Four Ways Human Feedback Elevates Generative AI in Field Service

Generative AI (Gen AI) tools are making waves in the service industry, but they are only as effective as the knowledge they are built on. Using AI in a vacuum—without the insights and feedback from your internal teams—can lead to missed opportunities and inefficient solutions.

Collaboration between AI and your human experts unlocks its full potential, allowing the AI to grow smarter with each interaction and challenge your team encounters.

This process helps capture and share critical knowledge, reducing the growing knowledge gap as employees retire or move on.

Why human feedback matters

Field service technicians, support agents, and dealer representatives encounter unique, undocumented challenges daily, leading to delays when AI tools offer incomplete or irrelevant suggestions.

While Gen AI thrives on data, static data often falls short in service environments. Human feedback bridges this gap. Incorporating real-world experiences beyond manuals helps make the AI more intuitive and aligned with your organization’s needs. This input helps the AI learn to recognize and respond to undocumented situations.

1. Improving decision-making with feedback loops

In environments where technicians and agents must make quick, informed decisions, AI tools provide a critical edge. However, these tools are only as good as the data they're trained on.

When technicians provide feedback on the AI's responses—correcting an error or confirming a successful suggestion—they help refine the AI, making it more reliable over time. This real-time feedback loop ensures the AI delivers more accurate and relevant recommendations during high-pressure situations.

For instance, an AI tool might recommend replacing a common part, but after troubleshooting, the technician finds the issue is another component that fails under specific conditions. When the technician shares this knowledge with the AI, it will learn to recognize those cases and adjust its recommendations.

Next time, the AI will suggest the right component, saving time on the diagnosis and leading to a faster decision.

2. Preserving tribal knowledge

Think about the expertise already in your team—those nuggets of wisdom that aren't written down anywhere but are key to solving tough problems. This is what we call "tribal knowledge." Your team members have built this knowledge over years of experience, dealing with the specific challenges of your industry. However, it's rarely documented and is often lost when these employees retire or move on.

With 70% of field organizations expressing concerns over knowledge from a retiring workforce, capturing tribal knowledge is more important than ever.

What happens when tribal knowledge is lost? Picture a new technician troubleshooting an issue. They follow the manual, but the problem persists because the underlying cause is a rare issue only a veteran technician would recognize from experience. Without access to this insight, the technician might waste valuable time on trial-and-error solutions, resulting in a bad customer experience.

One of the most powerful features of a good gen AI tool is its ability to capture and digitize your team's deep knowledge. When your team members feed this knowledge into your AI software, the AI can learn and improve its performance, ensuring that it incorporates the most effective solutions, even those not identified in historical records, manuals, or other documentation.

3. Extracting critical Insights from your experts

As seasoned technicians retire, they take years of experience and knowledge—assets that aren't easily replaced. Simultaneously, new technicians entering the field lack the skills and experience to manage increasingly complex tasks. 

Experienced technicians often know more than just solutions—they understand the best practices and shortcuts that make a real difference in the field.

For example, a veteran technician might find a unique solution to a recurring issue not documented in existing manuals. By sharing this solution with the AI, the system can learn and apply it in similar cases, capturing critical insights that would otherwise be missed.

When you give your technicians the ability to share their expertise with the AI, you ensure that your most valuable insights don't leave with retiring technicians. Instead, they are preserved in a smarter, more responsive AI system, ready to empower the next generation of service technicians.

4. Building a smarter service team

When your team engages with AI tools, they help shape a smarter, more responsive system. This isn't just about correcting mistakes; it's about creating a partnership between human expertise and AI. The result? A more efficient, empowered workforce that delivers higher-quality service.

Over time, as your team interacts with the AI and contributes their feedback, the system becomes a valuable repository of knowledge, enabling newer technicians to tap into this collective intelligence and resolve issues more effectively.

The power of feedback

Gen AI tools are powerful but only reach their full potential when integrated with human feedback. By engaging your whole team in this feedback process, you create a smarter, more responsive AI tool that can address complex challenges with precision, ultimately enhancing your service operations across the board.

This collective input allows the AI to learn from diverse experiences and perspectives, refining its capabilities with every interaction.

How does Service AIdvisor incorporate feedback?

If you're using Service AIdvisor, you can leverage our end-to-end feedback loop to infuse Service AIdvisor with the collective expertise and knowledge of your internal teams.

With our Expert Answers feature, your experienced staff can directly add their knowledge, and Service AIdvisor will learn from it, using it as a source for similar questions.

Best of all, leaving feedback is quick and easy. Your team members can add their feedback right from the Service AIdvisor's chat interface without the hassle of switching tabs or navigating to a separate workflow.

Ready to get started? Start a no-cost proof of value program to experience the value of Service AIdvisor and empower your workforce in 30 days!