Many companies are attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up, and improve the accuracy of, their customer service.
Examples include Go Moment, a California company that uses IBM's Watson AI technology to run a virtual assistant to help hotels automate their customer service, and Lola, a Boston startup that intends to use AI to help give agents "superpowers" as they text-chat with customers.
The first airline to use AI alongside human customer service agents is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. It has tapped DigitalGenius, a tech company in San Francisco, for the task.
As the companies describe it:
"When an agent needs to answer an incoming question, he/she gets a proposed answer through AI, which is trained on more than 60,000 KLM questions and answers. The agent decides whether the proposed answer is the right answer to the question, adjusts the answer if needed, and sends the answer across the appropriate social media channel.
"The system learns, based on the action of the agent, and becomes smarter in real-time.
"KLM receives around 100,000 mentions via social media per week and this number is still growing. A dedicated team of 235 social media service agents personally engages in 15,000 conversations which are all loaded in KLM’s customer relationship management tool.
"The AI system of DigitalGenius is integrated directly within KLM’s customer relationship management tool to provide a layer of deep learning and AI to service agents in real time."
Last April, DigitalGenius raised $4 million in investment, adding to the $3 million it had previously raised.
In the coming months, KLM will anxiously watch to see if AI is as good at saving companies money as it is at coming up with answers to questions.
In the coming years, the industry will anxiously watch how much AI technologies empower agents and how much they replace them.
Earlier: Phoenix from the ash cloud (or how KLM formulated its social media strategy)