Four Challenges to Overcome for AI-Driven Customer Experience

Frontiers |

P.V. Kannan and Josh Bernoff

To win over skeptics, champions of AI-driven customer service need to show more benefits than just saving money. There are economic, technical, political, and cultural barriers that savvy managers must overcome in order to successfully integrate AI into their company’s customer service systems.

The Future of Customer Service Is AI-Human Collaboration

P.V. Kannan and Josh Bernoff

The future of customer service will allow bots and humans to focus on what they do best. For chatbots and virtual agents, that is handling routine cases quickly and efficiently. For the human supervisors, that is solving more complex problems, using empathy and emotional intelligence.

Creating Digital Offerings Customers Will Buy

Jeanne W. Ross et al.

How can companies decide which new digital offerings to pursue? Successful digital offerings are created at the intersection of what technologies can deliver and what customers want and will pay for. That point of intersection, however, has proved to be elusive. To find it, companies must experiment repeatedly, cocreate with customers, and assemble cross-functional development teams — and the insights gleaned along the way must be shared internally.

Selling Solutions Isn’t Enough

Hannah Grove et al.

Rather than trying to sell standardized products or services to the biggest possible set of buyers, B2B companies need to develop ways to help specific customers achieve better outcomes. Instead of describing their solutions, companies first need to understand customers’ specific challenges, objectives, operating practices, and competitive environment, then create offerings to deliver value within a customer’s specific business context and culture.