As offices around the world switch to remote work, our interactions with customers and colleagues have evolved hand in hand. Professionals who once relied on face-to-face communication and handshakes must now do business in a world where both are rare. The colleagues we once sat next to each day are now only available on Slack and Zoom, also changing the nature of internal communication.
While this new reality poses a challenge, the advancement of key technologies allows us not only to adapt, but to thrive. We are now on the precipice of the greatest revolution in workplace communication since the invention of the telephone.
It is not enough to simply accept the new status quo, mainly because the general economic climate remains weak. Artificial intelligence has a lot to offer in improving the way we talk to each other in the age of social distance and has already seen widespread adoption in some areas. Much of this algorithmic work has gone on behind the scenes of our most used apps, such as Google Meet's noise canceling technology, which uses artificial intelligence to silence certain extraneous sounds during video calls. Other advances work in real time right before our eyes, such as the myriad of virtual Zoom backgrounds or the transcription and machine translation technology integrated into most video conferencing apps.
This type of technology has helped employees realize that, despite the unprecedented shift to remote work, digital conversations are not only limited to recreating the experience in person, but can improve the way we communicate entirely.
It is estimated that 65% of the workforce will work remotely within the next five years. With a more practical approach to AI, i.e. using technology to actually increase daily communications, workers can get information about concepts, workflows and ideas that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Your customer service experience
About 55% of the data collected by companies falls into the category of "obscure data": information that is not completely used, stored on an internal server until it is deleted. Any company with customer service invariably increases its dark data archive with every chat log, email exchange, and recorded calls.
When a customer telephones with a question or complaint, he is informed in advance that his call "could be recorded for quality assurance purposes". Given how cheap data storage has become, there is no "maybe" about it. The question is what to do with this data.
