AI is now embedded across business enterprises in ways we could not have imagined just a few years ago. One area where it is proving its value—both by enhancing workflows and improving the customer experience—is customer contact centers. Contact centers face evolving customer expectations and growing demand, and an AI-enabled customer experience tool is the perfect way to meet those challenges.
Here’s what you need to know about how AI improves the customer experience and simplifies workflows to allow customer contact center agents to focus on higher-value tasks.
Read more: CCaaS continues to evolve with these contact center solutions
Streamlining AI customer experience workflows
Customer contact center agents are great at responding to customer inquiries. However, they may not have the data or tools to quickly customize customer experiences, such as upselling or making personalized recommendations. AI can handle massive amounts of customer data and put it in the hands of customer service agents when they need it, giving them the insights to satisfy customer demands and delight them with tailored experiences. Consuming and analyzing customer data provides customer service agents with context for customer requests, enabling them to build relationships rather than just answer basic questions.
Key Takeaways:
- The AI customer experience is about personalization and speed, as well as an enhanced human connection.
- Customized AI agents can help human customer service agents focus on higher-value tasks.
- An experienced managed services provider like OnX can help you map your journey toward enhanced AI customer experiences.
The AI customer experience: Speed and personalization
While AI helps customer service agents streamline workflows and enhance the way they help customers, the AI customer experience can feel similarly streamlined and personalized.
- Intelligent call routing: Instead of being bounced around to different customer service agents, AI agents can gather the right information to route calls to the right person.
- Call context: Once they receive the call, customer service agents have the full context of a customer’s request, including the issue history and insights about what the customer might need.
- CRM documentation: Customized AI agents can take notes and update customer relationship management tools, allowing customer service agents to spend more time on higher-value activities.
- Communication across platforms: AI agents can share a customer’s inquiry across platforms, so that the context of their request and the history of their interaction is available no matter how they choose to contact your business.
- Always-on AI agents: AI agents never sleep, so they can handle a high volume of customer requests, allowing companies to staff customer service centers appropriately.
- Real-time sentiment analysis and coaching: AI can detect customer intents and sentiments, giving agents the heads up they need to respond appropriately, and even coach agents on the next best steps to make customers feel heard and valued.
AI can make customer service agents more productive and improve the customer experience in reactive ways, but there’s another way in which AI customer experience models can make businesses even more proactive: boosting growth and loyalty.
Moving from reactive to proactive
Usually, customers contact service centers when they have a question or a problem. But because AI can consume and analyze so much data, it can anticipate issues and help agents act before there’s an issue.
This is aided by predictive models based on customer experience indicators. For example, a customer’s previous interactions might determine what services they could seek in the future. That would enable a customer service agent to proactively reach out to ensure a customer’s experience is satisfying or offer tailored recommendations. AI’s integration across multiple data sources and company systems can help uncover trends and identify when network issues might be likely to occur. That could help service agents define the number of potentially affected customers and reach out with alternatives—or resolve issues before they arise. This is the kind of proactive customer service that builds brand loyalty.
AI customer experience boosts human connection
AI customer service is not just about bots handling customer issues, although that’s often the perception. Deloitte research found that customers’ trust in a brand dropped by an average of 51% when companies used AI poorly. They also found that trust increased when companies demonstrated thoughtful design of the AI customer experience.
AI should be a powerful tool for human service agents, not a replacement for them. At its best, it empowers agents to focus on high-value tasks and build stronger customer connections. Companies would also do well to be transparent about their use of AI—a quality that respondents to the Deloitte survey said increased trust.
Read more: Six steps to tackle AI-based modernization with enterprise hybrid cloud
Level up your AI customer experience with OnX
Do-it-yourself AI can be risky. Businesses need expert guidance to equip themselves to offer the best AI customer experience and gain the most from their AI investments.
With decades of experience helping companies tailor customer service operations, OnX is the right partner to help you on your AI customer service journey. Learn more about how OnX can help you speed into the future by contacting us today.
