Beyond technology, an important cultural shift is happening. A new generation is growing up with AI as a normal part of life.
For this generation, asking AI questions and automating tasks is fast becoming the norm.
The exception? When contacting customer service.
For the most part, it’s still “press one, press two” IVR experiences, chatbots that break on a whim, and repeating information here, there, and everywhere.
While contact centers plan pilots, this disconnect between the company and online communications with friends, family, and ChatGPT is only getting bigger.
As that happens, customers’ tolerance for poor support is shrinking. One study even found that almost 65 percent of consumers now feel impatient, bored, annoyed, frustrated, or disrespected when they have to wait at all.
The result: contact center leaders face an uphill battle in satisfying increasingly impatient customers.
Recognizing this, they understand continuing with the status quo – because “that’s the way we’ve always done things” – is no longer a viable path forward.
Competitors will advance their contact center experiences, side-step customer frustration, and secure the next generation’s loyalty.
That raises the question: where do we start our contact center evolution?
Define Your Customer Journey Strategy
Too many companies operate with disconnected systems and experiences. CRM data is in one place, customer interaction data is in another, and back-office data is out of reach.
No agent, human or AI, can handle complex queries seamlessly when operating in such silos.
Given this, it’s crucial that customers define their customer journey strategy to ensure the very best experience.
It’s crucial to map out what an ideal journey looks like and identify the data you need from each system to support that. One example is to integrate CRM with the Contact Center and leverage customer records and history for the ideal support experience and to provide agents and AI with the context that is needed.
Once you do that, you can build your AI and machine learning strategy around it. Use innovation and data to enhance the customer journey. Then, bring in the right vendors and partners to support you in achieving that vision.
The key here is to first chip away at the top five to ten most common customer contact reasons. A solid implementation of a Virtual Assistant and AI can help here before it even comes to an engagement with a real agent. The contact center gives itself breathing room by taking away some of this work.
UJET’s Virtual Assistant provides a range of capabilities for these scenarios. UJET’s AI-powered solution is designed to enhance customer experience and leverage multiple data sources to provide use cases such as: