Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Shi Tianhao
"It's a pleasure to serve you!" This phrase, which is familiar to most people, is now more issued by intelligent customer service.
If you are a careful person, you will definitely find that today's customer service phone calls of telecom operators, banks and other institutions, the first to chat with you is already a highly intelligent robot, and only complex problems will be transferred to human customer service. We have always said that technology changes life, AI technology is being widely integrated into the traditional call center system, intelligent customer service has been one of the most frequent scenes for ordinary people to contact with AI.
More than 30 years ago, the wave of landlines entering the home market just emerged, and mobile phones began to become popular, opening up the historical context of China's customer service development. In the era of Internet and cloud computing, information technology is widely used, and the form of customer service interaction has gradually evolved from a single voice interaction to a pluralistic interaction such as text, pictures, videos and hyperlinks, and the call center has become the trend of the times, and a more flexible business model has enabled thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises to establish their own customer service centers.
At the source, Bell invented the telephone, indirectly giving birth to a new profession in customer service. The explosion of cloud computing has brought about the popularity of cloud call centers. In the era of 5G and big data, artificial intelligence customer service systems have become the "mainstream" standard for large and small enterprises, and the information technology revolution has continuously promoted the "evolution" of customer service systems. Technological changes are also presented in the changes of service providers, the first generation of call centers Huawei, Cisco, etc. are important solution providers, cloud call centers, intelligent customer service era, the birth of Ronglian cloud and other intelligent communication cloud service providers.
The history of global customer service that accompanies the growth of consumer society dates back to the last century.
The development of communication technology brings the first "decade" of customer service
In 1876 Bell invented the telephone, during World War I, the army began to lay out wired telephones, the original customer service representative was the position of "telephone operator". After World War II, wired telephones in Europe and the United States began to spread in ordinary households, and only the rich had telephones before. The popularity of the telephone gave birth to a new business, and "booking tickets" through the telephone began to become popular in Europe and the United States at that time.
In 1956, Pan Am built the world's first call center, which can be regarded as the earliest customer service system. The history of the development of call centers in China also closely follows the development of communication technology. According to a 1995 article in the magazine Modern Economic Information, China's telephone penetration rate was only 2.63% at that time, but the penetration rate in large cities began to move closer to developed countries. For example, Beijing is 25%, Shanghai is 15.8%, Haikou is 32%, and Shenzhen is 55% and ranks first among the largest cities in the country.
It was since the late 1990s that call centers were introduced in China, and the first generation of call centers first appeared in the field of civil aviation services for accepting passenger ticket reservations. The system of the first generation of call centers mainly added telephone queuing functions to the early PBX, which at that time could not even be called a call center, but was called a hotline, and its entire service was done by hand.
This era is the era of hardware, in addition to several state-owned telecom operators, but also gave birth to Huawei, ZTE, Yuxin Yicheng and other traditional call center market leaders. There are also call center service providers such as Avaya, Cisco, Aspect, Genesys and others in foreign markets. More than three decades ago, these tech giants continued to iterate on hardware and software equipment, and telephone-based call centers were built in major cities, which became the base for supporting the first phase of customer service boom, and the manual customer service of shopping malls and banks was transferred to the telephone system.
Enterprise-to-consumer services are no longer limited to physical space, and the popularity of landlines and mobile phones has made customer service an important "link" for consumers and enterprises to connect. Customer service is mainly used in the following scenarios, recording customer consultations and complaints, giving customer feedback in accordance with the corresponding process, timely handling customer calls, recording and solving customer needs and opinions, including providing customers with complete and accurate solutions and information, solving customer problems, and providing high-quality services.
Problems called, complained, consulted, booked, began to become popular, "call center" became the "service center" of enterprises.
2001-2004 was a three-year period of rapid development of call centers in China. At the end of 2004, it reached 139,900 seats, and the industrial investment reached 20.49 billion yuan. In 2006, the market size of call center agents reached 159,000, and the industry invested 24.93 billion yuan. At the end of 2012, the total number of seats in the mainland call center industry has exceeded 580,000, the number of people directly doing homework has exceeded 1.2 million, and the cumulative investment scale has exceeded 82 billion yuan.
However, in the early days, the process, content and mechanism of the entire service of the customer service industry were relatively rough:
Although there are many problems, it is undeniable that the emergence of telephone customer service has effectively solved the problem of "linking" consumers and enterprises. Compared with running to the bank and business hall when there is something, it is obviously very convenient to charge the phone bill and check the balance through the customer service telephone, and a large number of consultations, appointments and even consumption links have begun to enter the "remote" era.
The customer service system went to the cloud to meet the new challenges of channels and interactions
Around the turn of the millennium, the PC began to enter thousands of households, in 2006 the new business model of cloud computing was born, and in 2010, the iPhone 4 was launched to kick off the prelude to the smartphone. The development of information technology has brought about tremendous changes in the world. The communication between enterprises and consumers no longer stops at voice and text messages, and the interaction in the form of pictures, videos and multimedia begins to appear, and the customer service system has become a trend.
