Verizon is employing AI so you can get better customer service

Customer service is an essential part of every business and even more so when it comes to mobile carriers. With constant changes in plans, new promotions, deals with confusing requirements and, of course, the occasional problem, it’s not rare that you have to talk to a representative.

Just thinking about having to call customer support is often enough to raise your stress levels. No one wants to go through that but sometimes we have no choice.

Well, the biggest US carrier, Verizon, apparently knows that and wants to improve its customer support experience. By using Artificial Intelligence. Verizon just announced its partnership with Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence that is meant “to deliver more intuitive customer support through natural-language recognition, faster processing, and real-time customer service agent assistance.”

We know what you’re thinking: “Oh no, I’ll have to rely on a computer to help me, this is only making things worse!” And you’ll be partially right. The AI isn’t meant to completely replace humans. The AI will handle the first stage of the customers’ requests:

“Whether through voice call or chat, customers will not need to go through menu prompts or option trees; they simply say or type their request, and the natural-language recognition feature finds the best way to assist them. No stilted speech or robot-like commands.”

If your issue is too complex for the AI to handle, then you’ll still end up talking to a person. Google’s AI will have its part in that process as well, helping agents access information about your account quicker and offering suggestions for possible solutions.

The AI was trained using a database of “millions of anonymized historical support logs about the type of questions customers ask and how they phrase their questions”, so it should be pretty good at grasping what you need help with. And, of course, as all machine learning algorithms, this one will only get better over time as it’s fed more and more data.

Verizon isn’t sharing exactly when customers will get a taste of this new experience, besides that it will be soon. We have only one question left: Is there something that can’t be improved with AI? Doesn’t seem so.