Three Building Blocks of AI-Driven Success in CX

Aberdeen Strategy & Research narrowed down three key steps to ensure companies drive operational efficiency and improve their competitive positioning by using AI in CX.

March 27, 2023

A company’s customer experience can become the basis on which a potential customer may decide whether the company is worthy of their business. Of course, the product matters, but the interaction between the company and the potential customer before, during, and after the sale is an important part of the decision-making process.

Potential customers may look for staff proficiency, conduct, reachability, product (or service) accessibility, personalization, and more. Except, digital transformation initiatives across industry verticals have shifted customer experience expectations from legacy ones to digital.

Artificial intelligence is one such initiative that can potentially unlock untapped strengths and opportunities lying dormant in digitally-delivered CX.

Cost is also an important factor in pushing for AI in CX. “High-quality customer support via seamless customer experience (CX) is a major differentiator for any company. But hiring agents to respond to every customer’s needs in an on-demand digital world is at times cost-prohibitive,” Frank Schneider, Verint’s AI evangelist, told Spiceworks.

“AI, specifically conversational AI, is crucial in solving for what Verint calls, The Engagement Capacity Gap, the chasm between what organizations know they need to do to meet rising customer expectations and the resources they have to do it. Conversational AI solutions can analyze customer journeys across phone calls, digital messaging, and everything in between to understand customer needs.”

“This understanding powers improvements across digital and voice front doors like interactive voice response (IVR) and bots by providing contextual guidance and workflows to assist customers as well as agents. As a result, customers get the information and interactions they need more quickly on their own.”

But when push comes to shove and human-driven customer support becomes necessary, AI can still help. “When they need to escalate to a human, agents can anticipate solutions for the customer before they are connected,” Schneider added.

“In this scenario, customers and agents feel recognized and respected with the right answer, right channel and right routing. It’s AI that makes these types of interactions possible and enables brands to ultimately deliver improved customer experiences.”

According to Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , contact center & customer experience (CX) leaders prioritize adapting to customer needs over everything else when setting and managing their digital strategies.

Aberdeen narrowed down three key steps to ensure companies achieve the maximum out of their AI-driven CX initiatives, drive operational efficiency and improve their competitive positioning. They are:

  • Master Data to Better Understand & Address Customer Expectations: Data is still the king – connect it properly
  • Optimize Your CX Activities with Data, Analytics & AI: Optimization through data, analytics, AI
  • Hyper-Personalize CX Activities Across All Channels: Hyper-personalization of CX activities

See More: Leveraging AI To Improve the Candidate Experience

Master Data to Better Understand & Address Customer Expectations

A key aspect of using AI to its full potential for the highest efficiency is minimizing poor/inaccurate data and ensuring it is relevant and timely. 

More importantly, building and maintaining a contextual view of customer interactions across all channels is crucial. “AI solutions leverage machine learning and learn over time through every voice and digital interaction across customer and agent conversations,” Schneider said.

How organizations connect data for AI analytics

Use of Interaction Data In Customer Experience

Source: Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window

“AI analytics for customer journeys powered by machine learning helps brands identify friction fast, giving enterprises the tools to make the necessary changes to keep the quality of both automation and human care high. For self-service, analyzing CX journey data allows rapid improvements and reaction to real-time conditions driven by unfiltered voice of the customer data.”

“And for contact center agents, auto quality monitoring (QM) score carding can help reduce the need for training while still ensuring agents remain effective and consistent. Using data from the agent interaction itself can help scale a brand’s best agent with every hire. In the end, both the customer and the agent will enjoy a faster, more fruitful interaction by leveraging the insights from this interaction data.”

Aberdeen also discovered that best-in-class companies, i.e., those in the top 20%, connected incoming data through AI automation 36% more than others (the remainder 80%). The results are evident in the graph below, which summarizes the percentage of firms that turn data into insights in accordance with changing customer needs & behavior.

Optimize Your CX Activities with Data, Analytics & AI

Customer attributes such as personality, demographics, etc., are important factors in effectively addressing issues. Machine learning-driven analytics of data and customer interaction types can help shed light on trends and activity correlations.

