For any South African, there are few things that infuriate us more than load-shedding – one of them being the sudden and stomach-sinking feeling upon learning their passport has expired.
The expiration itself is not what sets off a wave of emotion or anxiety, it’s the deal-breaker realisation that this entails a visit to the nearest Department of Home Affairs branch to endure a long day of endless queues and ink-tainted fingertips.
But many are too frustrated (understandably) to realise the exhaustive procedure to renew their passport, or get any other service from home affairs is a symptom of a greater cause: the failure of government to integrate efficient and effective automated systems that might speed up customer-facing services.
As a result, the department has retained a bad service customer reputation for decades in the minds of almost every South African.
If home affairs were a private company, it would have been liquidated within its first six months, with competitors quickly snatching up its market share through the deployment of far more advanced systems.
Enter intelligence age with smartbots
Fourteen years ago, many successful businesses saw the value in employing a chatbot function on their websites, with the understanding that the next decade would lean towards a more digital-centric economy. Today, advancements in e-commerce have begun to revolutionise our global digital economy with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI).
The chatbots of yester-year, which were typically defined as a program that followed pre-defined rules and scripts, are becoming obsolete today.
We’ve all interacted with a chatbot at this stage – think of the many occasions in which you have been given a list of prompts in a chat-like screen at the bottom of a website, with another set of prompts until your issue or query has been identified. Pre-AI era chatbots offered a rather limited form of interaction, with no room for more nuanced engagement.
AI is a choice all businesses are going to be forced to make if they wish to remain relevant to their customers.
However, the proliferation of the chatbot’s successor, the smartbot, an AI-powered type of chatbot that uses advanced technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing and data analytics to simulate human-like conversations and interactions, has become the spearhead of customer interaction technology.
This bears significant consequence in a country like South Africa, in which consumers are growing less and less patient when it comes to contacting businesses and wanting timely responses to their queries, with many of them never receiving a response. A quick visit to Hello Peter demonstrates this.
One can almost conclude that South Africans are truly subjected to some of the worst customer service in the world, and this does not even take government services into account!
Hello Peter’s site immediately reveals tens of thousands of people's complaints going unattended. Sadly, this is the norm of customer service in our country − and consumers have begrudgingly accepted the fact that they will have to wait for over an hour to speak to any agent, only to be disconnected midway through their first sentence.
We’ve causally accepted that we might send an e-mail with no feedback for days on end, only to find out that the service ticket was cancelled as they could not get hold of us on the phone.
Unfortunately, companies are making it difficult for their customers to give them feedback and do business with them because they are governed by customer interaction services that simply do not deliver the level of satisfaction that consumers need and deserve today.
One of the biggest setbacks for businesses in building satisfactory customer service operations is the overhead costs required for call centres or teams dedicated to answering and resolving queries online (or on social media).
This is compounded by the fact that businesses may not have sufficient resources to run these operations 24/7, exacerbating the frustrations of customers with slow responses to their queries, or perhaps no responses at all.
In fact, when companies do try to call their customers, they fail to reach 30% to 40% of their clients (even with multiple attempts). This is because people don't pick up the phone, they are busy, or are sick of spam calls.
In comparison, up to 85% of users engage with WhatsApp messages that are relevant to them. This represents a ±40% uplift in reach without the associated costs of phoning clients over and over until they pick up.
Thankfully, AI presents a strategic opportunity to change the face of customer service in South Africa today. Besides the ability to have an interactive and open-ended engagement with a customer, AI smartbots eliminate mundane business processes that do not require the human touch.
If a customer must submit key documents like bank statements and proof of address for a credit card application, a smartbot can leverage other technologies, such as optical character recognition and natural language processing, to automatically extract the critical data from the customer’s uploaded documents and help complete the application faster. All a customer would then need to do is review and sign off on the final application.
Further to this, a smartbot has the potential to collate all complaints and provide a summary analysis of them instantly that can inform profit-saving changes in business operations.
Instant gratification 24/7
The world is moving at a much faster pace than before. This is enhanced by the change in technology and the automated way it is developing. Customer-facing services must meet the needs of consumers who desire instant gratification around the clock when they are faced with challenges regarding a business’s product or service.
You will see less debate on whether this technology will hold, but rather how it will determine which businesses will or will not survive this new tech wave.
The cost of this technology is justified when compared to the continuous overhead costs of human-based customer contact systems. Businesses have the opportunity now to stay ahead of their competitors and avoid losing valuable growth and profit at the same time.
AI is a choice all businesses are going to be forced to make if they wish to remain relevant to their customers over the next few years. We say that AI is a choice, not a chance, which means that outcomes and success are primarily determined by the decisions we make rather than by random events or luck.
It emphasises the importance of deliberate and thoughtful choices in shaping our future, rather than relying on chance or fate.
Share