During this period, cloud call center service providers began to appear, which integrated telephone, mobile phone, online customer service, Email, SMS and other communication methods through computer and telephone integration technology (CTI) and cloud computing technology, built a large-scale call center system, and sublet call center agents to different enterprises located in different locations to use. During this period, we are most familiar with service providers such as Ronglian Cloud.
Overall, the emergence of cloud call centers is the result of strong market demand, which brings at least four advantages over traditional call centers.
First of all, cost savings; in the SaaS mode, the call center service will deploy the server uniformly, and the user only needs to register simply online to use the deployed online call center system immediately. This approach not only eliminates the need for enterprise users to deploy offline servers separately, saving costly deployment costs, but also allows users to purchase services on demand.
It's as if in the past people who drank water needed to dig a well, but now the water company has a unified water supply, which is taken on demand and charged according to the amount. Go live quickly.
Second, to achieve the integration of various systems; the traditional call center system due to software and hardware limitations, Internet channels and telephone channels have their own systems, there has always been a problem of integration. Ronglian Cloud power cloud call center to replace the traditional call center, in addition to solving cost and efficiency problems. As an important contact bridge between enterprises and users, the customer service center also needs comprehensive digitization, focusing on the base of the call center and integrating with other systems.
The cloud call center cloud has unified management, after dividing each function, through the calculation of customer service, management, quality inspection and other interactive information for diversion management statistics, easy to view, to solve the traditional system visual operation, the lack of integration of all parties and other issues.
Third, to cope with the new challenges of multiple channels; with the advantages of cloud architecture, cloud call centers integrate traditional telephone, mobile phone, online customer service, email, SMS and other communication channels, breaking the information islands between various communication channels between enterprises.
Finally, the statistics and analysis of the service process are realized; the data report of the cloud call center supports the generation of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. And all the data can be displayed in a line chart, bar chart and other intuitive and vivid charts, data comparison and analysis at a glance, so that managers get rid of a lot of tedious work, focus on internal management, external optimization, improve the overall operational effect.
In the second decade of customer service, information technology was widely used, the customer service system was transferred to the cloud, and technology began to become a powerful helper for manual customer service, and the service experience was optimized at some levels.
Development today, Ronglian cloud call center has achieved seamless multi-service system connection, in addition to the customer service side of the reception, intelligent customer service system is now also with other business systems including CRM, CDP, work orders, after-sales, SCRM, member center and other multi-business systems through the integration, obviously showing an integration trend, to solve the problem of information islands, and further assist large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of customer service must-have capabilities.
5G, big data era, intelligent services were born into a popular new "decade"
Today, when AI upgrading comprehensively promotes industrial change, more and more traditional industries are beginning to draw nutrients from AI technology, using new technologies to develop new productivity, and artificial intelligence customer service has begun to appear in the enterprise customer service system.
As early as 2016, Alpha Dog defeated The Go world champion Li Shishi in the Go tournament, which triggered the world's attention to artificial intelligence, and a large amount of hot money poured into the field of artificial intelligence.
Since 2017, Ronglian Cloud Call Center has gradually changed from serving small and medium-sized customers to medium and large customers, forming a mature solution suitable for various business types and sizes of enterprises. In the thirty years since the outbreak of the Internet and mobile Internet, China's business has developed rapidly, and most enterprises have experienced a sharp rise in the number of users and products/services, followed by the "overloading" of customer service centers, as one of the best industries of artificial intelligence, customer service, testing the application of AI from a small range, and gradually popularizing. AI customer service is infiltrating more aspects of customer service.
Ronglian Cloud's dialogue-based AI technology with NLP technology as the core is applied in the customer service center, and is first applied in the fields of finance, automobile, and government affairs that are willing to try and explore new information and intelligent technologies.
In the face of more complex "responsibilities", the artificial intelligence system has realized some content substitution, as well as the role of real-time assistance and intelligent training.
Artificial intelligence, in simple terms, is a discipline that enables computers to simulate certain thinking processes and intelligent behaviors of people (such as learning, reasoning, thinking, planning, etc.), and big data is a very important part of it. In the era of cloud call centers, information technology is widely used, and all kinds of enterprises have massive amounts of relevant information and data, stored on local servers or clouds, which has become the best "nourishment" for training intelligent customer service systems.
Undoubtedly, the new decade of intelligent customer service has arrived, and Ronglian Cloud has helped this profession evolve to technical posts and professional posts at three levels.
1, the replacement of standardized services; since the birth of the customer service system, more and more systems around the customer service center construction, customer service center from the earliest cost center to profit center transformation, in addition to the user multi-contact transfer and opening, and now has become the base of customer operation, and even the cockpit of customer operation, the future will become a full value center.
