Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its impact across business functions in every industry, with customer experience being no exception. Nearly half—47%—of CX leaders say their organizations are engaged in ad hoc AI tool implementation, per the ServiceNow CX Trends Report.
While there are several ways to maximize the impact of AI, there are also important considerations regarding the ethics of AI in CX. It’s imperative not to lose sight of these concerns among the many benefits of improved efficiency and customer service.
Although the most recent iterations of generative AI are fairly new, plenty of work has already been put into defining how to use AI ethically. The White House, for instance, crafted a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in 2022. Its tenets serve as a guide for ensuring ethical use of AI, including:
- Safe and Effective Systems: AI systems must be created with adequate input from diverse experts to ensure safety, effectiveness, and mitigation of risks and harm.
- Algorithmic Discrimination Protections: Automated systems must be designed to avoid discrimination and unjust treatment.
- Data Privacy: Tools should have built-in protections against abusive data practices, and users should control how companies use their personal data.
- Notice and Explanation: The use of an automated system should be disclosed to users that fully clarifies how and why it impacts them.
- Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback: Users should have the option to access a human to assist them.
Following this blueprint is not only the best ethical practice but also the best way to ensure customers’ trust and loyalty.
CX leaders report that AI and Generative AI are the two most significant drivers of business value across several KPIs. In particular, there are notable cost, resolution time, customer effort, and case volume reductions. According to ServiceNow CX Trends data, the area where leaders perceive AI as providing the highest business value is cost savings, with 28% of CX leaders saying AI increased cost savings and 26% saying the same about GenAI.
Our recent Impact AI: The State of AI in Banking report surveyed 1,125 banking IT leaders in 12 countries, finding that a small group of “Pacesetters” are leveraging AI to grow customer trust and provide a more positive experience. These Pacesetters impacted nearly every KPI, from cost savings to higher revenue to greater productivity.
However, these benefits can be outweighed by unethical AI usage or AI that provides a poor customer experience, so it’s important to use it correctly.
It’s no surprise that increased efficiency is one of the biggest benefits of AI. For one, AI can transform the daily workflows and productivity of the support team by automating repetitive tasks, tracking and analyzing data quicker, and letting workers focus on resolving customer issues rather than mundane tasks.
Using AI can boost the efficiency of the customer experience as well. Teams can use predictive analytics to better anticipate customer needs, and when a human touch isn’t required, AI Agents can step in. These “agents” are autonomous systems that can handle customer service interactions and resolve issues, offering customers a quick solution with a limited wait—and freeing humans for more important tasks.
AI can improve empathy by providing sentiment analysis and allowing you to leverage chatbots trained with emotional intelligence. This gives customers a real, human-like experience instead of leaving them feeling relegated to a robot.
AI Agents can power an empathetic customer experience by autonomously handling common cases, accelerating resolution and letting humans focus on strategic initiatives. Customers will have strong personal interactions with agents and walk away with a feeling of being supported—important aspects of great customer service.
While most customers prefer a quicker and more efficient experience, AI isn’t without its risks (many of which also lead to AI adoption challenges). The biggest customer worries surround quality and effort rather than the expected privacy and security concerns.
Per ServiceNow’s CX Trends, the top customer concerns include:
- Difficulty of AI tools or chatbots in understanding nuanced customer needs (60% of customers)
- Limited capability in handling complex or nuanced cases (57%)
- Lack of human touch (56%)
- Higher potential for errors (54%)
- Privacy and data security issues (36%)
- Displacement of customer service agents (36%)
Ultimately, businesses may address some of these concerns by focusing on the ethics of AI in business.
When using AI for customer-facing tasks, be aware of the ethical implications around privacy and data security. The best way to ensure strong security and privacy is to minimize data collection, gathering only the essential data needed by the AI tool. Moreover, you can protect users' privacy further by anonymizing as much data as possible (encoding or removing personally identifiable information).
Focus on these concerns when setting initial AI guidelines, keeping them in mind as you continue to audit and refine the systems. It's also beneficial to transparently include your privacy and security policies in any customer-facing information; this helps reinforce their trust while also keeping you in line with compliance requirements.
