We welcomed Fadi Bassil, VP of Global Customer Support at Incorta, to the AI Lab at the Festival of Work. Fadi joined Mesmerise Solutions CEO Patrick Rafferty to discuss how AI can upskill your workforce, bridge the productivity gap, and supercharge the team’s performance. Read on for insights on leveraging AI to enhance strategies in the dynamic field of workforce management.
The Background and the Problem
At Incorta, an open data delivery platform, the customer support team handles highly technical issues for global clients to ensure 24/7 uptime and a performant Incorta Analytics platform. Given these requests, a simple chatbot AI is inadequate for managing demand. Therefore, the team needed a comprehensive AI solution to serve more customers quickly without increasing costs. Here are the key processes where AI helped Fadi’s team improve performance without losing the quality of their customer service.
Key Areas Where AI Made a Difference
Customer support looks after customers in the short term by resolving their issues and in the long term by feeding back the customer’s experience with the product. Gen AI helps increase efficiency in areas traditionally reserved for subjective manual analysis and production, namely, ticket deflection through enablement and issue analysis for product feedback.
- Ticket Deflection: Effective ticket deflection depends on specific, relevant content. The support team typically creates this content manually from the documentation and cases. Relying on Generative AI means content that used to take days can now be produced in a few hours, giving the support team time to work with customers.
- Enhanced Decision-Making: In addition to product usage data, there is a treasure trove of insights on improving the product regarding issues and interactions with customer support. Extracting this insight, however, is time-intensive human analysis, making it less frequent and forced. Language model advancements made summarization, categorization, and analysis of complex text-based interactions and logs accessible and accurate. The result is a continuous, mostly automated review of product issues to feed product decisions.
- Efficiency Gains: The use of Gen AI led to improvements across several support metrics, such as a reduction in complex ticket resolution times from 37 days to just 12 days. The team was able to manage a growing customer base without proportional increases in staff, ensuring sustainable growth. This efficiency not only benefits the support team but also enhances customer satisfaction.
- Adoption Considerations: Fadi highlighted that while AI technology requires investment, the costs are justified by the efficiency and impact gains achieved. Initially, they started with public AI models and gradually moved to private, customized models offered by Incorta to better suit their specific needs. This “start-small” approach allowed the team to scale responsibly, providing results and productivity gains before committing to further investments.
Managing Change
Gen AI is a new fast-moving field with a high learning curve and unproven ROI. Adopting it requires an openness to experimenting and a shift in the team’s behavior and mindset. Being an analytics company made experimenting at Incorta easier. However, the basics still apply. Experimenting small, failing quickly, and incrementally demonstrating the benefits helped overcome initial resistance. Rather than discounting the field because of the organization’s readiness, enlist external help to shorten the adoption cycle and demonstrate ROI.
Governance and Risk Management
Most people are experiencing Gen AI through the top players who offer online models, potentially sharing private and sensitive data with these vendors with little governance and risk assessment. There are three pillars to mitigating the risks:
- Education on the risks and best practices when using such models is also needed. DataCamp is a leader in online education.
- Using privately deployed open-source models is becoming much more accessible, with many analytics providers like Incorta and Databricks offering the option on top of their platforms.
- Using monitoring tools targeted specifically at monitoring and tracking Gen AI model usage, such as WandB’s Weave solution.
Gen AI is seeing massive investment. A side benefit is the rapid rate at which technical and educational solutions are created.
Cultivate Continuous Learning for Effective AI Integration
This insightful discussion underscored that upskilling in the age of AI is not just about adopting new technologies but also about fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. As AI continues to evolve, so should the strategies for integrating it into a workspace. With the emphasis on the importance of continuous learning and adaptation, AI tools should be targeted to enhance both productivity and job satisfaction.
We hope these insights inspire you to explore the potential of AI in your own organization. Stay tuned for more discussions on leveraging AI for business success!
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