Last week Bright Pattern joined Frost and Sullivan’s Global Vice President of Digital Transformation, Alpa Shah, for a webinar on achieving excellence in CX with AI and omnichannel quality management. Alpa shared how in this new era of digital disruption, customer experience has always been a priority and in 2020, improving customer experience and satisfaction rose to be the No.1 goal for corporations (as shown in the chart below).
The key to driving exceptional customer experience is understanding what your customers want and need. And what do customers want? Frost and Sullivan research shows that customers want the ability to use any device on any channel at any time. Customers also want a more personalized, customized experience when talking with companies.
View the full on-demand recording of the Frost and Sullivan webinar.
The best way to achieve exceptional customer satisfaction is to align customers wants and needs with your customer journey by utilizing omnichannel platforms and artificial intelligence. But how can you implement call center AI for an immediate impact? Ted Hunting, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Bright Pattern explained how you can use external-facing AI to improve customer experience, and internal-facing AI to improve agent experience.
AI for Improved Customer Experience
External-facing AI can be used as part of a blended approach where customers can benefit from the immediate response of a bot with the ability to talk with a human if they prefer. This is ideal for the contact center as well because bots can triage simpler tasks, allowing agents to focus on more interesting and complicated customer inquiries.
Another form of external-facing AI that can add a lot of value to companies and customers through the customer journey is a Conversational IVR. Conversation IVRs allow customers to speak as they would naturally and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology routes the customer properly. This greatly improves the customer experience because your customers will no longer need to memorize a long list of options and numbers, speak exactly as the IVR requires, or wait to hear all options. This improves call handle time and customer satisfaction.
AI for Improved Agent Experience
AI can also improve agent experience and performance though internal-facing AI in the form of agent assist. Agent assist is where AI helps agents move the conversation along by providing suggested responses. AI assist is capable over chat, SMS, email and messengers.
Internal AI can also be used to measure the quality of customer interactions. As the world has become more digital, it has become increasingly difficult to measure customer satisfaction on new and digital channels. Most companies are able to monitor quality over their voice channels, but most struggle to apply the same quality management processes to their digital channels. AI-powered quality management can help companies monitor 100% of interactions regardless of channel. AI-powered quality management provides real-time sentiment analysis to agents so they can detect the overall customer satisfaction of the interaction. If sentiment is poor, a business rule can be applied to notify a supervisor or customer retention specialist so that they can step in and resolve the dissatisfaction immediately.
For more information on utilizing AI for quality management view our latest ebook.
When asking the audience “How do you plan to use Artificial Intelligence in your contact center?” 50% replied that they are not sure how they plan to use AI, but they know that they need it. If you fit into this category, make sure to view the full webinar recording for all of Ted’s tips for call center AI! Below are the full results from the poll showing that other top answers were bots/self-service and Conversational AI.
In the webinar, Ted and Alpa also discussed how to get started with effortless, personal omnichannel conversations, how to measure the quality of every interaction, and best practices for innovative companies.
For more information on implementing call center AI for an immediate impact and other omnichannel and AI tips, view the on-demand recording of the webinar.
