Running head: RESEARCH PAPER: CUSTOMER SERVICE AI 1

Research Paper: Customer Service AI

Maximus Cortes

NUAMES
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Research Paper: Customer Service AI

Introduction

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become more commonplace with the

advancement of technology with it being used in things such as vehicles and customer service.

AI is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally

require human intelligence. With vehicles it is used to drive for people so that the person does

not need to worry about some of the hazards around them as much. However, for customer

service things get a little bit different with its use being to actually talk or help others talk to

customers. This has caused many problems with what people believe is the right thing to do with

all of these new AI systems talking to customers without them knowing. Most would not think it

would be a problem except that studies show that a large percentage of people who have talked

to an AI communicator did not know it was an AI. There is a large argument of what people

should do with this type of AI in the future. With the question being “Is the use of AI in

customer service comfortable for the customer?”

There are multiple different angles that this question can be viewed from and different

people that it can affect. There are those who are already comfortable with the idea that an AI

will be answering their questions about a problem while others will still always feel

uncomfortable with a non-human talking to them. However, it is safe to say that the use of AI in

customer service will be used to try and make customers comfortable. In this paper, the main

points that will be covered are:

1. The main goal of AI in customer service is to improve the experience.

2. AI is advancing and most people do not know an AI is talking to them.

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3. The AI does not need to speak to the customer to help.

With the main goal of the AI in customer service being to improve the experience that the

customer has when calling, many people think back to when this was first attempted and how the

experience was not much better than normal calls. However, with the upgrades that AI has had

over the years, the way they are used in calls has also changed. Many of these changes can be

shown through the use of things such as Virtual Agents. These are AI that have been specifically

made for customer service so they can answer the most common of questions with the most

patience imaginable. It will answer questions about fixing something for as long as the customer

needs them and “doesn’t care if that takes three minutes or 25 minutes” (Kannan & Bernoff,

2019). Unlike humans, who will become tired and try to end the call quickly, the virtual agents

are made to help and the work pays off because “When machines handle routine inquiries,

customers are happier” (Kannan & Bernoff, 2019). With the added advantage that this allows the

human workers to answer some of the more complicated questions and gives more time to do so

without the other simple question being dropped on them, AI is improving the experience.

Although these types of AI have been upgraded from what they used to be, not all

companies have decided to change to these better AI. This causes many people to still have bad

experiences with the AI systems that many companies have in place. However, there is still

another cause for the terrible experiences that people have with AI. This being that many people

don’t enjoy talking to AI chatbots and would rather talk to an actual human. The personal choice

can have people have a difficult time with getting through customer service because some

questions would be easier to answer with the AI and even though the customer may have asked

to talk with a real person, they would be transferred back to the AI. A person who this had
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happened to stated that “I was connected to a human representative, but before I had time to utter

my predicament, he told me ‘I shall put you through to the booking system’ – and the infernal

loop resumed.” (Polani, 2017).

The next point that needs to be proved is that AI is advancing enough that people will not

know the difference between the actual person and the virtual agents. With the improvement in

the voices of the AI by recreating many different voice types and accents in technology like

Amazon’s Alexa. Then people will start to implement them into their customer service chatbots

so that people will not immediately change to human workers for the more simple questions.

This plan seems to be working because “a survey found that 45% of people ‘prefer chatbots as

the primary mode of communication for customer service activities’” (Ingram, 2018). And the

amount of people that prefer the chatbots have been rapidly increasing these past few years

because of the upgrades. Many say that the rate at which this technology has been increasing is a

bit frightening because “among those who thought they had not (talked to AI), 63% actually had”

(Ingram, 2018).

There is also a lot of worry for those who work in customer service losing their jobs

because of the amount of calls that AI can take in far surpassing that of the amount that some

human workers can answer. With certain chatbots such as ABIE being able “to handle more than

25,000 inquiries every month,” the fear of losing jobs becomes that much more justified in the

eyes of workers (Kannan & Bernoff, 2019). However, a company cannot start with having an AI

answer calls alone. The company must know exactly who their customers are when it comes to

their personalities because the AI must be made with that in mind to make sure that the

customers are as comfortable as possible. This means that “the businesses that do the best job of
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harnessing AI for customer service will be those that know their customers’ journey and their

personas” (Ingram, 2018). This also gives an opportunity to those that work on AI to get jobs in

those companies to develop the type that they need.

There is also another underlying problem with making all of the AI in customer service

sound more human-like, the fact that some people are a bit uncomfortable with not knowing if it

is an AI that sounds like a human, or maybe a human that isn’t very emotional in their tone of

voice. This has made people question as to whether or not industries should be able to put their

customers on a call with an AI chatbot without telling them that who they will be talking to was

not human. Some people believe that they shouldn’t need to tell the customer that they are

talking to an AI if said AI has passed the Turing Test. The Turing Test is a test of a machine's

ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human

(​Wikipedia​). Why should it be disclosed that the customer is talking to an AI if the chatbot is

exhibiting human behavior? Afterall, the customer knowing that they are talking to an AI will

only give them a reason to try and switch to a human worker who may be better suited for more

difficult problems. This is also proven further when people notice that “AI voices and chatbots

work best when the human on the other side of the conversation doesn’t know it’s AI” (Elgan,

2020).

With everyone being different in what they prefer for the AI options, it is difficult for

many industries and governments to decide if they should tell people if an AI is speaking and

answering their questions. In these cases, the industry should decide whether they will tell their

own customers or not because it depends on what their audience would want. If they believe that

their customers would be more comfortable to know, they should tell them. If the company
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thinks it would be better that they don’t know about the AI they are speaking to, they should

decide to withhold the information. Letting the company decide for themselves will give a

market strategy that people can recommend certain places because of what they choose.

