Big Data and AI in Customer Support : A study of Big Data and AI in customer service with a focus on value-creating factors from the employee perspective

Sammanfattning: The advance of the Internet has resulted in an immensely interconnected world, which produces a tremendous amount of data. It has come to change our daily lives and behaviours tremendously. The trend is especially seen in the field of e-commerce where the customers have started to require more and more from the product and service providers. Moreover, with the rising competition, the companies have to adopt new ways of doing things to keep their position on the market as well as keeping and attracting new customers. One important factor for this is excelling customer service. Today, companies adopt technologies like BDA and AI to enhance and provide excellent customer service. This study aims to investigate how two Swedish cooperations extract value from their customer services with the help of BDA and AI. This study also strives to create an understanding of the expectations, requirements and implications of the technologies from the participants' perspectives that in this case are the employees of these mentioned businesses. Moreover, many fail to see the true potential that the technologies can bring and especially in the field of customer service. This study helps to address these challenges and by pinpointing the ’value- factors’ that companies participating in this study extracts, it might encourage the implementation of digital technologies in the customer service with no regard to the size of the company. This thesis was conducted with a qualitative approach and with semi-structured interviews and systematic observations with two Swedish companies acting on the Chinese market. The findings from the interviews, conducted with these selected companies, present that the companies actively use BDA and AI in their customer service. Moreover, several value-factors are pinpointed in the different stages of customer service. The most reoccurring themes are: ”proactive support”, ”relationship establishment”, ”identifying attitudes and behaviours” and ”real-time support”. Moreover, as for the value-creating factors before and after the actual interaction the reoccurring themes are ”competitive advantage”, ”high-impact customer insights”, ”classification”, ”practicality”, as well as ”reflection and development”. This essay provides knowledge that can help companies to further their understanding of how important customer service along with BDA and AI is and how they can support competitive advantage as well as customer loyalty. Since the thesis only focused on the investigation of Swedish organizations on the Shanghainese market, it would be of interest to continue further research on Swedish companies as China is seen to be in the forefront when it comes to utilizing these technologies.