Customers' AI assistants may bring your business more calls, not fewer

People are starting to hand errands like cancelling a subscription or booking a restaurant table to personal AI assistants. Salesforce argues in a new post that this will bring businesses more contact, not less. The assistant can start a request, but the business still has to finish it.

What changed

So far, most of these tasks do not need a phone call. The assistant works through a website, uses an API (a way for software to talk to other software) or deals with the business's own agent. But not everything works that way. A personal agent may see a user's inbox and what the user has given it, yet it likely lacks the full picture of that person's history with a company.

It can also hit security checks built to keep bots out, or questions only a human representative can answer. Even a simple cancellation can mean going back and forth with a company's agent or a staff member.

Why volume could jump

An AI agent does not mind waiting on hold. A person might check on a delayed order once. An agent asked to watch it can call back every few hours until it ships. An agent shopping for a better phone plan can contact several providers in the time a person dials one. Its calls can arrive at 2 a.m. as easily as noon.

Busy seasons are nothing new for contact centers. Salesforce says personal agents could turn peak volume into the new normal. Voice is already the most expensive way to serve a customer, so the cost could add up.

What Salesforce suggests

Its advice is to meet personal agents with your own business agents. A personal agent may not know a customer's loyalty tier or what must happen before a change goes through, so it improvises and often fails. A business agent brings your set processes and facts from your own data. Salesforce points to its own tools for this:

• Casey, its help agent, works across voice, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp and Apple Messages.
• Agent Script sets what the agent can and cannot do.
• Testing Center runs simulated calls before the agent takes a live one.
• When a call goes to a person, it passes along a summary, the full transcript and a suggested next step.
• Service Rep Assistant gives staff step-by-step action plans for each case.

What to keep in mind

This is a vendor's view, and it promotes its own products. The post gives no figures for how much extra traffic to expect. The practical point still holds for any business: expect requests that begin with a customer's AI assistant, and plan for your staff and systems to handle the follow-through.