I previously asked whether AI companies in customer service are the next Google’s, Instagram’s etc. Here’s some evidence on how that might occur.
The potential for automated conversations across all channels of a business, across all businesses in the whole world is huge. Adoption is growing, and if you’re the company providing the technology to these organisations, you’re on the path to becoming a huge organisation if you can continue to penetrate the market as it grows.
But there’s something else that these AI platforms have that some of the big guns don’t. Data.
You see, take Balto as an example. Balto provides agent assist technologies for call centres. Call centre agents, while speaking on the phone to customers, have a little widget in the corner of their screen. That’s Balto. And Balto listens to the call that they’re having with customers. Not only does it listen, but it understands.
Therefore, Balto can suggest courses of action for agents to take in real time, while they’re speaking to a customer. This has tremendous benefits for the business because they can cut down on agent training (the Balto assistant can bring them up to speed while they’re working), and they can make sure the customer gets a consistently great service (no more weak performing agents – Balto is the best agent you could have and its available to everyone in real time, all the time).
However, there’s something else.
Balto has quite a few customers. Those customers combined have millions of calls per year. And Balto hears every one of them.
So, in the same way as Google was built on its ability to organise and make sense of data, so too can Balto.
Balto has analysed over 100 million calls, aggregated the insights and made them available to call centres. Now, with Balto’s Real Time Index, call centres can understand how their agents are performing based on industry standards. Balto pretty much has a recipe for successful sales and customer service calls.
For example, imagine being able to detect an up and coming customer objection, then recommend how to resolve the objection based on the most successful calls that’ve been made through its platform. Imagine detecting things like dissatisfaction, looming complaints, perhaps sensing a contract cancellation or better still, a purchase commitment and being able to act on this in a way that’s more likely to get results.
Of course, there are ethical considerations here that myself and Marc Bernstein, CEO, Balto, have spoken about in detail together on our podcasts.
This data can be used to give all contact centres the ability to have consistently successful conversations with their customers. And that’s something that most would pay for!
