Lyft claims that customer-service request fulfilment has become 87 percent faster. This follows an initial implementation of having Claude field questions from drivers themselves.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Lyft says that the chatbot only handles common queries and will otherwise direct customers to human customer-service representatives.
- According to Anthropic, the creator of Claude, over 40 million riders and more than one million drivers are a part of the Lyft ridehailing “community”. So, quite a lot of people will be able to interact with this customer-service A.I.
- This represents yet another instance of a major company integrating A.I. in a big way in its operations.
- Customer service has been an area that A.I. experts identified early on as potentially seeing a lot of automation, and Lyft’s decision here seems to confirm that.
- Part of why A.I. is attractive to many business owners for a customer-service application is that most customer service, whether done by humans or A.I., is largely heuristic and follow-the-script by nature.
The Significance for Business Owners
In this context, one thing missing from A.I. that matters is the ability to feel emotions and understand implicitly the significance of feeling anger or fear or confusion or whatever else a customer or driver may be calling about.
That could be a drawback in some cases. Sometimes a good strategy for satisfying a customer is offering an olive branch of emotional support. “I’m sorry” or “I understand how frustrating that may be for you” sometimes works or sometimes doesn’t come out of the mouth of a human (who may or may not be sincere at that moment).
However, who would feel emotionally assuaged by an A.I. that cannot feel emotions and so is obviously just programmed to say a certain thing? In this instance, being able to reach customers on an emotional level is not as likely.
On the other hand, this lack of emotions can be an asset in situations with very-ornery customers who would push every emotional button on even a seasoned customer-service rep who has the patience of a saint. Here, A.I. can handle with unbreakable “calm” and “patience” (things the A.I. can’t actually feel) even the most difficult customers.
From a business owner’s perspective, situations like that make it obvious that A.I. can suddenly have managers focus on just satisfying the customer without having to worry about any emotional frustration or strain a human employee may have as a result of a particularly incensed customer.
Customer-Service Chatbots Are Becoming More Widespread
Chatbots have dependably been one of the most-popular forms of A.I., especially during this recent boom of A.I. development that started with the public debut of ChatGPT in late November 2022.
You yourself may have been noticing these chatbots if you have had to call a customer-service line for a company recently. Maybe it was only brief, finding out information about the nature of the call then redirecting you to a human on the other line.
Or, maybe the entire interaction was with A.I., and you got what you needed.
One thing that does seem certain is that the more powerful that chatbots get, the more willing tech companies will be to sell chatbots to companies to answer a wider range of questions.
Not only bigger knowledge bases, but greater adaptability and flexibility will also push chatbots to a new level of implementation across businesses in all industries.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Lyft will likely be keeping close tabs on customer and driver satisfaction with the A.I. customer service, which is worth paying attention to as this could help light the way for how to best implement A.I. in customer service.
Business owners considering implementing A.I. chatbots for customer service should weigh the pros and cons of A.I.’s lack of emotion, along with having to limit its flexibility, as A.I. hallucination tends to generate wilder and more-ridiculous mistakes than human customer-service reps making a mistake.
Consider also the industry you work in and whether customers will be truly satisfied with A.I. on the other end of the line.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
Recent Comments