilize them in the right way.

Companies should think beyond technology. Applying digital tools combined with traditional workflows, improving methodologies, and empowering employees to embrace continuous improvement will put any company on a fast track to a bright future.

If done right, AI solutions can create an upright circle, freeing up valuable resources to invest in customer service improvements and technical innovations that differentiate the organization from its competitors, enhance growth, & achieve a competitive advantage.