In an era of unparalleled digitization, customers expect businesses to not only meet their demands but also anticipate them. Beyond robust customer segmentation and a marketing strategy, organizations must have a more profound sense of preferences and behavior.

By harnessing the power of ML algorithms, you can leverage personalized interactions with document AI to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Document AI is one of the most effective ways to process vast amounts of data in real time from diverse sources and make insight-driven decisions based on customer interaction. 

You can increase your stronghold on data management, improve information retrieval, and offer tailored experiences to attract and retain loyal customers. 

In the following article, let’s understand the benefits of document AI and navigate the challenges and industry best practices to implement it.

Intelligent document insights for customer experience

Intelligent document insights are actionable data derived from various documents with the help of AI-enabled technologies. These technologies use OCR, NLP, deep learning, RPA, data visualization, etc., to extract valuable information from customer documents, such as feedback forms, contracts, social media interactions, bulk emails, support tickets, and voice records.

Businesses identify customer preferences, interests, and purchase histories by analyzing these documents using social wall analytics. In turn, they can stay ahead of the curve and gain a competitive advantage by providing personalized product recommendations, tailored offers, timely reminders, and content suggestions.

As a result, organizations effectively categorize customers based on their behavior and implement more targeted marketing campaigns that drive profitable results and customer retention.

Leveraging the key capabilities of document AI

Organizations can leverage the unique capabilities of intelligent document processing systems and benefit from the following use cases.

1. Onboarding and account management

With document AI systems, businesses can automate data extraction, verify information, and expedite onboarding. For example, financial institutions can streamline their loan and mortgage application processes by automatically extracting relevant information from income statements, tax returns, and bank statements. Automating these tasks reduces manual processing time, improves accuracy, and provides customers with a faster and more seamless experience. 

Similarly, during ongoing account management, insights from customer-related documents can assist in providing personalized support, addressing customer queries, and ensuring compliance with contractual obligations.

2. Compliance and regulatory reporting

Complying with regulatory obligations is paramount and challenging at the same time. One of the most significant setbacks is navigating the complex web of regulatory laws and amendments, the varying regional jurisdictions, and the evolving technological landscape. Manually extracting terms and clauses from contracts, privacy policies, loan agreements, lease agreements, and insurance policies is time-consuming and error-prone, and even a minor breach can lead to severe regulatory penalties. 

And thus, enterprises must rely on document AI to monitor compliance and safeguard themselves and their customers. It analyzes and extracts relevant information from vast amounts of unstructured documents, enabling organizations to stay up-to-date with the latest compliance requirements and adjust their policies and procedures accordingly. Using natural language processing (NLP) and cognitive computing capabilities, document AI tools scan and evaluate scattered regulatory information across multiple websites and databases.  

3. Customer feedback and sentiment analysis

Intelligent document platforms come equipped with NLP chatbots, OCR, ICR, OMR, and voice recognition technologies. When applied with pre-trained ML algorithms, they analyze customer records such as feedback surveys, and support tickets, they might also conduct email validation and analyze phone calls, and social media interactions. They help better understand customer needs, pain points, and satisfaction levels by extracting sentiment, key themes, and preferences.

4. Fraud detection

Through machine learning and natural language processing, document AI can analyze vast amounts of customer-related documents, financial records, and transaction data to detect patterns, anomalies, and indicators of fraudulent activities. Organizations can proactively protect their customers' accounts, assets, and personal information by swiftly and accurately identifying fraudulent behavior. It helps maintain trust and ensures a more secure and trustworthy customer experience.

Related - What is Document Fraud and how to prevent it?

5. Personalized communication

Businesses can personalize their digital marketing campaigns by analyzing customer documents, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographic data. Intelligent document insights help identify preferences, interests, and buying patterns, allowing targeted offers, recommendations, promotions, and more engaging and personalized marketing communications.

Moreover, integrating intelligent document processing (IDP) with customer service software, emails and chatbots allows for a seamless customer response management system with minimal human intervention. IDP can accurately identify the intent behind customer emails or chat messages through a distinctive pattern-based recognition approach. Along with this, integrating the SPF record checker into your intelligent document processing can enhance email security, adding an extra layer of authentication and ensuring secure communication even through email marketing tools.

4 Ways intelligent document insights transform customer success management

1. Data-driven decision-making in customer experience optimization

Intelligent document insights drive informed decision-making. By leveraging critical insights from vast document sources, businesses gain the leeway to accelerate product development company, service improvements, and customer engagement strategies. 

For instance, financial institutions can use such insights to help their loan experts serve as knowledgeable gatekeepers and implement better pricing strategies and coverage terms.

2. Improved customer response time

Today, customers expect quick redress of their grievances and are less tolerant of processing delays. It is no longer feasible to manually process requests and extract information from vast data sources. 

Intelligent document processing software ensures that all kinds of data (structured and unstructured) are accessible at various touchpoints. For instance, NLP-powered chatbots respond instantly to simple queries, while customer service professionals can swiftly retrieve information from a central repository to resolve complex questions. They can skip past lengthy process lifecycles and quickly close the processing of loan applications, claims, invoices, KYC and AML compliance, property valuation, lease agreements, etc.

3. Enhanced privacy and security

Intelligent insights from advanced algorithms and analysis techniques help detect data breaches and prevent thefts. Organizations can safeguard sensitive documents and information and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. They can redact personally identifiable information (PII) and seamlessly manage consent data by extracting consent-related information from privacy policies. When customers perceive that a company prioritizes their security, it fosters trust and confidence, improving the customer experience.

