Members of the Machine Learning Center of Excellence at HP’s R&D Center Bangalore with HP support agents
A pilot project led by Niranjan Damera-Venkata, a Distinguished Technologist in HP’s Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Compute Lab (AIECL) and Head of AI research in India for HP Labs, is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help HP customer service agents solve customer issues with greater speed and efficiency, holding out the promise of significantly improving the HP customer experience while lowering support costs.
“The idea is to handle service calls in a new way,” explains Damera-Venkata. “If you think of the existing industry model as giving agents a set of road maps to help them work with a customer towards a solution, we’ve been experimenting with giving them a GPS app that can intelligently and efficiently guide them to where they need to go.”
The research effort teams HP’s Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Compute Lab with its R&D Center Bangalore, the company’s premier R&D unit in India and with HP’s global customer service organization. The core engineering team is part of the machine learning center of excellence at the R&D center, tasked with applying AI to transform customer service.
The new approach draws on comprehensive data from hundreds of thousands of customer service interactions to diagram possible pathways to a solution for every kind of challenge that customers are likely to face.
“In the GPS analogy, the program rides alongside the agent, looking at all the roads that they’re going down and, in real time, helps figure out the best route to get to the destination,” Damera-Venkata says.
Call center technologies already exist that use AI to help service agents understand the types of issues that a customer is facing and surface relevant documents. In the HP Labs solution, however, that intelligence extends to helping find the most efficient pathway to a technical resolution as well. That’s a significantly more complex challenge.
