How Trusted AI Opens Up New Possibilities for Customer Service

The question of how AI will impact service delivery is top of mind for service leaders and contact centres globally. The answer is increasingly clear as conversational, predictive, and generative AI capabilities come together to improve agent productivity and customer service.

When talking to service leaders and contact centre professionals about their priorities, there’s a consistent theme. They remain focused on efficiently meeting customer expectations, but this has become harder to do.

As customer expectations rise, so do calls and emails to the contact centre. And the cost to handle those calls and emails has increased, driven by inflation and increased wages. Self-service channels resolve some  questions and requests, but those that remain are more compex. 
The good news is that AI is ushering in a new era in service delivery, one where customers and agents are both more empowered and issues are resolved faster.

Why trusted AI is a game changer

What if you could automatically generate content to help customers solve their own problems and deliver that content over a connected set of engagement channels? 

Or what if you could automatically generate a service plan to solve your customers’ issues and then evaluate and improve that plan using AI? 

It’s easy to get excited about the future of customer service, but for many organisations, it has felt out of reach. They want assurance that these new large language models (LLMs) are not going to hallucinate and provide the wrong answer or make a promise to customers that they can’t keep. 
This is where trusted AI is changing the game. Trusted AI delivers responses grounded in an organisation’s data. So when a customer asks for help from a customer service chatbot, the response is informed by an understanding of who the customer is and what they might need. It’s also informed by  knowledge articles, product documentation, and other unique data.

Einstein 1 Service brings AI into the flow of work

Einstein 1 Service brings together trusted AI and data to support the delivery of personalised customer service at scale. 

It starts with meeting customers on their channel of choice and providing a self-service experience that allows them to resolve their own issues with the lowest possible effort. 

If that’s not possible, customers are seamlessly connected to an agent that has AI superpowers to meet their expectations. Those superpowers come from having all data unified in Data Cloud and using it together with solutions like Einstein Copilot to bring AI into the flow of work.

A customisable, conversational, and generative AI assistant for CRM, Einstein Copilot helps agents surface relevant answers to customers’ questions using their internal knowledge base. Einstein Copilot can also help with tasks such as routing cases for approval and generating conversation summaries. 

Einstein Copilot serves as an effective assistant to service leaders, too, and especially when paired with Service Intelligence. Powered by Data Cloud, Service Intelligence brings together all the data a service leader needs to make informed decisions fast. 

For example, service leaders can quickly see key metrics such as total number of escalated cases, average time to close, and customer satisfaction scores. They can also spot specific issues such as a spike in a particular support queue. Then, they can interact with Einstein Copilot to identify the reason for that spike and find a solution.

How Xero are reimagining service delivery

Nigel Piper, Executive General Manager, Customer Experience at Xero, is focused on how generative AI can improve the experience of both customers and employees. 

The business is already several years into its AI journey and uses it to help customers and partners quickly find answers and support via Xero Central. More than 96% of their questions are answered instantly through the content created by Xero while the rest can be immediately directed to the appropriate specialist.