There’s an old African proverb I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

The proverb — which Hillary Rodham Clinton brought to fame with her 1996 book — also has meaning here at Directly. Our business is in helping companies use expert–in-the-loop AI to deliver customer service at scale.

As I wrote in a recent post, AI isn’t all that smart without us humans helping to train it. In fact, it takes a village of experts to help a virtual agent to develop the right intelligence and succeed in its intended purpose.

The customer service scale problem

Scale. New technology is often aimed at solving problems of scale — from manufacturing breakthroughs that increase a company’s ability to mass produce products, to cloud-based enterprise software that helps a mobile salesforce become more efficient and ultimately drive more revenue.

In the realm of customer service and support, the challenge of scale has been a barrier to business growth for decades. The 1970s saw the rise of industrial contact centers, as growing companies hired teams of low-cost employees to manage inbound support issues. In the 90s, companies moved many of those call centers offshore to reduce costs — and in many cases, added automated phone trees to try to filter calls to the right departments or experts.

Then, with the rise of the Internet, companies began creating online self-service help centers with FAQs and other resources in an effort to defray growing support costs. These online knowledge centers were a start, but internal teams simply can’t produce the breadth of content needed to keep up with a growing number of customer questions as products and services mature and grow.

In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of online community forums — where companies’ customers are given the opportunity to answer questions from other users. Forums help solve the content scale problem, as a large number of external content generators can quickly build a broad, constantly renewing knowledge center. As our CEO Antony Brydon puts it, community forums were to the knowledge center as Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia.

But many forums are also riddled with thousands of bad answers among the good. These sometimes jumbled messes of information lead to a lot of failed searches and can drive people in need of support back to the phone. In fact, a recent study by ContactBabel and Directly found that 62% of people resort to phone calls because they can’t find the information they need on self-service support sites.

Enter artificial intelligence. An AI-powered digital agent can ingest the collective wisdom of a broad community — and present answers in an instant. Answers at scale. But not always the right answers.

The AI needs feedback — human feedback — to know which answer among a tangled web of information is the right one for a specific question. And not just any training. Expert training.

A village of experts

I believe you can learn something from everyone. But as a parent, I want to surround my child with a combination of skilled, experienced, and empathetic people. That’s especially true when it comes to developing specialized skills. As my colleague Ben Rigby wrote, if you were trying to learn violin, you’d be better off being trained by a concert violinist than spending all of your time learning from a book.

It’s not all that different than how companies should think about teaching an AI-powered digital agent. AI needs a community. But not just any community — product experts that help curate answers and train the AI.

Directly’s CX automation platform allows our customers to identify and engage their top users to train the AI. For example, only the top 7% of Samsung mobile phone users are involved in training the electronics giant’s customer support AI. Similarly, only those that have completed 5+ family trees for Ancestry.com are involved in answering questions and training the virtual support agent for the company.

Only the combination of expert training and community content will make for truly intelligent AI at scale. Like the proverb says, “it takes a village.”

Want to learn more about how AI can help your customer support scale?

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If you’d like to see our AI in action, contact us to set up a demo. Also, make sure to check out our latest research, produced with our partner ContactBabel, The Inner Circle Guide to AI, Chatbots & Machine Learning.