Guest blog: AI - levelling up customer experiences
Customer experiences – what happens when organisations and consumers interact – often vary not only between sectors but also depending on the size of the organisation. Within retail, customer experience (CX) capabilities of leading brands such as Amazon have typically out-performed their mid-sized competitors; inflating consumer expectations and helping fuel the ‘Amazon Effect’ which has raised the bar for standards across all sectors, not just e-commerce.
However, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) into CX has the potential to level the playing field and equip organisations of all types with the tools to match and beat the best, irrespective of their size. By investing in AI, businesses can unlock a multitude of benefits, including:
Extended, always-on support
Larger providers are well-versed in dealing with 24/7 customer demands and handling high volumes of interactions. By comparison, smaller organisations often deliver service in a much narrower time and date window, which might not be convenient for the consumer. AI-driven chatbots help organisations of all sizes provide service to customers around the clock, seven days a week.
Although they can’t solve every inquiry, an AI-driven chatbot will answer basic questions or gather relevant information to pass on to a human when the contact centre reopens. Even when the contact centre is open, not all queries require a human interaction, and having AI-powered chatbots that can communicate with customers enables effective self-service where appropriate; for example providing an update on a delivery through a tracking number or advising a traveller of their individual baggage allowance for a flight. A chatbot can also point customers towards content on the organisation’s website that will be able to deliver additional information and support.
More available, supercharged workers
Large organisations typically have hundreds, if not thousands, of call centre workers who provide service and support. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on the other hand operate a much leaner CX environment, with more generalist call centre workers. However AI, delivered from the cloud, is allowing SMEs to do much more with just a small number of people. AI is taking care of admin-heavy tasks within the contact centre and allowing workers to spend more time supporting customers. For example, creating post-interaction summaries and actions takes up a significant amount of agent time and is low-value, low-satisfaction work. AI is providing transcription and summarisation capabilities and creating content for the agent to simply check, amend if required, and submit. This allows them to support more customers effectively, rather than being bogged down by admin.
For SMEs that have a generalist set of contact centre workers, AI can also produce and serve up live knowledge articles based on the customer’s query and approved information sources, transforming generalist workers into subject matter experts, and ensuring a small team is highly optimised.
Real-world feedback & guidance
Call centre workers require on-going feedback and support to continue their growth, allowing them not only to deliver first-class customer experiences but also to develop in their careers. At the same time, the managers of call centres want to be able to support and audit their workers as efficiently as possible, preferably without flogging through piles of call recordings. AI has opened up new ways to identify what was done well and where there are areas for improvement. AI can automatically assemble tailored feedback after every interaction, providing hyper-personalised guidance that makes reference to actual interactions. The benefit of effective feedback, driven by AI, is open to organisations of all sizes; providing unique, individual insights for thousands of call centre workers in large contact centres and allowing smaller contact centres to deploy world-class quality assessment that could have been out of their reach before AI.
As AI technology and solutions advance, it is rapidly becoming more available to organisations of all types. Larger organisations can leverage AI to deliver more effective and efficient CX, and SMEs can use the technology too, closing the competitiveness gap and improving experiences for consumers, regardless of organisation size or sector. SMEs won’t always require the industrial-strength solutions, but using AI to make improvements is key to retaining and developing customers and contact centre workers alike.
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