Everyone talks about artificial intelligence in futuristic terms. The internet is aflutter with discussions of whether AI is dangerous, if robots will take over a la Terminator-style, and when this will happen.
But the truth is, AI is already here and making a positive impact. Research analysts predict a 300% increase in AI investment in 2018 compared with last year. Additionally, revenue in the AI market is expected to surge to more than $57 billion by 2021 from about $12 billion in 2017, said Ram Chatty, an AI Solution Leader at professional services firm Genpact, during a presentation at CBA Live this month.
AI can be used today to enhance the customer experience, prevent fraud, and handle complaint management, he said, and he detailed the ways in which this can be achieved:
1) Customer Experience
People are more than three times as likely to say that AI is making their lives better (34%), rather than making their lives worse (11%), according to a consumer study from Genpact. However, 41% of respondents said AI made no difference in their lives. Chatty suggested using journey mapping to determine where to insert AI to enhance customer experience. Journey mapping is a simple diagram illustrating the steps or flow your customers go through when engaging with your company. This could be a journey with a product, an online experience, retail experience, a service, or any combination. More specifically, Chatty said that companies should conduct research to uncover customer’s behavior, workflow, and triggers across multiple channels, and incorporate key performance indicators and customer experience analytics to measure the impact AI is having.
2) Fraud
Keeping fraud at bay is a constant arms race, and AI-driven advanced analytics can alert your business to inconsistencies and anomalies that might be signs of fraud. The auto finance industry has long struggled with originations fraud. Automation and machine learning cannot only determine someone’s creditworthiness, but also look through all of the features associated with an account and determine if there is a potential fraudulent issue.
3) Complaint Management
Chatty pointed out the opportunities for AI in complaint management through the use of linguistics-based AI. Manual methods of compliance are too expensive and not scalable, and can result in hefty fines later, he said. But AI can aggregate content from customers through their phone calls, emails, and other forms of communication, to apply computational linguistics and sentiment analysis to understand a customer’s intent. From here, AI can develop insights and identify high-risk complaints; this also allows a company to identify operational gaps and mitigate failure risks.