Businesses Facing More NLP Challenges Than Expected

Natural language processing (NLP), a type of AI used in customer experience (AI for CX), is invested in by three-quarters (75%) of European organizations.

Yet over half (51%) of businesses reveal the outcome of implementing NLP was different than expected, according to research by Davies Hickman for Odigo, a leading global provider of Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions.

Most European business executives (84%) say NLP requires time to prove it works. Other challenges revealed include overcoming the fear that NLP will replace people (79%), software integration issues (79%) and proving ROI (78%).

The main lesson business leaders cited is that the outcomes and benefits of introducing NLP were different from what they expected due to a shortage of in-house skills and resources.

Training the models was also a key learning in 38% of businesses. Despite this, the majority of European business executives say they will invest more in NLP in the next two years: 31% definitely and 43% possibly.

Every year, businesses spend over $1 trillion (£902 billion) on customer service calls, according to IBM research.

But AI and NLP solutions are changing the game. It’s predicted that by the end of 2022, chatbots and NLP will save companies about $8 billion (£7.2 billion) per year in customer support costs.

The need to support various applications to ensure customer experience success will continue to drive AI and NLP adoption.

European organizations are already using NLP widely and for varied reasons. Advanced analytics help understand customer insight trends (58%), while other applications support contact centre agents when providing customer experience (57%) and smart routing of customer interactions to the right agents (57%).

Jean-Denis Garo, Head of Product Marketing, Odigo, comments, “Users are now familiar with, and even enthusiastic about, self-service usage. With the proliferation of online services, the further into the future we go, the more prevalent automated encounters will be in the customer journey.

“NLP has evolved as a revolutionary technology in the field of AI for CX. But AI is not plug and play. To unleash its full potential today, experts must have a complete understanding of the skills and requirement needed for implementation. This will ensure agents and customers remain at the forefront of all CX revolutions.”

For more information about Odigo - visit the Odigo Website

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