Imagine lining up for a race before a sea of spectators. You take your mark. The race starts, the adrenaline spikes, and you’re off like a shot, putting everything you have into your legs and muscles to take you as far and fast as you can go. You’re gaining on your opponent, closing the distance until you at last pull ahead into the lead. The crowd roars, your hand is thrust into the air. You’ve just crossed the finish line, and nothing feels better than that well-earned victory.
Can you imagine the thrill and the pride of that moment? This feeling certainly isn’t limited to a physical race—the satisfaction of success relates to nearly every aspect of life. In business, it’s meeting goals. As a customer, it’s getting your needs met with precision and efficiency. In customer experience, it’s delivering satisfying interactions that foster loyalty and trust in consumers.
No one enters a serious race to come in any place other than first, and an attitude of, “It’s good enough,” is never truly good enough to take you to the customer experience winner’s podium. It takes an exceptional performance to outpace the competition, a combination of dedication, drive and discipline that turns amateur abilities into record-breaking feats. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) that’s been adapted and purpose-built for customer experience (CX), otherwise known as CX AI.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, the race for CX excellence is on, and brands must regularly evaluate the progress of their CX AI investment to ensure they remain on track to meet their goals. The time is now to assess your organization’s CX initiatives and determine if you’re set up to deliver gold medal-status service, or if you fall short at qualifying.
AI is more than just the current industry buzzword—it’s becoming a well-honed tool CX leaders can use to catapult their organizations into superstardom. Keep reading to learn how to make it work for you.
How might your contact center software limit your CX agility?
As a stakeholder in the CX race, it’s crucial to know what you’re capable of, but it’s also important to know your limitations. Without that perspective, it’s impossible to foster any significant improvement in the services you provide to customers. Knowing the limitations of your current contact center software, specifically, can provide insight into what you can do to outperform fellow racers.
Winning a race, particularly in customer experience, never hinges on just one thing—it’s a combination of many different elements that enhance your organization’s performance. As a foot race might rely on speed, concentration, training, gear, power, and drive, winning the CX race involves critically assessing your systems. Everything needs to work together to produce groundbreaking results. Putting CX AI into action to augment those systems not only streamlines your current operations but also presents new and cutting-edge technology to strengthen your CX muscles and take your brand to the next level.
But where to even start? Consider evaluating the following situations to determine how your organization can best incorporate AI-powered tools into your CX platform:
- Pinpoint all the possible touchpoints and channels your customers interact with to get their issues resolved. How easily can customers reach out through their channel of choice? How many touchpoints to find the information they need? Do all the steps proceed in an order that prioritizes the customer’s needs, versus what’s easiest for the business?
- Determine how many systems your agents are required to navigate daily to resolve issues and handle customer needs. If they’re using so many that it’s interfering with their ability to handle interactions smoothly, it’s time for an upgrade.
- Identify common or recurring points of friction during interactions, such as customers repeating information, call drops, lack of context or background information about the issue at hand, or lack of agent soft skills (e.g. empathy, active listening, etc.).
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Progress is never without discomfort. While budget constraints (a sort of sore muscle or fatigue that could pose a difficulty in a race) may play a role in a brand’s software limitations, these constraints can often be mitigated or even surpassed with savings and efficiency gains provided with the right AI technology solution. Smart CX investments can help organizations increase productivity, cut costs, and improve CSAT, and retention efforts.
Keeping up with the industry requires a keen outlook on where to invest funds, and wouldn’t you know it: In a 2024 survey completed by ICMI, they found that 75% of CX leaders plan to invest in AI-powered solutions in the next 12-18 months for the purpose of improving CX. It’s no secret that CX AI has the potential to deliver a significant competitive advantage and drive growth.
You’ve seen the opening, now take it and power through—the time to act on AI solutions is now.
