Connections

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be used to improve a company’s billing and tech support, as well as significantly increase efficiency and enhance customer experience (CX) with more personalization, according to Zendesk and Kajabi.

“You can’t just throw humans” at challenges that include sudden spikes in demand and traffic for a company, Sarah Reed, senior director of content and event marketing at Zendesk, said Jan. 27, during Zendesk’s “A CX Moment with Kajabi” webinar.

Agreeing, Jared Loman, VP of customer experience at Kajabi, said: “It’s also not logistically possible,” from a financial standpoint, to throw humans at the problem.

After all, he explained: “When you bring a human in, it takes at least several months before they’re fully trained, onboarded and really ready to make a meaningful impact…. You could have had all the money in the world and humans were not going to be the solution to this problem.”

Adding AI, ML

When it came to implementing AI and ML, “we maybe had a slight, tiny edge,” which was, “I think, like a lot of people, we were already kind of… thinking about” those technologies, Loman said. “We were starting to kind of become aware and open to it. And so we’d done a little bit of research.”

For his company, AI and ML are “all about self-service and the AI component is a search engine; it’s about surfacing the right resources to the user to address whatever question they’re answering,” he explained.

“We were a little bit ahead on the self-service side because it’s something that’s always been important to us,” he added.

The implementation of AI and ML, meanwhile, exposed some gaps that he wasn’t anticipating.

“For most businesses, when you’re just starting out, when you have four, five, six, seven, even like 50 people in the room who are working at your company, the amount of support tickets that you’re ingesting as an agent and the type of conversations that you’re having allow you to have a fairly solid feedback loop just naturally,” Loman said.

At that point, when one customer is having issues with a feature, everybody at the company knows about it and discusses it, he noted.

But when your company grows and has thousands of tickets, “you’re just not having the same conversations anymore and so you need a better way to understand [and] keep a pulse on what is happening,” he said.

Such gaps are where you can “see a lot of promise” with AI, he said. There were surprises. Some of the data reaffirmed things he and others at his company thought were the case, he pointed out.

Meanwhile, “probably one of the shockers” was the amount of tickets that came in for the settings page of Kajabi’s software application, he noted. That “kind of blew by mind” because it was fairly simple and not a heavily trafficked area of the app, he explained.

But that “exposed an opportunity for us to like really get sniper-targeted on an area that I don’t think I ever would have anticipated,” he said.

So, summing up, the AI was effective at “validating what we thought we knew and also exposing things that we didn’t,” he said, adding it also can help with the addition of captions for videos.

The Key to Success

Reed asked Loman what his top tips were for organizations who are starting to use AI and ML.

“Focus on your self-service strategy first,” he responded. “That is key to success in this space…. Self-service is really, really key because a bot cannot answer a question. Machine learning isn’t going to learn anything unless it has something to ingest, to feed back to your customer.”

Looking ahead to the rest of this year, he said: “I’m excited about creating very personalized experiences for our customers more than anything because what  machine learning and AI – just technology in general – can do is it can do things that agents cannot do on their own. It can surface information that would take an agent minutes or hours to accomplish.”

Reed responded by saying: “Along with that personalization also comes some great efficiency gains, which is good for your customers as well as your agents so that they’re not spending all that time working on things that they don’t need to.”