In this guest post, Epictenet CEO Ritesh Srivastava (pictured below) explains why the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will give companies lesser reasons to keep customer services offshore.

AI and machine learning are two of the hottest topics these days when it comes to technological advancement. While these technologies have been around for quite some time, their use cases have come more in adoption recently, as these technologies are becoming increasingly commoditised. There is no doubt AI will have an impact across all industries and every business area, with one of them being customer service.

The last couple of decades have seen organisations reduce costs by offshoring some of their customer services. Now these technologies may help in bringing these services back onshore.

AI-based chatbots will soon play a key role, and as the machine becomes increasingly intelligent, more services can be offered to the customers using natural language processing with very little human intervention.

Chatbots are taking self-servicing in the financial services industry to the very next level, after we have seen the success of ATM machines, internet banking, mobile banking and online applications. A sophisticated chatbot platform allows true interactions and dialogues in a natural language and more seamless service in contrast to any other self-servicing channels available.

The use cases of chatbots are many, from answering simple customer queries to making a product sale and support. Chatbots have significant advantages over live chats, as they can completely be integrated to the core and CRM systems providing a frictionless experience for the services currently provided by channels like internet banking, mobile banking and online forms.

We have seen how old static websites have been taken over by new responsive websites, mobile banking gaining popularity over internet banking etc – these are examples of how the new wave of digital disruption has started disrupting the early generation of digital technologies, and it will not be long before live chats will lose the relevance.

The rise of AI-based customer service will help organisations provide more consistent services significantly reducing stress on contact centres, and the organisations will have lesser reasons to keep the customer services offshore.