There’s no disputing that AI automation has been a buzzword in the few months since 2021 began. The incredible technology pairing are facilitating a level of CX across the board that could only ever be imagined before now. In mimicking human responses while sifting through incredible amounts of big data, AI is enabling companies to grow ten-fold and beyond in an environment where the economy is rife with restriction.
In this edition of the CX Today round table, we welcome:
- Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer, Puzzel
- Gregor Campbell, Account Director, Odigo
- Dr. Venky Krishnasamy, CEO & Co-Founder, Koopid
- Ed Creasey, Director of Pre-Sales International, Calabrio
- Paul Jarman, CEO, NICE inContact
Our panellists will discuss how AI speech technologies drive the VoC, whether the role of AI in humanising customer interactions change and what the future holds for automation.
How do AI speech technologies drive the VoC throughout the customer journey?
Allan: “Speech recognition and analytics is fast becoming a core component of agent assistance, humanised self-service and chat/voice bots, and personalised proactive outbound experiences .When used in conjunction with an AI engine, speech recognition and analytics ensures that what the customer wants and needs is fully understood, and can therefore be used to personalise the user experience.
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Jonathan Allan[/caption]
"This counteracts the current issues of customers being ‘forced’ through pre-built journeys. Ultimately, speech recognition is just as important a tool for agents as it is for customers. Happy and supported agents mean greater productivity and, as a result, increased customer satisfaction.
“When it comes to humanising the experience, instant transcription, analysis and machine-driven insights create the opportunity to service customers in an empathetic way and cultivate fully frictionless journeys. They key to optimising the user journey comes down to combining these technologies with more traditional data analytics to truly determine what the customer wants and needs.”
Jarman: “Digital channels are growing in popularity as users look for efficient and convenient experiences, and self-service is a key part of this. In today’s world, customers no longer want to be tied to only accessing support during traditional business hours. If a customer needs something handled at 3:00 a.m., they expect to be able to handle it via self-service options like FAQs, chatbots, and other digital services and technology. If they cannot resolve the issue themselves, they expect proper routing to a live agent who can be there to help them, even if it’s only to drop an email that will be answered as soon as possible.
“Traditional call centres are mostly a thing of the past and self-service must be part of the future digital portfolio offered by businesses to meet customers’ evolving needs and expectations. Although this option won’t be every customer’s preference for their interaction, it’s essential that it is part of the growing list of digital channels on offer. Contact centres must be prepared to adapt and embrace self-service at the heart of digital, omnichannel CX experiences.”
Creasey: “AI technologies are a powerful tool when combined with traditional employee coaching techniques. For instance, Quality Management (QM) helps to identify the phrases that keeps cropping up in customer conversations to flag up issues, categorise contacts and then prioritise them. However, to be able to make decisions to truly improve customer journeys it is necessary to use AI-driven QM to analyse 100% of calls and interactions, not just a 2% subset.
“It isn’t possible to effectively track service quality if you are only evaluating a small percentage of what is being said. The beauty of VoC analytics is it provides contact centres with the near real-time data they need to re-engineer complete customer journeys quickly and efficiently as expectations and behaviours change.[caption id="attachment_36123" align="alignright" width="150"]
Ed Creasey[/caption]
“One of the UK’s leading health food retailers applied analytics-enabled QM to accelerate customer contact resolution and restore service levels when demand for online orders soared and telephone, Web Chat and email volumes rocketed during the pandemic. It is also possible to get really creative with analytics, integrating customer survey platforms like Survey Monkey directly into the contact centre and using AI machine learning to capture and analyse the results. This vital CX intelligence can then be used to pre-empt and predict future patterns and improve Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and CSAT levels.”
Krishnasamy: “Leveraging the right technology and processes centred around AI, speech and automation allows you to create deeper value-adding relationships with your customers. By bringing a richer level of contextual understanding to the customer journey helps to increase retention, spending and advocacy—all of which boost top-line revenue.
“Specifically, transcription capabilities provide a rich source of conversational truth to VoC programs which yield benefits to the customer experience in a few important ways. The context of voice calls is available to other systems for use in actively managing the customer journey. An example of this is using content in the text transcription to suggest the next best action during or after the interaction. The transcription becomes part of the entire VoC data store that is available for analytics and optimisation, providing greater context than the data that typically exists in a company’s CRM.
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Gregor Campbell[/caption]
“This granular data yields a depth of understanding not previously available. Finally, as the vast majority of customer journeys now begin in a digital channel, the detailed content of calls that occur after a customer has exhausted their resolution options in one or several digital channels - provides invaluable insights to better construct digital conversations, refactor the digital properties and optimize the channels that are offered at each step in the journey.”
Campbell: “Capturing Voice of the Customer (VoC) enables an understanding of customer goals, reduces experience gaps and leads to differentiation that drives loyalty and increases engagement. For organisations to fully understand the VoC, it is essential to capture data from a wide variety of sources. In the gathering stage AI Technologies combine data into a comprehensive overview of the customer, where intentions, desires, concerns and habits can be identified. After the capture stage, advanced analytics enables actionable, data-driven decision making.
“Key areas of investment that support customer journeys can be found at desktop level where AI augments the role the agent performs. Natural language processing (NLP) allows real-time agility in understanding a customer’s challenges, as well as key topics that are being raised across all experience channels a company offers."
Will the role of AI in humanising customer interactions change as nations come out of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Allan: In today’s ‘always on’ environment, customers expect 24×7 service through their preferred channel, and chatbots play a key role in delivering the real-time, on-demand service that customers expect. That said, good customer service starts and ends with people, and the pandemic has only highlighted that. Although technology has altered the way customers interact with customer support services in the last year, when it comes to complex interactions, person-to-person communication is still the channel of choice. Innovations such as digital personal shoppers or virtual showrooms are immersive experiences that span both the physical and digital worlds, and clearly illustrate what we can expect the future of customer journey to look like beyond the pandemic.”
Creasey: “To AI or not to AI? Is not a straight forward question with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. As we emerge from the pandemic bridging the digital and human worlds will become vital. If AI is seen as a way of replacing humans the road ahead is fraught with danger. However, if it is used to create a more agile customer service team by the use of better analytics than there is an opportunity to focus on CX with a human touch.
“While customers have been forced to use different communication channels as a result of the pandemic those organisations which adapt fastest to “normal” levels of service will benefit most. Contact centres know they need to find the right balance: customers want convenient self-service options, but they’re also looking for the empathy, personalisation and complex support only a human interaction can provide.”
Krishnasamy: “AI will be utilized by companies to empower consumers to be able to get things done when they want, where they want, and in the way they want. Now and in the future, personalization will be vital for brands that want to create competitive market differentiation through customer experience.
Paul Jarman[/caption]
Dr. Venky Krishnasamy[/caption]