AI isn’t a plug-and-play technology. In order to build an AI system for your business you’ll need to devote employee time and labor to optimizing the experience.
Before your company generates any revenue from an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system implementation, it will be required to dedicate time and financial resources to the project. The scope of the project will determine the size of your company’s investment. Because AI implementations are designed to improve the lives of employees by eliminating repetitious work, you’ll need to incorporate employees into the AI system creation and implementation. Although these won’t necessarily represent new costs, since you probably won’t need to hire new workers, your business should be prepared to absorb the costs of the labor involved in the AI implementation. In this article we’ll discuss the many roles people will play in building and optimizing your AI system implementation, and why these upfront costs will ultimately pay big dividends.
When working with Amelia, IPsoft’s AI-powered digital colleague, your team will work side-by-side with Conversational Experience Designers. These IPsoft employees are charged with helping you create natural-dialog-based conversations. So, if you’re an insurance agency, you’ll need to dedicate a team of employees who can come up with a range of dialogue possibilities, including the tangents people might take during conversations, the idioms people might use when speaking with digital colleagues, and, most importantly, the specific terminology you’ll want the digital colleague to adhere to when chatting with customers. While this team is helping define these conversational elements, they won’t be directly generating revenue, but they’ll be helping to create a digital colleague who, in a few months’ time, can take on tasks that won’t require human intervention – so the costs’ benefits will come.
People On All Sides of the AI Systems Implementation
This team will also work with our Cognitive Implementation Engineers to ensure that Amelia has the appropriate emotional response to things your customers might say or do. What triggers might anger your customers? Are your digital agents dealing with acceptances and rejections? Will they be handling fraud-related issues? You’ll need to assign a team of employees to advise our engineers on the many emotional landmines that come with fielding customer service queries.
Once you’ve established a comprehensive list of triggers, you’ll want to work with our team to provide appropriate emotional responses. Should Amelia remain firm when telling a customer that he’s been rejected for a policy? Should she take a more understanding and empathetic approach and offer alternative plans? Should she escalate angered customers to human agents? This team goes through every possible scenario to help determine how Amelia should use emotional intelligence to deliver the best possible service experience. Although building emotional intelligence prior to launch doesn’t deliver ROI, when your digital colleague begins interacting with customers, the financial benefits will be substantial. Emotionally intelligent AI will put customers at ease, which will encourage them to return to AI for future issues, while will ultimately compound into an exponential number of automated resolutions, and more satisfied customers.
In addition to working on developing Amelia’s emotional intelligence, you’ll want to set up a creative team to work with our User Experience Designers to determine the best possible visual experience for customers interacting with Amelia. This includes the look and feel of the chat-based experience, as well as the avatar you’ll use to greet customers (Amelia doesn’t have to be Amelia).
These designers also will work with our designers to determine how and if customers can receive visual-based answers to questions. For example: If customers ask about different insurance policy options, you can have Amelia send them text-based information, or an image with different options and plan details. If you work in financial services and customers ask to see market trends, Amelia can send graphs and charts, versus words and numbers. Interactions can be customized to specific visual preferences, but we’ll need people on your team to work with us to build out the visuals.
AI Systems Designed to Improve Peoples’ Lives
Once your experience is built, and you’re ready to start training your digital colleague, you’ll need a team of employee super users to interact and engage with the technology to optimize its performance. This team will be focused on working out errors and unnatural language associated with early AI implementations. They’ll see to it that the digital colleague is answering questions correctly, with emotional intelligence, and following the paths you’ve designed it to follow. After initial success with a small user group, you’ll want to expand to larger group of employees.
Ultimately, AI is designed to improve the lives of your employees. AI such as Amelia will eliminate repetitious work and free employees to do more creative, revenue generating work. However, in order to get AI systems up and running, expect to dedicate a number of employee resources of various types to the project, so that ultimately your AI system will do what you need it to do to improve customer experience and grow revenue. In other words, the hard work upfront to develop your AI system will eventually pay off in the long-term, in multiple ways.