By Sandhya Balakrishnan, Regional Head, US, Data Analytics and Engineering, Brillio
Digital has pushed as well as enabled every part of the business to pivot around the theme of Customer Experience. Today functions enabling business processes are no longer perceived as just cost centers to be measured on efficiency and revenue enabled but as a significant influencer of Customer Experience with numerous interactions which shape the customer’s relationship with the business. Internal facing IT Operations and Customer facing tech support are no exception to this transformation. AIOps not only delivers automation on steroids but is geared to deliver personalization for customers and to handle unanticipated circumstances. Whether it is booking a flight without long call wait time or renewing a subscription service with low touch and on time, AIOps can ensure not just efficient but highly personalized interactions.
Why do we adopt AIOps?
AIOps brings the power of AI to technology operations. It drives few key objectives:
1. Automation: Not only can many processes such as onboarding evolve to a self-service model but anomaly detection and correlation analysis can help reduce manual effort in root cause analysis and issue fixes
2. Pre-empting failures: Event based failure predictions and next best action recommendations based on past resolutions are some of the most popular use cases in ensuring SLAs are met and service down time is minimized
3. Personalized interactions: Access to big data on customer profile, service history and prior resolutions for similar issues ensure service agents can personalize their interactions with customer boosting ability to build relationship and hence CSAT.
4. Optimize operating cost: The data behind AIOps is a source of rich insights to route the right issues to the right agents and provide guidance to them to drive MTTR down and improve first resolution rates.
5. Customer insights: Mature customer centric organizations understand this first line of defense is a rich source of insights about how customers perceive their products and services.
Stepping into AIOps
AIOps delivers above mentioned objectives by democratizing relevant knowledge about the process and customer and making insights from them available to customers and service agents at the right time in a highly personalized manner.
To embark on this journey, organizations must revisit their current model and build a vision for futuristic operations which reduces customer’s effort and maximize customer delight. Concepts from e-commerce can be borrowed to perform a customer journey mapping for various personas when they have to interact with service and product disruption or issues. Analysis of the metrics associated with each step in the customer journey can provide rich insights about which aspects of the process to automate and has the potential to deliver a wow moment.
Realizing this vision will involve investing into collecting data and setting up a robust big data platform which can support scaled AI use cases. While typical AI techniques such as anomaly detection and event correlations can help predict and pre-empt events and issues, techniques such as Natural language processing can help unlock insights from unexplored dark data such as call transcripts. These transcripts are rich insights unlocking customer insights, product / service insights, and most frequently occurring issues.
Moving towards the future of operations
Elevating CX, achieving agility and automation in operations is the unspoken given in today’s hybrid world. AIOps has undoubtedly become the requirement for technology operations to pave the way to this desired future.
It is important to acknowledge that a cultural shift is inevitable to reap the benefits of AIOps. This requires shedding the baggage of traditional operations and rethinking legacy ways of execution. For example, AI has now become an enabler to agents releasing back time to them to perform more value-added activities a machine cannot duplicate. However, with the technology disruption employees will be required to be re-trained as per the market needs and transform. It is key to recruit, upskill and train talent who are open to embracing new technology as well as to adopt new-age partners who can infuse fresh thinking around modernized digital operations.
With technology becoming more human and advancements in AI/ML capabilities, AIOps is no longer a mere afterthought. It has become the business imperative to deliver the mandate of CX to customers of technology operations. Hence, the adoption of AIOps for the seamless loop of detection, analysis, automation, and personalized remediation is critical to ensure the organization’s journey to the next generation of digital prowess.