Intelligent Customer Service Automation | AI Update 2023

Intelligent Automation in Customer Service

What if your customer service team could focus on business essentials because an artificial intelligence (AI) has already prepared everything? With intelligent customer service automation, you can optimize business processes and deploy critical resources where it counts: in supporting your customers and making sure they receive the best customer experience (CX) they can get. Automating routine tasks frees up resources for more complex tasks, so that your customers get the best help they need.

Due to increasing digitization, the amount of unstructured data is growing. Most of this information resides in texts, emails, PDFs, and scanned documents submitted by customers. Processing these manually in customer service is repetitive, labor-intensive and cumbersome. Intelligent document processing (IDP) tools make these business processes more cost-effective. They translate the content of documents (electronic or physical) into actionable and meaningful information – thus reducing support time and improving help for customers, as well as sales.

Among the goals of many companies are:

• Increase service quality and customer experience
• Increase sales, reduce support time
• Make existing business processes more robust for the digital future of the company
• Faster and more accurate document processing in customer support

When it comes to achieving these business goals, intelligent customer service automation brings you decisive advantages.

What is intelligent Customer Service Automation?

For simple tasks in help centers, traditional RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is often sufficient. For digital processes, AI is required, which enables structured retrieval of document content and data from customers. Manual steps such as typing, renaming, filing and validating are automated and thus almost completely eliminated. Documents are processed purely digitally, enriched with known master data and harmonized across different systems.

AI software learns to understand and structure information from documents 24 times faster than humans. Your support team then only needs to check a few elements in the automatically prepared documents. As a result, your customer service benefits from faster and more efficient processing of documents - and your customers receive faster and more accurate support.

The information extracted from the documents is also stored directly on a case- and customer-specific basis and supplemented with relevant metadata, ensuring high data quality. This allows your customer service team to focus on more demanding activities - and with it, a higher and more consistent quality of service that benefits you and your customers.

In addition, AI-generated decision templates reduce errors. In sequential workflows, humans tend to trust the other members in the support team. An AI is more impartially controlled. Questioning AI decisions also improves process understanding in organizational development, which in the long run improves the efficient design of information flows in the company.

The solution: AI tools for Customer Service Automation

In customer service, telephone contact has become secondary. Customers prefer to contact a help center or customer support. via email, web and app (with corresponding attachments). 80 percent of all data submitted by customers is in unstructured formats such as business documents, emails, images and PDF documents. Switching between different applications in customer service is cumbersome, partly because customers' data has to be checked and transferred manually. The associated long customer waiting times are significantly reduced thanks to intelligent customer service automation.

The benefits of automated software solutions for intelligent document processing in customer service at a glance:

• Capture paper documents in seconds
• Instant recognition and classification of documents
• Automatically extract data from documents
• Direct time and cost savings through automated digitization
• Higher accuracy and better data quality
• Process efficiency through intelligent process optimization
• Relief of the support team
• Ease of use
• Higher and more consistent quality of service for your customers

The time savings and better resource allocation that come with professional Customer Service Automation solutions also allow you to scale your CRM.

Customer Service Automation in various industries

As a solution for professional document processing, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) tools can make life much easier for all industries and companies. Especially for those who have to cope with a high effort in processing and archiving documents (e.g. banking, finance, health, education and government sectors). There, repetitive and organizational tasks tie up resources - IDP software enables more efficient and effective work. Typical examples of documents that can be automatically and intelligently read, categorized and assigned by IDP are:

• Invoices & receipts
• payment advices
• Insurance policies
• vehicle documents
• Delivery notes
• Energy certificates
• Salary statements
• Rental agreements
• ID cards
• Certificates
• Customer information
• Credit applications
• Orders

Different layouts from different customers can be read without any problems. And these functions are just the beginning. The potential uses of AI today lay the foundation for more applications tomorrow.

Digitally transform customer service with Konfuzio

Both the volume and variety of data are increasing exponentially. With the right data strategy, this data can be used and analyzed. This improves the customer experience, increases operational efficiency and ultimately profits. One solution for professional document processing and high-quality information retrieval is Konfuzio. It is fast and reliable in different languages, enabling optimization of data and document-related processes in various application areas.

With Konfuzio you automate and optimize the entire operational workflow when processing documents: Accept invoice and scan, recognize invoice type, categorize correctly and archive, relevant data correct extract and arrange them in the correct fields (e.g. Provider, date, price, article, payment terms, due date), mapping of data to an accounting system (e.g. ERP or Excel), mark posting codes, set payment date, pay invoice, balance and estimate next invoice date.

Let's take a look, how Konfuzio achieves this.