The first step toward embracing an ethical AI strategy is to create guidelines and policies about AI use.
Outline acceptable AI use and what you expect from your employees, especially when handling customer data. Create guidelines for the following examples of AI ethics in your workplace:
- Establish best practices to ensure customer privacy.
- Determine how employees can and can't handle customer data.
- Ensure your customers are aware of, align with, and agree with your AI policies.
Before rolling out AI to all employees and customers, ensure you fully train your team on internal AI policies. Without understanding the requirements and expectations, employees risk using AI in ways that don’t align with the company’s ethical standards.
Leaders should facilitate regular AI ethics training and training on data security and privacy. Plus, as part of regular employee development and training programs, workers should undergo training on how to use AI tools in their specific roles.
AI is ushering in a human renaissance by transforming how people work, but it is also important to consider how humans can benefit from AI. This is best seen in the form of an internal AI liaison. Companies should entrust an AI liaison with responsibility for the business’s use of AI, overseeing AI compliance, best practices, and—most importantly—AI ethics.
The company can ensure more consistent AI practices across the organization by hiring someone with specialized expertise. This individual can also bridge the gap between technical and business teams, ensuring alignment.
Be transparent with employees about how and when you use AI. The more transparent businesses are with their employees, the more loyal and engaged they’ll be. Ensure all workers understand the use of AI in their role, and be clear about the ethical considerations as well.
Then, gather feedback and iterate on it to improve. Conduct employee surveys or encourage direct employee feedback in meetings or focus groups. Over time, adapt AI practices as needed based on this feedback.
AI can be an integral part of a company’s customer experience strategy, but it’s important to be transparent about its use to preserve customer trust. By providing up-front information about how customers might interact with AI, businesses foster customer confidence and make working with AI a more positive experience.
One best practice is for companies to publish their AI policies online and publicly. These policies can outline how you use customer data when customers might encounter AI in your processes and the expected outcomes. It can also be helpful to explain how a customer may opt out of using AI and, instead, interact with a human.
Engaging in regular bias testing decreases the likelihood of your tools acting on biased information.
To conduct this testing over time, execute regular audits of any AI tools. If you uncover any concerning information, make ongoing adjustments until the tool performs better. Use diverse data sets to ensure that tools adequately represent all demographics without inaccurate or discriminatory outcomes.
AI isn’t static, nor should your policies and tools be. Leaders use AI platforms in various ways, but it’s necessary that whatever you choose is well-documented and maintained over time. Consistently checking on and updating your AI systems helps avoid ethical issues.
Do this by setting a cadence for regular reviews of your tools and being ready to retrain them to enhance accuracy and performance. It’s also helpful to adapt company policies as AI technologies continue to advance and change.
Understanding the ethics of AI in CX is the first step to using AI to transform your company’s customer service management.
Ready to get started with a demo of ServiceNow’s ServiceNow AI Platform and discover how to bring ethical AI to your CX team? Get in touch today.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about the ethics of AI in CX
AI provides several ways to refine your customer experience strategy by increasing productivity and efficiency, but using these tools ethically is important. Start by establishing guidelines for using AI ethically. Make sure all employees are aware of and trained on these policies and that you’re regularly seeking feedback. It can help to hire an AI liaison to oversee the systems and policies. Ensure customers understand how they may interact with AI and how their privacy is protected. Remember to test your systems for biases and audit and retrain them over time.
The use of AI makes it easier than ever to deliver great customer service. By handling some of the manual and tedious work, AI tools let customer service agents handle more challenging and meaningful customer tasks. Plus, AI can often provide a quicker resolution directly to customers, resulting in much shorter resolution and wait times.
AI can improve CX in several ways, including reducing resolution time and cost while increasing customer satisfaction. AI Agents can assess customer data to provide personalized recommendations and offer 24/7 support. AI can also conduct sentiment analysis to detect customer emotions, which allows agents to better address issues. It also automates manual and repetitive tasks. These improvements serve to enhance the customer experience while making daily workflows easier for agents.