The most useful thing about artificial intelligence, in customer service, is that it forces the firm to be specific about which interactions ought to be human in the first place.
The editorial question
Before the technology question is the editorial question — which interactions, in the firm’s brand, are part of the brand. The firms that automate those interactions discover, sometimes years later, that they have automated their brand. The firms that protect those interactions discover that automation, applied elsewhere, was free.
A practical sequence
We have, with clients, found a useful ordering: the firm describes the interactions that must remain human, then describes the interactions that can be assisted but not replaced, and only then asks where automation belongs. The ordering matters. The reverse ordering produces the brand-automated outcome described above.
What the technology stack looks like
The technology stack is, almost invariably, less interesting than the operating decision behind it. The vendor selections are, mostly, downstream of getting the operating decision right.
Practice · Technology · Marketing