Generative AI isn’t ready to “go it alone,” and it’s becoming evident that effective human-machine collaboration will achieve far greater results and revenue impacts.
Customer experience is arguably generative AI’s most affected operational area. It’s estimated that up to 30% of traditional customer support functions are being replaced by AI-driven efficiency. A clearly defined human-in-the-loop (HITL) strategy can extenuate the customer experience to new heights, ensuring retention, business reputation, and repeat business.
The AI-Customer Experience – an Opportunity and a Challenge
Hubspot’s research says that 79% of customer support leaders value AI for their strategy. A report by LivePerson states that 91% of businesses are positive about using AI for customer engagement, with a massive 96% believing generative AI will enhance customer interactions.
By 2022, pre-generative AI chatbots were expected to save businesses more than $8 billion each year and around 30% of customer service costs.
Today, generative AI chatbots, and custom GPT bots, can present customers with fast, accurate responses to their questions 24/7 and in multiple languages. AI can deliver consistent experiences and reduce customer service wait times. Chatbots save human agents substantial time, leaving them bandwidth for more expert tasks, problem-solving, and creativity. Notably, human customer experience agents will have more time for complex customer inquiries. What’s more, the logs created by customer-bot interactions are incredibly powerful sources of customer insights, and AI can even upsell or generate qualified leads.
However, generative AI chatbots for customer service have drawbacks. There are the usual risks associated with AI, such as security and data privacy concerns, inaccuracies, bias, and hallucinations, and the risks may depend on the guardrails in place and the data provided to train a chatbot.
Even generative AI chatbots can be inconsistent and struggle to understand context. They lack the empathy of human agents. Without reasoning and emotional skills, chatbots can only escalate problems based on the content of the conversation rather than a greater understanding of a problem or situation. And, let’s face it, sometimes humans would rather speak to other humans.
The Benefits of HITL for Customer Experience
Although HITL is a term used to describe how humans train AI models, it’s also being used to describe human-AI collaboration in action to produce output and in business operations. So, in the case of HITL for customer experience, it’s predominantly about how humans work in conjunction with chatbots to serve customers and how humans take responsibility for and oversee AI output.
Learn What is Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) and Why Does it Matter?
A HITL model in which human customer agents and chatbots work together to serve customers can significantly accentuate the customer experience and provide other operational benefits.
Enhanced customer service
Chatbots relieve human agents’ pressure from basic inquiries, repetitive tasks, and hefty call queues, freeing them to handle complex customer inquiries. Agents with more time to be thorough, caring, and empathetic can better answer these complex problems.
Less escalation
Before chatbots, customer frustrations were escalated from agents to supervisors. Now, the escalation process moves from chatbot to human agent. Bots can learn to understand when to refer to a human agent and facilitate this connection smoothly to ready and waiting agents.
Improved chatbots
Defining the role of HITL, including humans’ oversight and accountability, makes for better chatbots. Human agents and leaders understand the benefits, risks, and their roles and work to continuously improve AI systems by moderating and monitoring content, suggesting, and actioning modifications.
Personalization
Customers today expect more personalized experiences. AI can pull from customer datasets instantly to apply personalization, but chatbots also give humans more time to provide personalized experiences on the calls and chats they make and take. What’s more, chatbot logs are a source of further customer insights because often, we have honest conversations with AI.
Safety and compliance
Defining a HITL with accountability is vital for any industry but absolutely critical to some sectors, like banking or healthcare, where the slightest mistake can be incredibly detrimental to a customer and to the organization. The HITL role can be developed as an important safety feature to double-check bot activities.
Getting HITL for Customer Service Right
Train the chatbot
The first role of humans is to “train” the chatbot to deliver basic customer service by providing it with the right information, defining its response style, and adding appropriate guardrails. Then, it’s vital to test a chatbot’s responses thoroughly and make improvements, repeating the process until there’s a high level of confidence in the bot’s quality.
Continuously improve
Deploying generative AI continues beyond simply training a bot once. Chatbots must be constantly updated to reflect changing products, services, prices, and even customer expectations. As errors and weaknesses are identified, these must be corrected with the bot and retested. Sensitive sectors, like finance, medicine, and law, will require particular attention to updating bots with any changing rules, regulations, and standards.
Train the HITL
It’s vital to remember the impact of AI adoption on human workers who fear for the future of their jobs. Once reassured, human workers need training and support to empower them to work effectively alongside AI with an understanding of the risks, the benefits, and how to improve AI continuously. Human customer support agents will need to know how to repurpose their time, handle complex inquiries, seamlessly support customers alongside AI, and protect their employers from risks. Leaders will need to consider reinventing roles and, at the very least, updating job descriptions and role responsibilities.
Reward the HITL
AI disruption is resulting in many customer service agents moving from mundane, repetitive tasks to actually being able to problem-solve, be creative, handle escalations, and even upsell. Human workers will benefit from development and training to work alongside AI, but they’ll also be taking on more in-depth tasks and responsibilities. Employers will need to consider how they reward human workers who deliver better customer experiences and safeguard AI activities.
Remember the customer
Whilst organizations are busy reinventing both their tech stacks and employee roles, it’s vital not to forget what all this activity is for – the customer. Businesses may need to update customers on their use of AI and must certainly provide the option of speaking to a human agent. Some customers will prefer human assistance. Then, it’s essential to continuously review the performance of the bot, HITL, and the customer experience by, quite simply, asking the customer. Businesses can survey customer sentiment, but also employ metrics and KPIs reflecting human-AI-augmented customer service.
Learn how CustomGPT.ai enhances customer support efficiency.
