Build Customer Management Practices with Empathy and Responsible AI at the Core

Key takeaways

• Responsible AI augments human capability in all business sectors.
• Customer Management is an important part in business.
• Responsible AI is People-Process-Technology integration for deeper customer-connect.

Empathy is a driver of all human relations. Doctors, who listen empathetically, are mostly trusted by their patients. The keen listening and understanding goes a long way in sustaining doctor-patient relations. The patients trust the doctor for a lifetime and often recommend the doctor to family and friends. The keen listening and kind words often act as placebo and become the trademark of the doctor. Patients seldom change the doctors even for a second opinion or specialist consultation.  Responsible AI augments human-to-human relationships in a similar manner in all business sectors, from healthcare to banking, insurance, manufacturing, retail, travel, and more. Customer Management is an important and critical function in all these business sectors and the patient-doctor simile fits well in the service agent-customer context. 

The Essential Human Experience in Customer Management

Customer Management balances itself on the critical fulcrum of human experience and business growth. This particular department entails management of customer data or Connected Data for generating 360-degree real-time customer insights. Maintaining and managing this Connected Data is a full time activity of this team. Enterprises institutionalize the data-driven processes to steer the department in a responsible way and away from bias. However, CRM systems, Excel sheets, and reports drain away the human element from the transaction when the agents tend to focus only on the business part. The agents have to keenly listen to the customer, address their specific points in a timely manner, escalate the issue through suo-motto cognizance in case immediate response is not available, and ensure that the customer concern is resolved. All these points go a long way in sustaining the customer relationship. Resolving the customer concern from the customer’s point of view and with empathy goes a long way in maintaining and building customer loyalty. This approach is important for maintaining the critical balance between the human experience and business growth.

Customer Management with a Human Approach 

Agents leverage Connected Data for business growth in every aspect of customer management. Proactively building a customer-centric human approach and a customer-first ethos sets the trend to think of human emotions or customer emotions first. Agents can further leverage technology in different forms, such as Responsible AI, Text to Analytics, Voice to Analytics, Business Intelligence, etc., to get a bird’s eye view of who the customers are, what they do, why they do it, when they do it, where they do it, and how they do it in order to address the customer emotions in the best interest of the customer. Engaging the human side of the customer goes a long way in taking their buy-in as a business advocate and improving the business’ net promoter score. The approach to align the business ethos with the customer/human motivations helps build better and deeper customer connections. 

What is Responsible AI? 

Responsible AI or Ethical AI ensures that Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions are built to benefit customers and society at large. The Responsible AI solutions ensure that they focus on the People-Process-Technology integration to augment human capability in any task. The in-built models are adapted to take the critical path or shortest path for a process without causing any damage to the human interest.

How does Responsible AI help Customer Management?

Responsible AI models can be trained to take a customer-first approach in all automation tasks. Responsible AI augments the agent's efforts and emulates human empathy similar to human-to-human interactions. Customer Management practices, with Responsible AI at the core, are instrumental in building automation solutions that can take customer relationship management and customer loyalty to an entirely new level. Responsible AI can adapt to customer behavior and bring out only those system recommendations that best suit the customer's interest. 

How does Responsible AI enable both internal and external customers?

Responsible AI has multiple use cases and applications in all industry segments and support functions. It normalizes the AI approach towards natural human tendencies in a contextual framework. Some important use cases are - 

• AI-enabled systems extract unstructured data from documents and PDFs using different engines. AI can suggest text outputs that closely resemble the captured data. However, Responsible AI selects the best fit based on fuzzy logic, not just permutations and combinations. It helps humans to select the right output without much intervention and bias. The use case predominantly helps all document-intensive industries.
• Online shopping or customer-facing portals improve business revenue through intelligent recommendations. AI can suggest the most sold products. However, Responsible AI levels out the suggestions closer to the customer preferences, persona, credentials, social status, income range, and other required attributes. The use case helps all customer front-ending scenarios. 

Conclusion

Customer Management practices should be implemented with a human approach. They should bring in the human element while dealing with CRMs, spreadsheets, and reports and think customer-first. Responsible AI models emulate human-to-human empathetic relations through People-Process-Technology integration. 

Next reading

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