4. Streamlined customer journey

Document AI improves and streamlines customer journeys by automating manual processes, reducing paperwork, minimizing errors, and enabling faster and more personalized experiences. Businesses can gain enhanced visibility across customer trajectories with better predictions, insights, and advanced information retrieval. With relevant information at their quick disposal, they can approach clients with more customized plans and leverage cross-selling opportunities.

Also, document AI enables a seamless flow of information by integrating with existing customer management systems such as CRM platforms and workflow tools. This integration eliminates manual handoffs, reduces data duplication, and ensures that customer information is updated and accessible across various touchpoints, resulting in a more streamlined and consistent customer journey.

A guide to implementing optimal document AI system for customer management

Implementing an optimal document AI system for customer management requires careful planning and execution. Here is a step-by-step guide to help you with the implementation process:

1. Identify business needs

Identifying the bottlenecks in your existing process before implementing an AI system is crucial. You can streamline document processing, improve data accuracy, enhance customer service, or automate manual tasks. Clear objectives will guide your implementation strategy and train the ML models accordingly.

2. Assess document types and sources

Failing to identify document sources and types can lead to inaccurate data classification, ineffective extraction, poor system performance, and missed opportunities for insights.

Assess your document landscape, including customer inquiries, support tickets, contracts, invoices, purchase orders, and more. Analyzing the volume, complexity, and variety of documents helps you determine the scope and requirements of the document AI system. It enables you to plan scalability, adaptability, and integration going forward.

3. Data labeling 

Gather a representative sample of your customer management documents and prepare them for training the AI system. It involves organizing and labeling the documents, ensuring they cover various document types, variations, and potential scenarios. 

Data labeling aims to train ML models to automatically extract and understand customer-related information from unstructured documents, such as invoices, contracts, emails, etc. Once the process is complete, you can use the labeled data to train ML models to automate customer data extraction from new, unseen documents.

4. Choose a suitable ML algorithm to train AI model

Choose suitable ML algorithms based on the specific use cases and data characteristics. Consider factors such as task performance, data structure, model complexity, scalability, and available resources. 

Supervised algorithms in customer management are generally suitable when there are labeled data to learn patterns and accurately make predictions. Examples include gauging satisfaction levels or sentiments where labeled data are explicitly provided.

On the other hand, unsupervised ML algorithms can uncover hidden patterns in customer documents using unlabeled data. Clustering techniques analyze documents to group customers with similar characteristics or behaviors, enabling the identification of distinct customer segments based on interactions, purchasing patterns, preferences, or communication styles. Additionally, they detect anomalies or outliers within customer data, such as transaction history or browsing behavior, to identify unusual or suspicious activities.

5. Training and evaluation

Train the selected ML algorithm using the labeled dataset and split the dataset into training, validation, and testing sets. To avoid errors, fine-tune the model parameters, such as learning rate and regularization. Iterate on the training process to achieve the best performance. Monitor the model's performance metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, etc.) and make necessary adjustments.

6. Integrate with existing systems 

Integrate the document AI solution with customer management systems. It involves understanding the architecture and data flows of your existing platforms and SOPs and identifying the touchpoints where document processing can be seamlessly integrated.

Evaluate your customer management systems' data formats and APIs to determine compatibility and ease of integration. You must also assess performance, scalability, data traffic, security, and version control for optimal deployment. 

Challenges and the best practices for document AI implementation in customer management

1. Use high-quality data

According to a report, almost one-third (32%) of participants believe bias within an AI algorithm caused them to miss out on an opportunity, such as a financial application approval or job opportunity.

If not carefully trained and monitored, AI models can unintentionally perpetuate biases within the training data. It is crucial to select training data carefully, rigorously evaluate the model's performance, and continuously monitor its behavior to mitigate bias.

2. Combine the power of AI with human expertise

Finding the right balance between AI-driven support and customer success experts is essential. While automation can provide efficiency and accuracy, maintaining the personal touch and empathy that customers appreciate often requires human involvement. AI systems may excel at providing quick responses, but they often struggle to comprehend and respond appropriately to complex emotional cues from customers. This limitation could lead to unsatisfactory interactions.

3. Data governance 

According to a Salesforce report, 84% of users are more loyal to companies with strong security controls.

Implement robust privacy and security measures to safeguard customer data. Document AI systems process sensitive information, and it is essential to handle this data responsibly, protect it from unauthorized access, and comply with relevant data protection regulations. Ensure compliance with applicable laws, such as GDPR or CCPA, and obtain explicit consent for data processing.

4. Explainability and interpretability

It is essential to establish trust and accountability while implementing an AI system. Utilize methods that enable explainability and interpretability. While explainability allows human users to comprehend and trust the results and output created by ML algorithms, interpretability depends on how accurately an ML model can associate a cause with an effect.

5. Find a suitable tool and prioritize training

While looking for a document AI platform, account for error, accuracy, precision, recall, and straight through processing (STP) rates. Also, consider its scalability based on the documents' varying nature and complexity. Identify the required data points, and evaluate the project cost and return on investment (ROI).

Prioritizing training is essential to ensuring the successful adoption and utilization of the document AI tool. Start small and begin with pilot projects rather than an organization-level rollout. Find customer service professionals willing to take charge of the implementation, and let them plan the workflow design and establish a feedback loop.

Key takeaway

In conclusion, integrating document AI into customer management processes offers significant benefits, including streamlined operations, enhanced customer experiences, and valuable insights from document data. However, ethical considerations, transparency, and monitoring for bias are critical for responsible implementation. By prioritizing training and adopting best practices, businesses can leverage the full potential of document AI, resulting in improved efficiency, better decision-making, and increased customer satisfaction.