There’s no denying it—AI is revolutionizing our lives and workspaces. By synthesizing vast amounts of data and solving complex problems swiftly, AI boosts our productivity like never before.
Reflecting on the past decade at Keysight, it’s clear how AI has transformed our industry. Picture the old days when customers had to sift through printed manuals, make endless calls to sales reps for information, or wait indefinitely for updates on repairs. Those days are long gone.
At Keysight, our mission goes beyond enhancing efficiency. We aim to deeply understand our customers’ businesses and help them achieve lasting success through new insights and our innovative products and solutions. So, what role should AI play in customer service to truly make a difference? As Keith O’Brien aptly put it, “AI-powered customer service doesn’t mean all interactions will be self-serve. Instead, it empowers human support teams with AI and machine learning tools to better assist customers.”
From reactive to smart
With over 60 service locations worldwide, more than 1500 service and technical experts, and nearly 50,000 pieces of content now digitalized, Keysight Global Services implemented a leading-edge AI technology to achieve operational excellence while building customer delight, the smart way. Here are a couple of our projects in our continuing AI services transformation:
Faster resolution through self-help
Our first step was implementing an online Support Portal, digitizing thousands of resources, and building the portal. User manuals, documentation, how-to-guides, videos, tutorials, and more are now at our customers’ fingertips. No wait. And most recently, our Knowledge Center has been improved with Generative AI (GenAI) to help customers who like to self-serve find highly accurate answers across multiple documents even quicker.
Right case, right engineer, right away
55% of >100K customer cases per year arrive digitally or via Keysight’s support portal. Our next step was to streamline case routing to shorten case resolution for all digital touchpoints and transform customer delight.
Using AI classification of all digital cases to instantly categorize case complexity, technology, language, sales category, and inquiry type. Customer cases are immediately routed to the most qualified, available Keysight Technical Application Support (KTAS) engineer. Thus, we are not just speeding resolution but also increasing customer issue resolution upon first contact with KTAS. At the same time, customer inquiries are correlated to specific accounts, so personalization is applied from the start.
Intelligence to speed repairs
To achieve industry-best levels of turnaround time for repairs under our KeysightCare support plans, we use AI to empower service technicians to diagnose and repair faster and more effectively using the platform’s intelligent search and multi-lingual diagnostic intelligence capability, as well as our own smart-instrument telemetry data.
Large language models and GenAI AI take technicians to the most relevant manual and page and provide them with a generative response, crowdsourced from prior cases across our service centers worldwide. Technicians can also retrieve the best fix at the point of service with turn-by-turn resolution intelligence and real-time search during diagnostics. With some of our models, instrument telemetry data at the point of failure is also captured to factor into the results.
Peeling the onion on customer delight
A guiding principle of the transformation of our services has been a culture centered around customer delight.
While technical expertise is a key pillar, our values are oriented around customer advocacy. As such, Keysight has surveyed customers and tracked whether they were satisfied with their case resolution for quite a while.
We found, however, that a single-answer question, focused only on case resolution, was neither sufficiently actionable nor did it reveal the true elements of customer delight. We have since moved to a series of more detailed questions such as if their question was fully addressed, treated with priority, how easy it was to get in touch with the right person, if they were kept up to date on status, and more — giving us specificity on improvements to address.
Alongside this deeper data, we’ve streamlined our processes to survey customers immediately upon case closure, route customer survey responses back to the case manager as soon as the customer completes the survey and investigate less than high scores no later than 2 business days. These actions have been instrumental in conveying our sincerity and priority to maintain customer trust.
What’s Next?
Whether a customer is a self-helper or prefers live help, we are significantly increasing the accuracy of our responses and time to resolution thanks to AI. And our customers are letting us know this is working. 90% of cases have reached the right person the first time, our GenAI has reached above industry accuracy, and KTAS customer satisfaction is at an all-time high at 90%+ and growing.
Soon, we’re excited to integrate the machine learning capabilities of our knowledge portal directly into our email system. Imagine this: when a customer emails us with a question, our system not only finds the perfect engineer to respond but also includes potential solutions and helpful resource links in the confirmation email. This proactive approach aims to empower our customers to find quick resolutions on their own. As always, ensuring relevancy and accuracy is key to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
But we are not done. Smarter connected products, smarter connected back-end processes, and smarter connections with our customers are in the works, with the help of AI and Keysight’s commitment to customer success. Stay tuned!