Gear up: How AI can enhance your operations
Think of implementing AI-powered solutions as outfitting an athlete with the most state-of-the-art gear available, designed with optimal aerodynamics and the highest quality materials to facilitate peak performance. Here’s how AI can equip your brand with compelling CX advantages:
- Manage data abundance: Your contact center collects a wealth of data every day, and much of it sits idle and its value goes to waste. With CX AI, brands can extract actionable insights from extensive customer data from all communication channels (phone, email, chat, social media, etc.). This enables businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors, preferences, and needs, and therefore enhance their CX strategies.
- Exceed customer expectations: Today’s customers expect fast, efficient experiences. CX AI is a strategic investment allowing businesses to personalize interactions, smoothly connect touchpoints, automate processes to increase efficiency, and provide proactive support. The result: Upleveled experiences and customer loyalty. AI makes disparate customer journeys a thing of the past, and customers not only take notice—they keep coming back.
- Anticipate customer needs: With predictive analytics, brands can analyze historical data patterns to make accurate predictions about future outcomes. Organizations can leverage insights from this data analysis to offer solutions and recommendations tailored to each interaction.
- Provide omnichannel support: Utilizing AI helps ensure you deliver consistent support across all communication channels, allowing customers to seamlessly interact with your company. Different customers have different channel preferences and access; meeting them through their channel of choice enhances loyalty and satisfaction.
- Offer 24/7 assistance: Not open? Not a problem. AI—in the form of bots or virtual assistants and other self-service options—provides constant support to customers, ensuring they have access to help and pathways to resolutions whenever needed.
- Generate high quality content—fast: Generative AI enables brands to not only generate content but also provide comprehensive support resources for agents. Omdia found that 89% of agents are convinced that generative AI will aid in their ability to help customers, allowing them to resolve customer queries efficiently. Organizations can automate the creation of knowledge articles and generate high quality content for both agents and self-service channels.
Check out the image below to get a sense of where AI is being deployed during different interaction phases:
Empowered employees can clear any CX hurdle
Your agents are the heart and soul of the CX your brand offers. Think of them as the athletes you’re training for an elite competition; their execution is crucial to securing a successful customer experience.
Investing in top-tier talent is only phase one (or should we say, lap one) of building a team of agents who can surmount any challenge. Equipping them with the best systems and technology available will take you that much farther in the competition, and much more quickly. That’s where AI comes in. It’s a powerful tool CX leaders can provide to empower agents and enhance their natural and learned skills.
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According to Omdia research, 84% of consumers believe that generative AI will improve an agent’s ability to help customers, and agents largely agree. So how does AI become an agent’s best friend?
Below are just a few AI-powered tools that can significantly benefit agents on a daily basis:
- Agent assist capabilities: Chatbots and virtual agents can handle basic customer inquiries and provide instant, accurate responses. Agents can still have eyes on these interactions, but typically won’t have to intervene unless the interaction is escalated.
- Real-time proactive guidance: AI supplies personalized guidance to agents in the moment, enabling them to anticipate customer needs and respond quickly and accurately using the insights provided.
- Post interaction analysis: AI can analyze call recordings and data and identify areas for agents to improve and can suggest relevant training modules and knowledge articles that could enhance an agent’s expertise and capabilities.
- Training assistance: Through AI-powered systems, agents can receive targeted training modules tailored to their individual needs and skill gaps. By analyzing patterns and trends in agent performance, AI algorithms can generate recommendations for specific training topics and techniques.
In addition to all of this, AI-powered solutions mitigate smaller, more mundane tasks for agents, freeing up their time and focus to tackle complex interactions and take CSAT to the next level. Purpose-built AI helps position agents for success from the start.
Get your tech priorities straight to pull into the lead
INTELLIGENT
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Laying out an effective training plan is crucial to running the best race possible, and setting specific priorities in place helps you apply your resources where they will benefit your brand the most. Prioritizing AI for CX promotes an interaction-centric mindset, increasing the intelligence and intuition of your system and enhancing operations.