Konfuzio combines OCR, NLP and CV

Konfuzio is a unique all-in-one software tool for automated document processing. For this, we use a homegrown combination of technology and algorithms for natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR) and deep computer vision (CV). The Hybrid AI in Konfuzio enables an ever-growing range of use cases for intelligent document processing in any industry. Konfuzio's powerful and exceptionally flexible AI catapults it to the top of many rankings.

Konfuzio's state-of-the-art AI software provides insightful data and analytics to manage documents wherever and whenever you need them. Konfuzio provides powerful content and a system to Document management with a wealth of business-critical functions that can otherwise only be performed manually. In addition, there are several integrations, which are perfect for system houses, consultancies and large companies.

Many previously manual or rule-based activities for checking, archiving and searching for information in documents are optimal use cases for the cognitive automation of business-critical processes such as customer support for public authorities, insurance companies or credit institutions. The data of the read documents is easily available within seconds and can be further processed in common ERP, DMS, BI or CRM tools. Before transferring the structured data and information, it is also possible for Konfuzio to apply further individual rules that fit the requirements of different companies.

Konfuzio is the only German provider with a powerful and flexible AI platform for intelligent document management and thus the general Process optimization in your company, that of your customers or users. You can train the AI yourself: so specific requirements are also met. At the same time, evolving AI ensures that your business remains competitive.

What exactly can Konfuzio's software solutions do for Customer Service Automation?

This is how Customer Service Automation from Konfuzio promotes better support for your customers:

Konfuzio streamlines administrative processes in customer service through an efficient and effective combination of key intelligent document processing capabilities - thus making sure that your customers receive the best customer experience they can get.

• The AI software of Konfuzio can be used via web browser and REST API and processes PDF, TIF, PNG, JPG, JPEG and email formats. Konfuzio reliably recognizes all these documents and quickly and accurately converts the text they contain into high-quality information for your human support team.
• Konfuzio is so intelligent that it understands files of a similar nature in terms of content and processes them comparably to the human intellect when reading documents.
• Thanks to the sophisticated indexing and search functions, documents can be automatically saved, processed or subsequently retrieved - significantly reducing the time needed for those tasks that can be allocated to help customers.
• e-mails and attached documents from customers are digitized and categorized. Tickets are created and assigned to workflows or channels (e.g. intelligent routing of contracts to the archive, invoices to accounting and queries to the support team). Communication content is transformed into processable transaction data and your support team receives relevant information directly on the screen to help your customers in the best way.
• The visual-semantic AI (Hybrid AI) can be easily customized via the Konfuzio user interface.
• Technically savvy users can customize the software individually and autonomously via Konfuzio's numerous source code modules.
• The solution interacts seamlessly with other programs such as Salesforce, Google Docs and numerous other RPA, ERP or CRM systems. This integration significantly improves the user experience.
• The powerful machine learning solution is available in the cloud as well as field implementable and can be trained for particular AI models using Python SDK.

The scanned documents (e.g. images, applications and documents sent to support) and the text extracted from them are imported into the company's own DMS, CRM, BI or ERP system for further automated or human processing. Interfaces to other company-related target systems are also possible. This structured information is then available in machine-readable formats - making it directly available and usable by support. This lean automated process simplifies the complete Document management enormously, improves the customer experience, and can be used in a wide variety of industries.

Get in touch for more information about Customer Service Automation with Konfuzio and registerto try out the Document Automation workflows directly.

Future AI solutions for Customer Service Automation

Application possibilities of new technologies unfold in the long term. Established AI use cases such as indexing or typing documents already enjoy high interest among decision makers and strategic executives due to their cost-effectiveness.

The knowledge stored in texts from different sources has been difficult to aggregate. This leads to duplicate work and even conflicting "knowledge" in different business units - intelligent automation can integrate this. Innovative leaders are already testing real game changers for cognitive tasks, such as AI text generators with pre-trained language models.

Examples of applications include smart text modules and email automation. Here, the AI uses stored text modules or e-mails that have already been sent to automatically generate new texts or e-mails in the language used by the company - across departments and in an integrated manner. This enables the AI to provide direct automated answers in customer service (e.g., in automated chat apps of help centers), beyond mere confirmations of receipt (cognitive agents). This increases the response rate for successfully addressing customers from about 1.5 % to up to 35 %. It also creates sales opportunities from cross- and up-selling, for which AI generates customized emails based on existing information about customers. The AI can also summarize existing texts to central statements and thus shorten them by 80 percent - time that is then available to the support team for more important tasks and thus significantly improves the customer experience.

Frequently asked questions

Are you considering intelligent automation of customer service in your company? Or have you already started and are looking for optimization and expansion options? Feel free to write your opinion on this topic in the comments!