Data Suggests AI-Driven Chatbots Can Greatly And Effectively Ease Customer Service Burdens Of Tech Companies

February 29, 2024 by Dave Haynes

The challenge for technology companies, across sectors and certainly including digital signage, is that success in building up a customer base also means servicing and supporting all of those customers.

There are customer support representatives on the end of phone lines and emails, and there are knowledge bases, FAQs, support ticket archives and, sometimes, user forums that see other customers help and advise people who are running into familiar issues.

AI-driven chatbots have been floated as a great way to handle first-level inbound support requests, and data just released by a financial services company suggests these AI assistants are really effective.

Klarna, which is mainly focused on supporting consumers who want to buy now and then pay later by instalments, yesterday released their numbers from a first month of activating an AI assistant that uses OpenAI’s technology.

From Klarna:

• The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats;
• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents;
• It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score;
• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries;
• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously;
• It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages;
• It’s estimated to drive a $40 million USD in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024.

The company says it has also seen a “massive improvement in communication with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets thanks to the language support.”

Built in to Klarna’s app, the assistant does things like fielding multilingual customer service questions to managing refunds and returns.

“This AI breakthrough in customer interaction means superior experiences for our customers at better prices, more interesting challenges for our employees, and better returns for our investors,” says Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna. “We are incredibly excited about this launch, but it also underscores the profound impact on society that AI will have. We want to reemphasize and encourage society and politicians to consider this carefully and believe a considerate, informed and steady stewardship will be critical to navigate through this transformation of our societies.” 

Do bots just take over all support roles? Don’t think so, but this kind of data suggests it has considerable potential to speedily and accurately handle questions where the answers readily exist, but would need to be found and retrieved by humans. It can certainly do a lot more than what I’ve experienced with earlier versions of chatbots, which seemed to mostly sort me into the right queue to then talk to a human.

I assume numerous companies in the digital signage industry are starting to use or at least look at this stuff. I know UK-based Signagelive is already using an AI bot to process inbound questions and requests.

CEO Jason Cremins tells me his company has cut over to an AI-driven support system called Intercom, training a company iteration of a bot on thousands of knowledge base articles, closed service tickets and documents.

The idea of using AI to generate images, graphics and even videos is, of course, interesting for digital signage network operators and managed services providers. But AI probably has a much greater potential in streamlining processes, removing grunt work and getting back to customers who have questions quickly and accurately.

Cremins says within 3 days of implementing the bot, the percentage of support chats/tickets resolved was 30.7%.