How to choose the right channel for a seamless customer experience

How Companies Choose the Right Channel for Seamless Customer Experience

Source: Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window

“The resulting intelligence empowers contact center and CX leaders to make more data-driven decisions when observing customer activities such as channel utilization, customer sentiment, customer retention, agent productivity as well as operational efficiency such as first contact resolution rates by product, by channel and by time,” Aberdeen noted in its recent reportOpens a new window .

It can also help determine the right channel to satisfy a customer’s needs.

See More: Monetizing the Math: AI Strategies that Boost ROI for Enterprise Investments

Hyper-Personalize CX Activities Across All Channels

Hyper-personalization is understanding the expectations and sentiments of every client individually as opposed to traditional personalization programs wherein CX is based on groups of customers.

“Using granular insights about individual clients (e.g., preferred channels, personality type), firms then customize the four core elements of customer interactions: channel(s) used to deliver service, customer–agent matching, the timing of conversations and the content of the engagement,” Aberdeen said.

Hyper-personalization for customer experience

Hyper-Personalization for Customer Experience

Source: Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window

A key aspect of enabling this is empowering agents with relevant knowledge. According to Contact Center Executive’s Agenda 2021 survey, agents spend 14% of their time searching for information required for their jobs. Additionally, access to customer information through unified systems is a must to eliminate inefficiencies.

Effects of AI in CX

“In a customer-obsessed economy where CX differentiators can ensure brands grow and retain revenue, AI can enable ongoing value via memorable experiences across all digital and voice channels in real-time,” Schneider told Spiceworks. “Adoption of AI solutions within CX has been strongest in banking/financial services, telco/cable/wireless, travel and hospitality, retail, big pharma and insurance.”

However, he added that all sectors could benefit from AI in CX. “AI ensures CX strategy can anticipate needs, solve problems and continually improve in ways that transform CX into a value-creating asset across all verticals and industries.”

In the report, Aberdeen referred to a few companies that have benefitted from implementing AI as part of their CX strategy. Telecom companies who revamped their customer service initiatives have enjoyed NPS improvements in just four months and saved $9 million in manual listening program costs. More importantly, it improved employee satisfaction by 25%.

A leading global entertainment firm improved cost savings of as much as $30 million over three years by infusing AI into its contact center activities, all the while reducing agent attrition by 10%.

A North America-based healthcare provider improved agent efficiency and reduced Average Handle Time (AHT) by 4%, translating into $2.8 million in cost savings. The company also  reduced manual quality audits by 50% per month per Quality Analyst. Overall, implementing AI and automation capabilities resulted in an annual reduction of $6 million.

Schneider concluded that AI could also help improve revenue generation when implemented as part of their CX strategy. “Conversational AI can be used to tailor offers based on customer preference, reward status, prior purchases or other CX journey data,” he said.

“AI can use that data to suggest the best solution to allow customers to enroll, buy, enjoy, report and fix problems and pay for a product or service. Beyond automated revenue generation, even support agents can have access to intelligent cross-sell and upsell prompts with answers based on CX data in real-time.”

Has AI helped you improve customer experience? Tell us how in a comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window or TwitterOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!

Image source: Shutterstock

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Sumeet Wadhwani
Sumeet Wadhwani

Asst. Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis

An earnest copywriter at heart, Sumeet is what you'd call a jack of all trades, rather techs. A self-proclaimed 'half-engineer', he dropped out of Computer Engineering to answer his creative calling pertaining to all things digital. He now writes what techies engineer. As a technology editor and writer for News and Feature articles on Spiceworks (formerly Toolbox), Sumeet covers a broad range of topics from cybersecurity, cloud, AI, emerging tech innovation, hardware, semiconductors, et al. Sumeet compounds his geopolitical interests with cartophilia and antiquarianism, not to mention the economics of current world affairs. He bleeds Blue for Chelsea and Team India! To share quotes or your inputs for stories, please get in touch on sumeet_wadhwani@swzd.com
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