This blog was inspired by our CEO being invited to participate in a panel on AI and Automation at Dallas Startup Week 2022, AI is Coming for the Worst Parts of your Job. The event is free to attend, so check it out if you're in town!
Customer Service and Transcribing Emails: A Cautionary Tale
We knew of a business that had a large customer service component. They had three customer service representatives (CSRs) who had to take orders via email and transcribe these into the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Anytime an order came in, the CSRs had to take each data point and enter it manually into the CRM.
These CSRs were hired for their ability to listen to, understand, and react to customers, and especially to fix their problems. But instead of spending their time on the phone or via email making customers happy, these CSRs were spending eight hours a day manually transferring order information from emails into the CRM.
The CSRs were overqualified to be data entry clerks, and they weren’t paid to do it, but because the business didn’t invest in an automated system to handle the data entry, it’s what the CSRs had to do. The CSRs hated it, the customers hated it; orders were rife with typos and bad data entry; but managers were too afraid to pay for a new system they weren’t sure of to clean up the issue with AI. So the business suffered, plodded along, and eventually got enough bad reviews on Google that it went under.
Okay, the last part isn’t true, but it could be.
AI Agents to the Rescue
There are a lot of professionals and service providers that recognize the problem of the CSRs transcribing emails all day: You want machines to do the things people could be bad at, hate doing, or are slow at, like data entry or crunching numbers, and you want human beings to do the things that people are good at, like understanding other people or finding workarounds and solutions to problems. There are hundreds of solutions out in the world to try and marry the world of machine learning with the world of actual work. And yet, they fail repeatedly to fix the problem.
Most AI on the marketplace today is rules-based, so it can only make decisions when there is no uncertainty. But what if your orders are coming in via e-mail with people stating their requests in free-form text? That involves a lot of uncertainty that humans are great at understanding, but confuses these rules-based AI.
What you need in this situation is machine learning that can handle uncertainty and isn’t purely rules-based. Tangible Intelligence solves this problem with AutoExtract.ai – a state-of-the-art AI agent, relying on modern machine learning algorithms.
Finding the Right Service Provider for Your AI Agent
Beyond finding the right type of AI agent, you need to have the right service provider for that AI. In order to solve a problem, with or without AI, you need an expert in that problem. Most companies don’t have an AI expert on-hand to explain the possible shortcomings of an AI solution, or where an AI solution isn’t being put fully to the test. Often, what a business thinks is an AI solution is anything but.
At the same time, most AI offerings come from data scientists who may have a PhD in machine learning, but don’t understand the core functions of the business or a plan for integrating their brilliant robots into business processes.
What you need is AI people who understand the business and business people who understand AI. That’s also where Tangible Intelligence can solve the problem – we have both experts in business intelligence and experts in machine learning working on your AI agent.
Your Ideal AI Agent Provider
When you’re looking for an ideal AI assistant, you need better-than-human accuracy and speedy data extraction. Our AutoExtract.ai was designed from the ground up to allow more people the benefit of using state-of-the-art AI to do the least valuable and most boring part of their jobs without needing to know anything about data science.
When you’re looking for an AI agent provider, the company should provide a way to measure and compare the new process to the previous (manual) process. Tangible Intelligence is able to do this measurement with or without models in the loop.
If you’re ready to improve your processes with the help of an AI agent, and want the right guidance in the process, you want Tangible Intelligence. Click the link below to set up a demo today to learn more about how our AI agents and their human counterparts can help.
