For many businesses, A.I. seems like a far-off technological advancement that will dramatically revolutionize the workplace. But A.I. isn’t a futuristic technology; it’s already here, and you can use it to simplify business workflows today.
At Workato, I work with several companies who want to use A.I. to make their business more efficient. Using tools like IBM Watson and Splunk together with Workato’s no-code platform, it’s easy to create an automated business process with a Workato recipe. A recipe is a set of steps that Workato follows, automatically sending information and completing tasks inside your apps. Here are four ways some of our customers have used A.I. in their processes that you can implement in your business in minutes, not months!
Related: What is product intelligence? Here’s an in-depth breakdown
1) Turning Voicemails into text using A.I.
Following up with customers is a hugely important task for so many teams within a business, especially the sales and customer support (CS) teams. If a customer calls for support, but no agents are available to take the call, the customer should be able to leave a voicemail and expect a seamless follow-up. A.I. makes it easier to automate voicemail follow-up, which was traditionally more difficult to automate than text-based communication through SMS, email, or online portals.
A leading cafe chain wanted to create easy support access via all channels—text, online, and phone—so they still allow people to leave voicemails at the Help Desk. To make voicemails even easier to handle for the CS team, the cafe uses Workato and IBM Watson to help triage the voicemails in ServiceNow. When a new voicemail comes into ServiceNow, Workato runs the voicemail through IBM Watson. Watson uses speech to text conversion to create a transcript of the voicemail. Workato then takes the text and adds it as a comment on the ServiceNow ticket. This not only makes it easier for the CS agent to deal with, but also helps keep very good records of all issues in ServiceNow for reporting.
Explore IBM Watson automations >
2) Detecting Customer Sentiment and Automatically Following Up
You can create a smarter service desk using artificial intelligence with CRMs like Salesforce, or service apps like ServiceNow and Zendesk. Because IBM Watson can detect the tone of a piece of customer communication – are they happy? are the mad? – you can use it trigger smart follow-up actions.
- Using Artificial Intelligence with Salesforce
Integrating your CRM—like Salesforce—or Customer Service app with IBM Watson is a game changer in this scenario. IBM Watson can analyze the tone of the ticket and Workato can automatically take the appropriate action in other apps based on Watson’s analysis. In the recipe featured above, Watson will analyze the content of a new Salesforce case and log the dominant emotional score as a percentage (ie. 80% Joy) in Salesforce. If the customer is marked as VIP and the dominant emotion is not joy, Workato will send a text message and notify a channel in Slack with the customer details so immediate follow-up can occur to prevent churn. If the customer is very happy, Workato will create a Trello card on the Marketing Board so that the team can follow up for a customer story or give a shout out on Social Media. For more ways to use A.I. with Salesforce check out the video below.
- Using Artifical Intelligence with ServiceNow or Zendesk
One of the most time-consuming activities for any CS team is support ticket triage and follow-up. There are many tickets filed, but how do they decide which problems to fix first? They could manually read and assess every ticket as it comes in, but that takes valuable time. Using AI with your customer service application can alleviate this pain point.For example, when an important customer files a ticket in ServiceNow or Zendesk, Workato sends the message to Watson. Watson analyzes the customer’s message and scores it according to its sentiment. Workato then moves Watson’s score back into the customer service app and also sends it to Salesforce, so it’s viewable on the customer’s profile.You can also set up automatic responses based on the sentiment Watson assigns the ticket. These responses can be conditional actions, such as sending a text message to the CS manager if the Watson analysis reads a customer’s sentiment as angry and they are categorized as a VIP. Or, if Watson reads a happy message, Workato can automatically create a Trello card with the customer’s Twitter handle to let the marketing team know to follow up on social media with the loyal customer. You can even use Workato and Watson to harness personality insights to drive your sales approach—Workato can send a survey for a low “joy” emotion and much more.
Related: What you need to know about AI workflow automation
3) Teamsourcing Difficult Support Tickets to Experts
Sometimes, the CS team must pass issues along to other teams, like engineering or DevOps. But manually passing tickets on to the right team wastes time and makes follow-up difficult. Integrating with A.I. can streamline the process, from the moment a ticket is received.
When a ticket comes in through a support app, Workato can send it through Watson right away—before a CS agent ever looks at it. This way, Watson can parse the text and classify the ticket so Workato can send it on to the right team. If Watson determines with 90% certainty, for example, that a ticket is a DevOps issue, Workato will send it to the DevOps Slack channel. Workato will then log any Slack responses on the ticket as private comments. But if Watson is only 30% sure the ticket should go to DevOps, it will still assign it to a real CS agent who can triage it manually.
Want to use this for your Customer Service team? Set up a demo >
4) Anticipating Issues for Digital or Technology-Based Products
Customer Support is often reactive—most companies wait to be told about a problem before addressing it. Sometimes this is the only choice, especially in traditional eCommerce; we can’t know in advance if the shirt will fit the customer, so we must wait for them to initiate the return process. However, many other products can now be monitored by a program and thus problems can be identified without any help from a human.
A leading cafe chain uses Workato to integrate Splunk and ServiceNow in order to pre-empt issues with the self-service iPads they have set up around the restaurant. On these iPads, customers can order and pay without speaking with an associate. If an iPad crashes, Splunk will record the error. Workato can detect these errors before a human can, asking Splunk for any errors in real-time. If an error is found, Workato automatically creates a support ticket in ServiceNow and pulls key information from Splunk including which location the crashed iPad is in (there are thousands of locations around North America) and which iPad crashed. Workato will also pull the contact information for the manager of the specific branch with the issue from ServiceNow and insert it into the ticket. This is an incredibly low-friction way to control issues across thousands of franchise locations. Monitoring the script manually would be costly, tedious, and less effective. This automation also allows the cafe to take the appropriate actions to fix the iPad without having a frustrated customer notify them that it’s not working first.
Using A.I. doesn’t need to be scary or difficult; in fact, it can make your existing workflows much easier to execute. And the best part is you don’t need to wait for the future to use it. With Workato and Watson, you can work more intelligently today.
Ready to streamline your workflows with A.I.? Explore IBM Watson automations >