There is also another type of AI that many customer service companies have been

beginning to use because of how helpful it has become in making sure that the customer is

comfortable and happy with the call that they made. This type of AI is made to give customer

service workers real-time advice about what they are missing in the conversation, things such as

energy in their voice or if they aren’t empathetic. This AI is used to better the experience of

customers when they call the customer service company by making sure that the customer feels

that the worker is there to help them and won’t mind the amount of time it takes. There is also

the fact that it helps the workers see what they need to work on when it comes to the way they

talk to the customers as time goes on. It is stated that the AI “may even offer a more realistic

reflection of performance” (Field, 2020). This is because the managers can’t be expected to listen

to every single call that a worker makes and this helps workers who may have had a bad call and

the manager only hearing that one and thinking it is the standard. The cues also help the workers

when they don’t notice themselves becoming tired and unmotivated with a worker having the

energy cue appear and then “sat up straight and spoke more energetically so that he appeared

more engaged in the call” (Field, 2020).

There are some things wrong with how the AI is programmed because many of the

workers will complain about some of the cues showing up and not going away even though they

believe that they have already fixed the problem. There is also the problem that the AI may think

that something bad is happening when it is completely natural. One case being “at one point, the
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tool thought a representative and a customer were talking over each other when they were in fact

sharing a laugh” (Field, 2020). The AI slowly becomes more of a background option for most

workers as they slowly learn from the prompts that the AI puts up and begin to fix the problem

themselves when they notice it. Many workers even say that they see the “software as a mild

annoyance at worst” and that “they liked getting pop-up notifications during their calls” (Roose,

2019). Although some had problems with understanding what exactly some of the prompts

wanted them to do, the makers of the AI would make sure to tell them about what they wanted to

go for when they made the cue.

The thing that people began to fear about this type of AI is that people who work in

customer service are being almost graded on a point system by AI and may be losing points on

things that may not be their fault. However, that is not how they are currently being used, it

could happen in the future but is still years away. With the AI not being accurate enough to

decide if the workers are actually being productive and talking well to the customers, the

executives of the industry can not judge their workers through the app. Although the use of AI

for this reason may be closer than people think, this is because Amazon uses a similar AI to

judge their workers’ usefulness in the company. IBM tested the software’s accuracy in predicting

the future performance of the employees and the company “claims it has a 96 percent accuracy

rate” (Roose, 2019).

It is difficult to ignore the fear that jobs will be decided by an algorithm that will decide if

they are a fit for the company or not. This is taken literally because Amazon has the AI “track

worker productivity in its fulfillment centers, and can automatically generate the paperwork to

fire workers” (Roose, 2019). However, the human aspect of the process is still involved with the
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managers being able to intervene if they believe that the termination of a worker was unjustified

and biased. This may become a problem for those working in customer service in the future, the

effects that the AI is currently having in the calls with the customers. MetLife, a customer

service company, stated that “using the app has increased its customer satisfaction by 13

percent” (Roose, 2019). Along with the employees being happy with the app and the customers

seeming to be more comfortable because of the AI, it is hard to completely reject the program

that brought this change.

The use of AI in customer service has started a change in the job platform that people

have begun to fear because of the thoughts that Artificial Intelligence will take over the world

when they get too smart. There is also the fear that as technology advances, the jobs that humans

used to do would get automated and those humans would lose the job and would have to find

somewhere else to work, only for that to be taken as well. However, evidence shows that the use

of AI in the field of customer service is to make sure that the customer is comfortable and gets

their problem fixed at the pace that they need. It is offering an opportunity to those who work to

make and upgrade personal AI a new area of work where they can test the limits of what the

chatbots can do when it comes to customer questions. With the evidence given, it is safe to say

that the use of these AI chatbots are made to make customers more comfortable in the experience

of customer service.

Beginning with the fact that the AI were made to primarily improve the experience of the

customer by making sure that they could fix problems that they were having while talking to

someone, or something, that would make sure that they were keeping up. Also having the AI

become a bit more human-like in the tone and voice by having them mimic actual speech
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patterns and accents of people so that the customer doesn’t feel that a robot is talking to them

because a human doesn't want to spend time helping. This gives the AI a kind of “human touch”

that many people believed that chatbots would never have and that being one of the main reasons

they disliked AI in customer service in the first place. Lastly, with the use of AI in something

other than answering the call of a person directly, it gave customer service another way to get

customers comfortable if they did not like the idea of speaking with an AI. The use being that AI

would give suggestions and cues to the workers about what they needed to change in the way

they spoke to make sure the customer was as satisfied with the call as possible. AI is meant to

make the customers comfortable.

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References

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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00696-0

Elgan, M. (2020, February 17). Should you tell customers they're talking to AI?. Retrieved April

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https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3527438/should-you-tell-customers-theyre-talking

-to-ai.html

Field, H. (2020, January 1). Technologists are creating Artificial Intelligence to help us tap into

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Ingram, C. (2018, December 31). Artificial Intelligence is coming to disrupt customer service —

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https://www.barrons.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-could-disrupt-customer-service-5

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Kannan, P.V. & Bernoff, J. (2019, May 29). The future of customer service is AI-human

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https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-future-of-customer-service-is-ai-human-collaborati

on/

Polani, D. (2017, August 30). Emotionless chatbots are taking over customer service – and it’s

bad news for consumers. Retrieved March 25, 2020, from

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http://theconversation.com/emotionless-chatbots-are-taking-over-customer-service-and-it

s-bad-news-for-consumers-82962

Roose, K. (2019, June 23). A machine may not take your job, but one could become your boss.

Retrieved April 08, 2020, from

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai-workplace.htm