No one knows our most intimate secrets as well as our banks and telecoms providers. They know what we spent, when and how, and who we called, when and for how long.
Yet, when we have a problem and need to speak to their call centres, they behave as if they’ve never heard of you. That’s fine and well when they’re trying to verify your identity at the start of a call. But when you get down to business, whether it is resolving a billing issue or applying for a home loan, you expect them to know you a little better. And when they need to transfer the call to another department, you expect their systems to keep track of you. Instead, they have to get to know you all over again.
It’s as if the bank or mobile operator has suddenly become the Drew Barrymore character who suffers daily memory loss in the movie 50 First Dates. The Internet was supposed to provide the antitode. Then the cloud. Now, it’s the turn of artificial intelligence (AI).
Will AI save us from this intuitional memory loss?
“This is a data challenge,” says Zuko Mdwaba, area vice president and Africa leader of Salesforce, the world’s biggest maker of customer relations management (CRM) software. “It’s a legacy challenge that customers have. The general rule in computer science is junk in junk out.”
This means that, before AI can help data, data must help AI. Or, to put it another way, says Mdwaba, “data empowers AI because AI learns from the data”.
This is at the heart of Salesforce’s AI initiatives, which dominated the company’s annual software conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco last week.
“Three of the four most important themes here are AI plus data plus CRM,” he said during the conference. “One of the things that we really pride ourselves on is we’ve been a leader in CRM for many, many years. It’s because there’s a lot of investment that we’ve made over the years around CRM.
“The fourth element is trust. We’ve got this customer data cloud where you have to ensure that the data is credible.
“Wat has changed now is the rapid pace that generative AI it is evolving and leveraging data. But we need to use AI in an ethical manner: ensure that our customers or our partners and everybody that we’re working with continue to trust us and trust is not only in the service they deliver but in the data that we help them to deliver.
So you can’t have this combination of AI plus data without ensuring that the data is trustworthy and ethical. We’ve been talking about data being the new oil for more than a decade now. But it was more from a predictive way of doing it.
“Remember there was the world of business intelligence where you were looking at data reactively, like a rearview mirror of what happened yesterday. What was the performance? And then, based on the data points we have, what can we predict? What should be the forecast for the future?
“But with generative AI, it’s at the next level, because it’s not only predictive, it is it is also at a level where it’s like having an assistant to help you put things together. The power of generative AI today is that it can help salespeople to be more efficient with their time, with things like understanding the customer, like composing a proposal, and obviously there’ll be some human intervention.”
In the call centre, it starts with leveraging data, and can culminate in getting generative AI to suggest the best solution to a customer issue. But In South Africa, it can take an additional step, says Mdwaba.
“The things that were heavy lifting are going to be shifted quite exponentially so that the focus is more on how you put in that human element to ensure that you get close to your customer. When you look at banking or telco, when customers are phoning a call centre or a contact centre, a challenge is that it’s hard for the person that’s taking the call to understand the customer.
“AI is going to be pretty useful around that, understanding the customer, and then surfacing the right information and connecting the dots around the touch points that you have with the customer across channels.”
The agent is often incapable of grasping the context in which a customer is making a call. AI can do this, and connect those dots.
“When you call a call centre, it could be on the back of something that you’ve done online already, or raised a case online or spoken to a different agent. So AI is going to help coordinate that and be more relevant in terms of assisting customers from a service point of view. So for me, I think the biggest use cases will be in sales in service, as well as in marketing.
“At the centre of is the customer. In terms of leveraging AI, it’s not just leveraging for one for one part of the cycle, but for every customer, at the centre.”
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on X (Twitter) and Instagram on @art2gee.