Over the years, various industries, including finance, education, Internet, automotive, O2O, catering, real estate, and enterprise services, have taken customer service systems as an important part of business operations. However, as the size of consumers expands, customer service systems require huge manpower to solve. For example, in 2012, China Mobile had 50,000 operators for just one 10,086 hotline.
We know that enterprise business is standardized, so customer service services also have a large number of standardized interactions, and these needs artificial intelligence can learn to standardize communication through the "reading" of relevant samples in the past. Some patterned and structured problems are also handled by artificial intelligence, so a large number of standardized services can be replaced by intelligent customer service, which not only solves the problem of redundant call center personnel, but also provides higher quality services to intelligent customer service.
2, personalized service agent assistance; in addition to some standardized services, due to the diversification of modern enterprise business and the richness of products/services, there are also a large number of personalized services in the interaction still need to be handled by manual customer service. However, due to the high liquidity of manual customer service and the complexity of the enterprise's business, it has often been difficult to rely on memory to handle services, especially personalized services. Moreover, some businesses have seven or eight links in the entire process, and with the assistance of agents, they can better remind the manual customer service of omissions or whether there are violations.
For example, an insurance company introduced Ronglian Cloud Intelligent Agent Assist to assist agents to solve inbound problems, including standard business issues such as consultation, inquiry, and claim settlement. In the customer service service, the system will accurately recommend the relevant knowledge at any time according to the customer's voice and text, so as to ensure that the manual customer service can provide services to consumers with higher quality, and the application of agent assistance directly reduces the complaint rate by 50%.
Moreover, efficient customer service communication will reduce the length of the call, which not only saves the time of consumers, but also improves the efficiency of the manual customer service itself, and the per capita answering rate rises by about 5%, realizing the reduction of personnel costs.
3, artificial customer service ability of intelligent training; the traditional training mode, generally by the enterprise unit itself, by inviting external experts and scholars or internal experienced old employees, or full-time internal lecturers, as training lecturers, regular, fixed-point, have a certain scale, off-the-job or semi-off-production, on a topic for a period of several days or weeks of formal training activities, take the form of lectures, supplemented by a number of intuitive teaching aids, multimedia means, case analysis, scenario simulation, fun skills, etc.
However, due to the large number of trainees, large mobility, high training costs, low learning efficiency of trainees, poor effect, lack of practical supervision, and difficulty in quantitative assessment, there are many drawbacks in the traditional training model.
People who have taken the driving book are very clear that downloading a driving test APP and constantly brushing and doing questions can effectively improve the pass rate of candidates' subjects one and four. Compared with the traffic laws with relatively fixed knowledge, the content of enterprise customer service knowledge is updated relatively quickly. The intelligent sparring can be quickly iterated according to the latest knowledge information, becoming the best tool for employee training. Moreover, since 2017, Ronglian Cloud has carried out AI exploration with well-known universities to integrate production, education and research. There are also quite a few academic and commercial achievements, and the Ronglian Cloud AI Academy of Sciences has continuously published papers in AAAI and other artificial intelligence summits to be included.
The intelligent training function also supports custom assessment task robots to personalize and customize the practice examination tasks and scoring strategies, which can realize the intelligent and diversified training and assessment of employees. It can also provide functions such as real-life dialogue exercises, voice-text dual mode, and assessment result reconsideration mechanism. Effectively shorten the training cycle, reduce the cost of corporate training, and improve the service skills of new employees.
At present, the common scenarios of intelligent customer service are pre-sales consultation, customer service reception, after-sales return visit, etc., and many standardized and modular interactions have been handed over to AI to handle. Ronglian's cloud intelligent customer service strategy is not to replace people through robots, but to assist people, release the value of people to do more challenging things, the future as the agent assistance is more mature, the proportion of intelligent interaction will increase, but customer service is still people as the core, complex, personalized interaction is still inseparable from manual customer service.
In the past thirty years, the customer service system has undergone very great changes in form and responsibilities due to changes in technology and external environment. With the application of AI in the industry field, the customer service system is moving towards high efficiency, high quality and high service.
And intelligent customer service is not only an alternative to some monotonous, repetitive interactions, it is also changing the career planning of many human customer service. It should be known that intelligent customer service needs a steady stream of knowledge and information "feeding" and "training", and many traditional senior customer service have begun to transfer to "customer service AI" trainers, and even start a business to output "solutions" to the industry.
Taking stock of China's customer service history for three decades, technology has continuously driven the transformation of customer service systems, and its scope of responsibility has also expanded horizontally with changes in the business environment. There is no doubt that human customer service will not disappear from artificial intelligence technology, but because of the iteration of technology, it has advanced to a new level. With the help of AI, gold medal customer service is no longer scarce, and the application of artificial intelligence makes every practitioner have the possibility of advancement.