In the business world, there’s another question that trumps all of these: How can AI improve the customer experience?
Most customers don’t really want to talk to robots when they have pressing needs, so replacing agents with AI isn’t really on the table. Instead, AI becomes an upgrade to the overall customer experience (CX) process, integrated with advanced contact center solutions like Continuant Connect (C4).
As I mentioned before, many customers don’t have a high opinion of auto-attendants. Few things are more aggravating than a machine telling a customer with an urgent request, “your call is very important to us.”
AI chatbots don’t aggravate this problem. Instead of blindsiding the customer with a soulless machine, chatbots can be approached by customers at their leisure to resolve simpler problems. These include answering FAQs or resetting passwords.
Of course, AI’s main purpose isn’t to do the agents’ jobs for them. A better use of this tool is in augmenting the work that agents do with real-time insights and a robust knowledge base. Agents can focus on better customer interactions with a bot feeding them relevant information as the interaction takes place.
AI features in contact centers and other CX solutions work to help personalize the customer experience and reduce friction. Customers want to be more than a cog in the machine or an item on a list, even when they’re aware there’s thousands of them. The ready availability of customer history and preference makes this more possible than ever before.
Now we move from behind the scenes to the front lines to look at some use cases of AI in CX. These will demonstrate how these AI features work in omnichannel contact centers, the kind you may see from Five9, Genesys, and even from us at Continuant with C4.
A customer has experienced an outage and needs to contact support. How they do so depends on the seriousness of the outage. If the outage is a simple one, like minor user error, an intelligent virtual assistant will have it resolved in a matter of minutes.
Conversely, if it’s a serious problem that simple troubleshooting won’t resolve, intelligence helps once again. It can quickly determine the gravity of the situation and send the customer straight to an agent with the right skills to get it fixed.
An agent finds themselves in the middle of a billing dispute. This interaction has the potential to drag on, involve several other people in the organization, and end disastrously for customer and agent alike.
AI-powered coaching prompts and sentiment analysis can help the intrepid agents resolve the situation on their own. With ready access to company policy and previous successful resolutions, they can settle the bills with little friction.
After a routine analysis, the AI in an organization’s contact center detects a sudden increase in inquiries about a certain issue and alerts CX management. This helps key decision makers get ahead of what may be a CX catastrophe.
Potential next steps include sending out alerts to customers informing them of this common issue before they have a chance to flood the support lines. From there, management can also inform their teams in product development or R&D to immediately begin work on a solution.
The AI notices that an agent has had more high difficulty calls than usual lately. To avoid burnout, the AI suggests the agent take a break, and routes calls instead to other agents who can pick up the slack.
AI is proving to be a game-changer for CX, but let’s not forget what’s at the core of positive customer experiences.
We talk a lot about tools like AI “freeing up agents to focus on more important tasks.” Without a doubt, the most important task an agent can be assigned to is attending directly to the complex needs of customers.
As time moves on, the best way to futureproof CX is by combining AI-powered automation and efficiency with the competence and compassion of the human touch.
At Continuant, our contact center, affectionately called C4, provides the apex combination of humanity and technology in the form of an omnichannel, AI-powered CX platform.
For nearly 30 years, we’ve worked with organizations of all sizes, managing the complex communications environments they’ve used to stay connected with their customers. We offered our support back when these were sprawling call centers. Now we’ve created our own solution to consolidate all that customer-supporting infrastructure into C4.
C4 keeps vast backlogs of customer information and history safe and secure within its database, while also making it easy to access amid customer interactions. It’s entirely cloud-based, making it easy to add and remove agents as needed.
The AI components of C4 make intelligent call routing easier than ever to set up and allow users to program effective chatbots and virtual assistants. At the same time, its omnichannel architecture allows human agents to contact customers through their preferred medium, be that calling, messaging, emails, or even social media.
If you’re looking for a seamless AI upgrade for your CX strategy, C4 may be just the thing you’re looking for. Follow the link to set up a free meeting and determine what C4 can do for you.