Ninety percent of Filipino consumers now experience interacting with virtual agents or software robots monthly, a study conducted by Forrester Consulting for software company Amdocs shows.
Costumers of communications and media service providers in the Philippines have given their critical judgment on use of artificial intelligence for customer care and commerce and how they want software robots or chatbots to serve them.
“I don’t think there’s anyone around the world to say AI [artificial intelligence] is not gonna change them, quite the reverse. Actually it’s really gonna start to revolutionize and transform businesses and people’s experiences across the world,” says Dan Horan, chief digital officer and chief marketing officer for Asia Pacific of Amdocs.
Amdocs surveyed 7,200 consumers, 521 of them from the Philippines, and 31 communication service providers across the world, 10 of them from Asia Pacific.
Forrester and Amdocs conducted two surveys among consumers and decision makers at CSPs to identify the correlation between consumers’ expectations and CSPs’ investments.
The survey shows that consumers understand virtual agents are here to stay and they are open to use them as 90 percent of consumers engage with bots between once a day to once a month. Almost half agree that these interactions will be an increasing part of their life.
The findings, however, show that current virtual agents struggle to deliver value and meet customer satisfaction. Bots, say consumers, cannot deal with complex requests (their biggest problem), understand human emotions (second biggest problem) or deliver personalized offers as well as humans (third biggest problem).
About 67 percent of consumers think CSPs are investing in AI to reduce costs and cut jobs while 77 percent of the CSPs state that they are measuring the value of their AI-powered processes and bots investments in satisfaction metrics.
Ninety percent of Filipino state that its more convenient (43 percent) and quicker (46 percent), but 48 percent say this is only because they had no other option. If offered a choice, 87 percent would prefer to speak to a human since human agents better understand their needs (83 percent) and can address multiple questions at once (63 percent).
The results of the survey suggested that CSPs must close the customer experience and expectation gap with clear plan to further the function of AI and produce contentment to customers. CSPs must involve the right people in the AI strategy process, focus on intelligence, and align the core use cases with what consumers want.
“The good news is consumers actually believe that if anyone can get AI right, the communications and media industry can. And that’s ahead of retailers and banks. So AI could be a winning gambit for service providers as long as they sync up their AI investment priorities with what customers actually want,” says Gary Miles, general manager of Amdocs.
Dan Horan says AI will not cut human workforce and will actually add more jobs in the future: “What we also underestimate is future jobs will change, the question is, what the new jobs are gonna be? And I think for me, when you start to look things like artificial intelligence, it will bring as far as new opportunities, new jobs and new ways of serving customers.”