Are Finnish companies ready to serve consumers’ digital assistants?
Although artificial intelligence is already commonplace, many companies are still struggling to understand and exploit its opportunities in customer service and the development of customer experiences in general.
In the study “Customer experience of digital assistants,” we examine how Finnish companies respond to the growing demand for machine customers, i.e. digital assistants. We found out if companies are ready to serve these artificial intelligence-based digital assistants acting on behalf of people.
The main idea was to evaluate how customer service agents and salespeople encounter generative artificial intelligence in natural language interactions in current business channels – chat and email. This limitation had to be made because companies in Finland hardly offer any open technical interfaces (APIs) for machine customers’ agent-initiated and self-directed transactions. Also, for example, artificial intelligence models that learn different service interfaces are not yet widely available.
In this research by Shirute, Assi, our digital assistant, played a central role in business encounters by searching for information and conversing with service providers.
According to the report’s findings, the ability of companies to serve digital assistants varies, and we identified several obstacles in the service path of machine customers that hindered the digital assistant’s independent business. The results show that the digital assistant’s service level depended greatly on whether the customer service representative recognised the operating machine when encountering customer service. In some cases, the service was excellent; in others, the conversations were left unfinished, or the contacts went completely unanswered. This raises the question of whether companies are ready to benefit from the business potential of digital assistants.
Based on the research, companies should start development activities to better serve digital assistants. This improves the service experience and is economically justified, as each machine customer can represent a significant business opportunity. Although the integration of artificial intelligence into customer service is still in the early stages, its importance will be emphasized in the future.
Read more in our press release: https://www.shirute.fi/en/press-releases/machinecustomers-april-2024/
Download the research report to learn more about our research and its results. Please also share it with your colleagues!
Digital Assistants Experience (April 2024)(Reduced size).pdf