Earlier this year, when every tech and business magazine released the top five, eight, ten tech trends, one in particular kept creeping up: Automation. Apparently, 2018 is the year of customer service automation. According to Chatbots Magazine, “by 2020, more than 85 percent of all customer support communications will be conducted without engaging any customer service representatives.” The reason? Automation. 

Currently, automation in customer service has two well-known faces: Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Chatbots are increasingly being used to answer simple questions about a business’s hours, location, etc. AI is a bit more complex and is typically written into software that allows customer service agents to be more effective.

We’ve embedded AI into our multilingual customer service software. Simply put, we use it as a tool for detecting language. For us and for many businesses, the advantage of using AI is its ability to automate. AI can detect and respond to queries much more quickly than a human. For Language I/O, this means our machine translation solution is faster and more effective than it would be without AI.  Our customers love this, of course, because it means their support agents can respond to customer queries quicker and more effectively than they could without AI.

Although automation is this year’s hot topic, we haven’t entirely pitched the human touch. Customers are okay with bots joining humans in the call center, but they still want an element of empathy that bots just can’t touch. While language doesn’t necessarily need empathy, effectively grasping it requires a level of understanding machines don’t have. This is why in addition to our beloved AI machine translation, we also provide professional human translation.