When customers connect with brands, do they prefer to be able to find what they need themselves and resolve their enquiries directly, or to speak to a human agent who will sort it out for them? Thanks to the growing role of AI within the contact centre, the boundaries are increasingly blurring between what used to be two distinct approaches.
With the introduction of a unified cloud customer experience platform such as NICE inContact’s CXone, AI functionality can be integrated subtly and with discretion, without the customer being overtly aware that they’re interacting with anything automated. All they notice is that they get the outcome they want from the interaction fast and a great experience while getting it.
Increasingly this means that human agents don’t need to be involved at all for a growing number of routine purchases and enquiries. Far from the clunkiness of the first generation of chatbots and IVR some years back, NICE inContact CX Transformation Benchmark in 2018 discovered chat to have the highest satisfaction of all channels, with 47% of consumers saying they were very satisfied with its convenience, speed and level of helpfulness.
The research indicated that 20-40% of enquiries can be resolved entirely at this level, and as machine learning continues to augment the intelligence of the system, the breadth of use cases will continue to grow – removing routine and boring calls from the agents’ workload, and replacing them with tasks and calls that call for human judgement and empathy.
Giving customers what they want, the way they want it
Do customers regard this as “self-service?” Probably not – it doesn’t feel like they’re doing the work themselves, because they’re in touch with the brand and the brand is responding, via appropriate interactions that feel completely natural. They get what they need fast, and might never know whether they’re interacting with a bot or a human – nor care. The interaction is hyper-personalised and proactive, thanks to intrinsic predictive analytics. And if they do stop to consider the fact that they might be interacting with an artificial entity, this creates fewer psychological barriers to a generation of consumers getting comfortable with voice activated smart home devices and virtual assistants.
Of course when they generate an exception which requires the attention of a human agent this is all simply part of the great customer experience – when their query is handed off with complete context and history, and that agent’s responses are enhanced by ongoing AI input in the background. The AI supports the human by providing just-in-time supplementary information, triggered by listening for natural-language key phrases, and insights into previous interactions and the customer journey to date. The agent is under less pressure to resolve calls fast, as their work is now more about listening and empathising, and offering really unique assistance to those with unusual complaints or requests.
A harmonious future for the win
So the future is clearly a blended approach to great customer interaction, without friction or delays. And it’s a future which presently shows great diversity in terms of speed of adoption, because although 80% of businesses have already adopted AI for customer service or plan to do so by 2020, some companies are still failing to grasp the benefits of investment in AI capability for their contact centres. This means early adopter or first mover advantage remains available in many verticals, for those organisations with the vision and foresight to seize it.
Decision-makers who get on board fast will be driving customer satisfaction, and increasing efficiency, and that’s what matters when it comes to keeping customers engaged with brands. Because making customers happy is the goal, and the synthesis of human empathy and AI smartness will be the combination which delivers.
