By: Rob McDougall, CEO, Upstream Works
Contact centers and the customer experience (CX) landscape have dramatically changed in the last few years. Customer expectations for personalized and efficient services have increased and contact centers have witnessed considerable spikes in customer contact volumes. COVID-19 and the great resignation put additional strain on contact centers that were already dealing with staff shortages. These circumstances have forced contact centers to adapt, become more efficient and further emphasize the customer experience.
A big piece of this new puzzle is the introduction of intuitive artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that help agents get up to speed faster and augment their abilities. With the support of properly operationalized AI applications and automated tasks, the agent experience has improved, which has resulted in quicker resolutions and increased first contact resolution (FCR) rates, bringing CX to a new level.
Enhancing the Agent Experience for Improved CX
On the backend, contact centers are seeing the benefit of integrating AI applications into their operations. It enables routine and repetitive tasks to be automated so that agents can spend more time focusing on meaningful customer interactions. Properly implemented, the use of chatbots, emailbots, robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) can free up the agent’s time so that they can tackle complex inquiries that require a more personal touch. AI-powered agent guidance can further support agents with real-time assistance, including intent, sentiment and suggested responses, speeding up training and enabling agents to provide better CX.
CX is all too valuable for brands. 93% of consumers tend to repeat purchases with brands who offer exceptional customer service, according a report from HubSpot Research. A contact center’s ability to provide great CX is vital. The more they can retain customers, the better their business performs. AI is a tool that can better drive customer adoption of self-service and solve simple questions they have with minimal effort from agents. The faster a customer’s inquiry is solved, the happier they’ll be with the brand.
Overcoming Staffing Challenges
One of the biggest challenges that contact centers face is hiring and retaining agents. COVID-19 and the great resignation only further amplified this challenge. Many contact centers saw increased customer inquiries; however, they were not equipped to handle the higher volumes. This led to agent burnout along with a dip in customer satisfaction due to ineffective handling of the large volume of inquiries. This is where AI became a crucial turning point for contact centers.
AI capabilities can help contact centers automate simple routine tasks where there is no need for agent assistance and provide an improved self-service interface. Questions about business hours, return policies and general account inquiries can be conversationally automated rather than using basic forms. These drive improved self-service containment and, as a result, agents can focus their time on complex customer inquiries that require more personalized service. Additionally, AI agent assistance arms agents with the information they need to tackle issues more consistently and accurately, with minimal risk and continued human oversight. This helps new agents get up to speed faster while onboarding, saving the contact center money in the long run. When agents are more successful in their role, they are happier and ultimately, retention improves.
Removing AI Complexity
When searching for the right AI solution, business leaders should have a clear strategy for the kind of technology they want with a targeted approach and a narrowly defined scope of what the AI application does. This is where choosing the right partner becomes important. An agent desktop that integrates multiple AI and business applications into a consistent workspace means agents can be more productive and have a greater impact on the customer experience, without adding additional desktop complexity.
Understanding how AI works and how it will impact a business is crucial, as it will directly affect agents’ performance and the way they interact with customers. Taking a focused approach to AI automation helps drive down the time required for agents to perform tasks at hand, automates multiple tasks and streamlines the overall agent workload.
Well-thought-out AI applications that are integrated correctly remove complexity without adding new silos and can help increase the performance of existing contact centers by creating new efficiencies. More importantly, they can help to improve the agent experience for a better and more personalized customer experience.
