We all have our go-to bad customer service story. Whether it’s at the airport or at a retail store or, perhaps more commonly in our forever-evolving technological landscape, over the phone with an automated voice assistant, we are all quite familiar with what bad customer service looks like. While, in some ways, this isn’t all too troubling, for business owners or anyone working in any customer-facing field, this does probably sound somewhat concerning. I mean, you don’t want your business to become a part of someone’s bad customer service story. But good customer service is oftentimes somewhat hard to come by and it can be hard to know what it looks like or how to train your employees to do it.
At Payday HCM, we understand these concerns. Not only have we had plenty of clients approach us with their own stories of bad customer service, but we, too, are a customer-facing business. Our goal, above all else, is to provide a good experience—whether you decide to go with our business or not. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our customer service, and we’re also constantly looking for ways to be trailblazers for new technologies within our industry. Naturally, in the age of AI, this leads to one conclusion: how can AI be used to help improve our customer experience?
In this article, we’ll go over the AI tool that Payday is working to develop to help us improve how we interact with our current and potential clients. We’ll hear from two of our Client Service Managers—Gloria Hernandez and Stephanie Landrum—about what this tool does, its uses, and how it can help not only our business but potentially other businesses as well create the best customer experience possible. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how Payday is utilizing the latest technologies to power our business and create lasting client relationships.
In this article, we’ll go over:
- How Payday HCM Began Working With AI Tools For Customer Service
- Bear AI: How AI Can Be Used For Customer Service
- Payday HCM, AI, And The Future Of Customer Service
How Payday HCM Began Working With AI Tools For Customer Service
At Payday, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our customer service and to provide the absolute best service to our current and potential clients. Naturally, we looked toward AI for the next possible evolution in creating excellent customer experiences.
Communication Is Key
The initial seed for the idea, according to Landrum and Hernandez, came from Payday CEO and founder Andy Siegel. Siegel, someone who’s never been afraid of embracing new technologies, wanted to see if there was any room for improvement with how we communicate with our clients.
“He wants to see how are we doing as far as responding? What are we doing to get an issue fixed as quickly as we can? How (do) we communicate with the client?” Hernandez said.
This idea of using technology to analyze how we communicate with our clients comes from a unique byproduct that also stems from technology: the increase in email communication and the increased possibility of miscommunication, according to Hernandez.
“It's easy when you're typing from brain to keyboard that you already have the thought process, but not everybody receives that email the same. So… we're trying to be very cognizant about (making) sure that there's no misunderstanding… (to) ensure client satisfaction,” Hernandez said.
Improving On Current Strategies And Practices
Currently, improving communication within customer communications involves a lot of manual tracking. According to Landrum, she and Hernandez have spent time in the past manually combing through emails, looking for possible pain points in customer communications. This is, of course, a time-consuming process.
“Our competition monitor phone calls, do the basic stuff. (But) our heart is our emails because that is 80 percent of (our) communication with (our) clients,” Hernandez said. “That 80 percent is crucial, and we want to ensure that the emails are just like any flow of a conversation when you're talking to somebody, that the emails flow the same way.”
With these monitoring tools, though, it can become easy for micro-managing to take over—for Landrum and Hernandez, transparency amongst the team is crucial for ensuring that everyone can take full advantage of these new tools.
“We're completely transparent. All of the (customer service representatives) are users as well, so they can see the same exact things that we do… picking up on potential red flags of things that clients might say… whether they be upset or ready to leave or that sort of thing,” Landrum said.
Bear AI: How AI Can Be Used For Customer Service
Of course, this brings us to the elephant (or perhaps bear) in the room: what actually is this tool, and what does it do?
Detecting Email Sentiment With AI
The AI tool, called Bear, is designed to analyze emails either going out to clients or that have come in from clients and detect whether certain phrases or sentences have a positive, negative, or neutral connotation, according to Landrum.
“The tool reads all of the emails. It's picking up keywords. It breaks it down by the sender or the receiver, the data comes in, and then it gives me a trend analysis. So, out of a whole email… the system is really good about picking up that sentence that is the keyword that they're upset or not happy or frustrated,” Landrum said.
The tool allows you to filter by sentiment, whether the email is incoming or outgoing, or by date range, according to Landrum. The tool compiles the data into a graph, showing how many emails have positive, neutral, or negative sentiments. This data can then be exported to a PDF file. To analyze an email, you use a “credit.” These credits can then be purchased to analyze more emails.
Improvements And Development
As of January 24, 2025, Bear AI is still in active development. Payday is playing a crucial role in the development process of the tool, providing feedback to the developers on functionalities and features that could be included in the software, according to Landrum.
“I've been communicating with the AI team for some time now, letting (them) know the things that maybe aren't working in the tool,” Landrum said. “They built this from scratch, so we'd like to see this… can we get things like that? It's really just being built based on Payday's needs.”
Landrum emphasized the uniqueness of the product, not only in its functionality but in terms of how Payday is working with the development team to help shape the tool. This relationship with the development team allows for quick fixes in cases where the system may apply the wrong sentiment to certain emails.
“We had a client who was upset. The CSR brought it to my attention, and so the first thing I did was come in (to Bear) to see if it flagged it. It didn't flag it the way I needed it to, so I'm going to bring that to their attention… it's just a working project. They're just gonna make it better and better,” Landrum said.
Payday HCM, AI, And The Future Of Customer Service
Looking forward, there are a number of changes and features both Landrum and Hernandez hope will be added to the Bear AI tool. More importantly, they anticipate this tool will help to make certain aspects of their jobs much easier.
Continuing To Improve
As Landrum, Hernandez, and the team at Payday continue to use the app, they become more familiar with the features currently available with the tool and the kinds of features and improvements they’d like to see moving forward.
“So, more filtering options, right? We have different teams… so we just need the ability to individualize it per person. The (export) function that they gave us is only PDF right now, so we're definitely looking to improve that. They've promised us that (exporting to Excel) is in the pipeline,” Landrum said.
Making Processes More Efficient With AI
Ultimately, this tool is aimed at making the client experience more positive. Both Landrum and Hernandez noted how utilizing this tool will help them catch potential issues before they can become much larger issues.
“I believe that this is gonna help us be proactive instead of reactive… this allows me the ability to get ahead of (a problem) right before anything escalates, and so then I can jump on it and reach out to the client, or ask the CSR what's going on. That's really where it's important for us is to just be ahead of the game,” Landrum said.
Hernandez echoed this sentiment, expressing a similar interest in remaining proactive instead of reactive while being able to provide clients with the best service possible.
“It gives us the ability to intercede and potentially call the client and say, ‘Hey, I saw the email. I just wanna make sure everything's okay…’ That really goes into everything that we're doing… and just giving clients more than they expect,” Hernandez said.
Powering The Future Of Customer Service With AI
Providing excellent customer service is a process that is constantly evolving. What may work one day may not work the next. In the age of ever-advancing technology, it’s become even harder to predict what sorts of methods or strategies will work when it comes to delivering clients the absolute best experience. For business owners, solving this problem can often make you feel stressed out, unsure of what the next best step is. Looking toward the future, AI is transforming the ways that we interact with technologies, and the tools discussed in this article are just one way Payday is staying one step ahead (and hopefully inspiring others to do the same).
These AI tools only help us to make the services we provide even better. From benefits to payroll to human resources, we’re always here to help. Whatever your business needs, we want to help elevate your business to the next level. Schedule a meeting with us today to learn more about our unique approach to customer service and how we can help your organization.
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