Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage. It is being discussed throughout companies, from the contact center to the board room. For customer service and sales, AI is being implemented in chatbots, robotic process automation, virtual agents, and many more technologies. But the jury is not out on AI when it comes to customer experience. So we decided to ask CX thought leaders this question:
“How will AI impact customer experience?”
Sheri Greenhaus
Sheri is the Managing Partner of CRMXchange, a large online information exchange for contact center professionals.
We have seen tremendous growth and acceptance by both companies and customers in the use of AI in the form of bots and automated messaging. Consumers are more demanding. They are interested in fast, accurate answers, whether the response is through a human or robot. The younger generation in particular will use AI based technology to find answers themselves. As a ‘last resort’ or for complicated issues, they will contact an agent.
Agents will be fully empowered subject experts. Due to advances in technology, their expertise will be coupled with a knowledge base of data accessed at their fingertips. The result: higher FCR leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Daniel Hong, Forrester Research, Inc.
Daniel is the VP & Research Director for Application Development & Delivery and Digital Business at Forrester Research, Inc. He blogs at Forrester Research.
The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated across the enterprise giving hopes of amping up automation, enriching insights, streamlining processes, augmenting workers, and in many ways making our lives as consumers, employees, and customers a whole lot better. Senior management salivates over the exponential gains AI is supposed to deliver to their business. Kumbayah moments occur in meeting rooms as teams begin planning cycles that embed AI technologies in their strategic plans.
But here’s the half empty: AI requires a lot more resources than most people think. It is not a “set it and forget it” technology. The reality is models are constantly tuned and optimized manually especially for customer engagement where natural language is a foundational. To put it into context, AI is in the toddler phase when it comes to maturity level. But it’s growing fast as more ontologies are built, vector space models improve, and companies operationalize AI by using a broader workforce to conduct the tagging of customer interactions — called blended AI.
Forrester blog: “Predictions 2018: Blended AI Will Disrupt Your Customer Service And Sales Strategy“, Daniel Hong, November 9, 2017
Sameer Khan, Direct Energy
Sameer Khan is the Director of Marketing Operations at Direct Energy. He blogs and podcasts at KeyWebMetrics.
- Personalized experience: Customers look for a connected experience with their brands. They prefer unified experience and faster solutions to their problems. AI can help bridge the gap by extending the personalized experience across channels, devices and segments at a faster pace based on customer inputs.
- Insightful journey analytics: Analytics stakeholders struggle with millions of touchpoint records across the customers journey. AI driven technology can help solve this by sifting through large chunks of data and surfacing key insights.
- Intelligent service delivery: AI can help augment the learnings from real-life customer service experiences and deliver through automated systems such as chatbots and virtual service reps.
Paul Lang, Avaya
Paul is the Head of Contact Center Product Marketing at Avaya.
AI will enable enterprises to offer more personalized customer experiences. It will deliver deeper customer insights and trend-spotting and create greater customer outcomes and loyalty.
For Contact Center agents it will enhance agent efficiency, compliance and agent satisfaction. Contact Center operations will be improved with analytics that track customer behavior and trends, together with proactive predictions rather than reactive course correction.
In summary, it will enable a lower TCO, with higher customer lifetime value, leading to increased growth, profitability, revenues.
Mark Stallings, Forty 7 Ronin
Mark is a Managing Partner at Forty 7 Ronin, which offers consulting expertise in contact center automation for the Genesys environment.
Businesses are currently implementing a rudimentary AI for their customers, so a better question is: how do improvements in AI impact the customer experience? I feel the greatest gain will be in Tools that make it easier for businesses to define rules and prioritize those rules. It makes it seem the business system the customers are interacting with, knows things about them and adapts to their specific situation be it late payments, or insurance claim processing, or status of my order about to ship. The more proactively adaptive a system is, the more appealing it will be to the customer.
Justin Tippett, CX Group Australia
Justin is the Founder at CX Group Australia, a connected group of businesses that provide products and services to those working in the CX industry.
We’ve already started to see the impact of AI on the Customer Experience led primarily with a cost-reduction/efficiency focus through the application of things like intelligent bots that aim to reduce or eliminate low to medium complexity enquiries.
I think the real excitement, however, is enabling CX practitioners to harness AI technology to deliver increasingly personalised experiences to customers.
The ability to offer a fully customised CX journey for each and every customer is going to completely challenge the conventional thinking on CX execution. Whilst that will present some new opportunities and challenges for us, it’s going to be a great time to be a customer!
