Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a major uprising in CX and customer service. Chatbots are more skilled than ever at answering common questions, scheduling appointments and even routing customers to live agents while auto-ticketing aids the streamlining of tech support solutions. AI can also benefit customer churn while sifting through extraordinary volumes of data. In the broadest sense, it also benefits cost-cutting, efficiency and empowers a workforce. That said, many companies are leaning on AI too much, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this mistake being understandable as workforces have grappled with remote working, redundancies and sickness, customers still need the human touch when it comes to CX and to engage and interact with a live agent.
With that in mind, CX Today welcomes Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer at Puzzel, for an exclusive interview on how businesses can strike the right balance between AI and the human touch.
“AI has been a real game changer in the customer service industry. But human agents still have such an important role to play in building rapport with customers, repairing relationships and driving loyalty. The big challenge for businesses is now finding the right balance that delivers for the customer,” Allan says.
There are many ways in which contact centres are using AI right now. Examples are how AI programmes can now provide agents with smart suggestions, helping them to spend less time deliberating over the right fix. This improves customer satisfaction and first contact resolution. Another example of how AI is currently supporting businesses is through customer retention where AI-powered algorithms identify customers at risk of attrition.
“The technology advancements we’re going to see in the future will be around making it easier for agents to do their job and making it easy for customers to gain access to their information,” he adds.
“Those advancements are going to be around the way that information is presented to the agent and the customer, rather than major changes in what the platforms actually do.”
Empathetic AI
Allen explains how vital it is for AI to demonstrate empathy. He says customer journeys must be designed around the human being and anticipate their needs.
“What we’re seeing with CX is that’s it’s all very technology-led, and what it needs to become is more customer-led. So the importance of creating a human journey becomes ever-more critical when you‘re using AI. Take IVR for example, where customers can get into a real loop if they’re not given the specific option they need.
“I think that could happen with AI unless it’s really built with the customer in mind. This means empathy needs to be injected into every customer journey with the aim of really understanding of what drives people and what each customer wants as an outcome. This, of course, means AI needs to be used across the whole customer experience.”
Allan also explains that in this digital age customers need human interaction more than ever and people want to speak to live agents. This is particularly evident during the early stages of the pandemic. Locked-down customers and those self-isolating needed human interaction more than ever, with experts suggesting the reason customer satisfaction levels were reported to be high at the start of 2020 despite in many cases, longer wait times and interrupted WiFi was down to consumers building up a rapport with call handlers and empathising with their remote working situations. And when it comes to the role technology can play in supporting interactions between customers and businesses in the future, it can create robust AI quality assurance processes, deliver real business value and optimise organisations through control and collaboration.
Interestingly he also notes changes in customer demand which appears to be down to customers’ ability to relate to live agents.
“What we saw at the beginning of the pandemic was an increase in customer satisfaction scores, which was driven by customers being a little more forgiving than usual. It was a very difficult situation that everyone was in due to COVID-19 and so they were cutting live agents some slack,” Allan said.
“However, as we went into the third coronavirus wave, this changed significantly. Customer satisfaction levels went back to normal, people became less forgiving, demand went up and customers got frustrated. This is where AI technology can come in with things like Speech Analytics and Sentiment Analysis to help contact centre agents understand how customers are feeling and identify the root cause of their issue.”
Omnichannel Experimentation
Allan continues to explain that although customers have become all the more demanding due to the coronavirus pandemic, it has accelerated the rise of omni-channel. This, he says, is down to consumers trying out different channels to find out what meets their demand requirements.
He says: “I do think the demand from customers is down to pandemic anxieties. We’ve found there’s a big drop off on email and a major increase in chat and social interactions with customers. It’s clear customers are trying new channels, perhaps because they’ve had a bad experience with email and have found social media more responsive.
“I think it’s very much promoting customers to find other ways of reaching out and experimenting with channels.”
To summarise, AI will continue to thrive as we navigate our way out of the pandemic and of course, lockdown and in some cases, tier systems too. But machine-learning cannot boost or maintain the correct level of CX without empathy. This will come a stark lesson to organisations that AI does not control businesses, the customer does.
