AI assistants are capable of quite a bit more than their living room responsibilities, although we very much appreciate that they can order us pizza and play Spotify. In the workplace, they’re helping to fill the gaps that commonly plague customer service: miscommunications, uninformed support agents, and meeting customers’ expectations. As much as machine learning has been touted for providing better customer experiences, it can help drive better customer engagement as well.

In the world of e-commerce customer support, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by tickets. And it can be a nightmare. Too many tickets + not enough agents to answer them = complete support overload. On average, internal support teams receive 492 tickets each month. That’s more than one hundred tickets each week, or ~16 tickets each day. And that’s just the average. Your brand might be receiving a much higher number.

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Riot.im Web 0.17, landing a dramatically improved launch time and a ~70% reduction in memory use on Web! iOS users will already see the speedup (since 0.7.6 which landed October 5); for Riot.im web/desktop users we’ll be turning the feature on gradually over the next week — you’ll see a notification next time you start the app, when the speedup has activated.

Group conversations can get noisy – new ideas, status updates, answers to questions, the occasional joke. It can be easy to miss important info, or a question directed at you. The new mentions functionality highlights your name visually and makes it easy to scan the text and find the sections relevant to the reader. Searching for "@My Name" (replace it with your actual name, of course) returns all mentions of you giving everyone another way to search and filter the most important messages.

Measuring the productivity of the customer support team in terms of the overall company profits might seem like mission impossible. But it isn’t. In the long run, your customer support team makes a huge impact on marketing your products. You cannot deny that customers return only to those brands or companies that solve their issues faster.

When Maersk, a global leader in shipping and logistics, was hit by the NotPetya ransomware attack in 2017, it not only found itself unable to manage day-to-day operations efficiently, but also unable to effectively inform the markets and its stakeholders of its response. Combined, the financial impact of NotPetya on Maersk is estimated to have exceeded USD$300m.

The only constant is change. These words are as true now as they were when the Greek philosopher Heraclitus spoke them more than 2,500 years ago. For all we know, change might even be accelerating; after all, technology is improving at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Expectations for the speed of support have skyrocketed. With literal instant messaging available between loved ones, friends, and coworkers, it’s an unsurprising evolution to expect instant responses from the companies we buy from. The number of U.S. online shoppers who use live chat has increased from 38% to 58% over the last five years.

Whether it’s a malicious cyber attack, or a complete system outage; when disaster hits your network the immediate priority is to maintain business operations and resolve the issue. However, what you might not realize is that during this recovery period your business could be at even greater risk of a data breach, or malicious attempts to eavesdrop on your confidential discussions!

As customers and companies become more familiar and comfortable with artificial intelligence, the conversations around it have become less “pie in the sky” and more along the lines of “oh, that’s how it can be used”. The speculations into how we might work alongside our robot coworkers and the potential of machine learning won’t end anytime soon, but there’s a lot to be said about practical applications of AI technology.