Intelligent customer service financing appears frequently! Hillhouse, Sequoia, etc. are all admitted How does artificial intelligence subvert traditional customer service?

"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" (Shanghai, reporter Huang Xinyi) Recently, the contact center and AI customer service field has frequently raised funds. First, Wisdom Tooth Technology, an integrated customer liaison solution provider, completed a $100 million Series D financing, which is also the largest single financing in the field's history. After that, AI intelligent customer service "Easy Chat Technology" also announced the completion of a 100 million yuan B round of financing.

Wisdom Tooth Technology co-founder &CSO Long Zhongwu revealed to the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that the current platform has about 10,000 paying users, mainly distributed in retail e-commerce, education, medical care, life services, game entertainment and other fields.

In addition to startups, established contact center vendors such as Avaya are also ramping up the use of AI. Fu Lili, president of Avaya Greater China, told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that Avaya has many cooperation solutions with AI manufacturers in the field of domestic call centers. Customer service centers are a labor-intensive industry, and AI technology will help it reduce costs and increase efficiency, while also further improving the work experience of employees.

Artificial intelligence is in the "mature period of de-bubble"

According to it Orange's data, there have been 19 investments in the field of intelligent customer service since 2021, and well-known investment institutions such as Hillhouse, Sequoia, and Tencent have entered the market.

Investment and financing in the field of intelligent customer service

Wisdom Tooth Technology Long Zhongwu introduced that the application of artificial intelligence in contact centers is mainly speech semantic recognition.

"Like image recognition, speech semantic recognition is the first commercial attempt in early artificial intelligence technologies. At present, artificial intelligence technology is in the mature period of de-bubble, as the technology becomes more and more mature, the degree of commercialization will become deeper and deeper, it will be commercialized in a broader sense, and the stock and scale space of the entire market will be larger and larger. ”

Fu Lili believes that FOR contact centers, AI technology is absolutely needed.

"Although from the customer experience, there is still a need for someone, warm service. But one of the big challenges we still have to see is the rapidly rising labor costs. There should be a balance between them according to the segmentation of the business. ”

Fu Lili pointed out that for standardized content, such as how to use the product and how to open it, it can be solved automatically through robots and AI technology. When it comes to customer complaints about products and services, the content of which is ever-changing and more suitable for manual handling.

At the same time, the introduction of artificial intelligence technology will also bring improvements to the employee experience.

"Why is the turnover rate of customer service personnel so high? Because this is a role that acts as a 'trash can', it is easy to be scolded every day. Through AI technology to identify speech semantics, emotional perception, to help agents quickly or even in advance to perceive customer emotions, or according to his historical preferences to predict the questions that users will raise, this customer service staff can respond more calmly. ”

In addition, compared with other AI application scenarios, the contact center scenario is more mature. "The proportion of customized revenue in our overall revenue is very low, and it is easier to achieve standardized replication." Long Zhongwu revealed.

From a cost center to a value center

From the traditional telephone call center, to the contact center that integrates multi-channel access such as WeChat, Weibo, website, APP, etc., to the intelligent transformation, the application of more and more emerging technologies is helping to realize the transformation of contact centers from traditional "cost centers" to "value centers".

As a veteran of more than 25 years in the technology and communications industries, Furly has witnessed the development of the Contact Center. "It turns out that the contact center is a bit like an island within the enterprise, an independent cost center. The management of the contact center is only limited to the contact center, mainly looking at the operational data. For example, how often agents answer calls, and how many times per minute. ”

Today's intelligent contact centers will help companies establish a competitive advantage in products, operations and customer service services.

"In fact, the data that comes down from the contact center is the most valuable data for the enterprise." Fu Lili said, "All the questions and complaints raised by users may indicate the defects of the company in the design of products and services. If the user's direct feedback data on products and services can be well mined and sorted out, and the internal enterprise communication system can be integrated with the contact center, feedback to the back-end product design department and service department, the product design and service can be improved through the first-hand end-user experience, bringing more value to the enterprise. At present, we have explored with Ali in this regard. ”

Long Zhongwu also said that with the development of the times, the role of the contact center is evolving. "The earliest definition of the contact center attribute is more for the purpose of responding to the service. With the continuous development of the Internet business in recent years, as well as the progress of the overall business, the contact center scene has been given more attribute requirements, in addition to services, there are marketing, operations and so on.

To this end, Wisdom Tooth Technology put forward the concept of integrated customer contact, hoping to open up business flow and data, and integrate different business attributes of service, marketing, operation and management. Private domain is also a major focus in recent years.

"In the past, traffic operations were more based on the public domain, and now the operational efficiency of the public domain is decreasing, and the private domain operation represented by the WeChat ecology has come into being." In this regard, we have a deep cooperation strategy with Tencent. 2021 is in the process of starting to have revenue and gradually scale. ”

The only eternity: adapting to change

At present, intelligent customer service is upgrading from traditional intelligent customer service to intelligent customer service driven by AI algorithm technology such as deep learning. Some industry analysts believe that intelligent customer service is still in the stage of weak artificial intelligence, but it is only a relatively shallow application. Robots' natural interaction capabilities, emotion recognition capabilities, and services that can be connected all need to be continuously improved.

Long Zhongwu pointed out that the application of AI in the contact center still has a lot of room for continuous optimization in the next three to five years. At present, artificial intelligence is still in the stage of gradual maturity.

In addition to the technical level, in Long Zhongwu's view, the current external environment and ecology are also a major challenge. "For example, the big economic cycle, policy control or the adjustment of the industrial structure, which will lead to enterprise users in the process of customer service marketing and operation, have to change the business, and even in the landing mode, business process and other aspects will change." This poses a huge challenge to the systems and tools it needs. ”

"Whether you have the ability to respond quickly, to understand changes, and constantly think about how to better cooperate with users and adjust the business to the way users want, this is the core competitiveness." Whoever can do this well in the future will become the winner. Long Zhongwu stressed.