Interacting with customers, including support and customer success, is an area of AI enabled applications that is seeing a lot of innovation and attention. Research endeavors and products are both pointing toward this as an area where AI can provide significant productivity and quality improvements.

An MIT study on ChatGPT for writing shows a 40% increase in productivity and an 18% increase in quality for certain business writing assignments, an important part of customer communication.

A study described in the Harvard Business Review had an interesting result about the acceptance of AI recommendations by people using the application. Past studies and much of the information on using AI results has indicated that individual users are more likely to use AI if the underlying algorithm and logic is understood. The results of this study showed the opposite and the authors have some hypotheses as to why that is the case.

One application area where a variety of AI and other analytical tools come together is in customer interactions. Forrester just published a Forrester Wave on a new category of application called Conversation Intelligence for Customer Service and the report is available free here from Cresta. There are variety of capabilities in systems like this such as conversation analytics, agent coaching, agent augmentation and interaction quality measurements.

Because of the expense of live agents there has been a trend over the past several years to try to reduce the amount of time live agents have to spend on support and these types of applications could provide a substantial boost to these efforts plus provide a better customer experience. Once these tools are successful in customer support expect to see them in other customer facing interactions.