When laying out the priorities of what AI-powered tools to invest in as well as where and how you’d like them deployed, strategy is key. Understanding the various AI technology options is essential before deployment. Each approach has its own pros and cons, but aligning the tech you choose with the outcome you want for both your organization and customers is critical to avoid wasted resources and inaccurate results.
By evaluating your CX needs and matching them to the most suitable AI solution, you can improve the chances of successful implementation.
Below are five key options to consider implementing and prioritizing when it comes to AI:
- Machine learning (ML): Features capabilities like anomaly detection and agent performance optimization by learning from analyzed data.
- Natural language processing (NLP): Enables AI to understand and respond to human language, facilitating features like chatbots, sentiment analysis, and voice recognition.
- Predictive analytics: Leverages historical data and machine learning to predict future events such as customer needs, call volume fluctuations, and customer journey orchestration.
- Conversational AI: Combines NLP and ML to create human-like interactions, supporting chatbots and virtual assistants to facilitate conversations and troubleshoot issues.
- Generative AI: Goes beyond understanding language to creating it, allowing for personalized and personable interactions by crafting unique responses to customer inquiries.
THE NEXT PHASE: Generative AI
The conversation around generative AI is gaining traction by the day, and its benefits are duly recognized by customers, agents, and CX leaders alike. In fact, 85% of business leaders are of the opinion that customers will have a significantly better experience with generative AI than without it.
The benefits of purpose-built AI technology are vast. AI provides the ability to automatically create call summaries, natural sounding conversations through chatbots, and detailed knowledge articles – just to name a few! Generative AI empowers brands to elevate their CX initiatives by leveraging advanced algorithms to create dynamic, customized customer solutions. Such a level of customization not only enhances customer experiences; it also differentiates organizations in a competitive market, increasing customer retention and strengthening a brand’s reputation.
As you can see in the graph below, deployment of generative AI in particular areas is already well underway.
So what’s the next step in your AI-powered race? Create a deployment plan that examines your current technology state and necessary considerations to achieve the desired state of future operations. Your organization will be better positioned to select the right AI technologies once this plan is in place, and you can move forward in working toward a new personal record: achieving the highest CSAT possible and providing CX that will earn a reputation as the best in the industry.
Push to a gold-medal CX win with purpose-built AI
During a race, an athlete NEVER slows down with the goal in sight, and nor should CX leaders. This is the critical moment in the endeavor—the final push that will culminate, thanks to every innovative technique, every moment of intense training, and every ounce of effort, into a gold medal victory. However, this is where the “good enough” mentality becomes most dangerous, and a brief lapse in concentration could mean game over. “Good enough” might get you across the finish line, but chances are you won’t get there first, and if that’s the case, all your efforts have effectively gone to waste. You won’t come out ahead of your competition, and you could lose valuable fans and sponsors (aka customers) to a competitor.
So how much more of a CX push can you make?
Remember: Good enough is never truly good enough. Exceptional CX is the differentiator for organizations today—in a world where brands are highly competitive, it’s ultimately the customer experience that differentiates one organization from another. To meet the future demands of CX, implementing purpose-built AI to help create those exceptional experiences is the epitome of putting your full effort behind a race, and your path to exceeding not only customer expectations but your own organization’s goals.
Sophisticated AI solutions for CX will ultimately empower contact centers to evolve into data intelligence hubs, predicting customer needs and offering proactive solutions. Such solutions will lay the groundwork for growth and adaptability to accommodate data-driven insights. The challenge is on—are you up for it?
Don’t stumble at the CX finish line. Access Omdia’s Putting CX AI into action: A practical guide to learn how to evaluate and utilize the insights CX AI provides to stay on track and remain a top contender.
And if you’re craving more CX AI education, tune into the on-demand webinar, You Asked: What Does It Mean to be CX AI Ready in 2024?, for industry expertise and insights into the evolution of customer experience, and how AI is changing the course of the race in exciting ways.
[1] Omdia: Putting CX AI into action: A practical guide (2023)