In this article we will focus on the role AI plays in improving employee experience – AI EX, which paves the way for improving customer experience (AI CX).
When the subject matter is contact center customer experience, attention is naturally on the RECEIVING side – the customers, which is a good thing: serving the needs and wants of customers rather than focusing solely on profitability of a company is a long term winning strategy.
But that does not mean we can ignore the GIVING side – those who are on the frontline of providing customer experience. Contact center agents play an important part in driving customer experience. There are many ways AI can assist and uplift employee experience to optimize AI EX and then AI CX.
Employee satisfaction (ESAT) increases when employees can grow their careers by continuously learning new skills, rather than being stuck with repetitive and menial tasks. AI can free up employees to learn higher level skills for more value-added work, by taking over routine work and reducing errors, thus increasing efficiency and productivity.
More than agent efficiency and contact center productivity, AI can also provide predictive, prescriptive, and other data-based insights.
In the human-to-human interactive part of customer experience, humans need to stay in the loop and take command, be they the contact center agents, employees, management, or leaders. As a tool, AI can help humans with data insights and analyses in areas such as:
Customer sentiment: Real time feedback and assessment by AI can provide insights on customer emotions and moods, even though AI is not yet able to grasp non-verbal cues and context, such as tone, implied meaning, body language, culture-specific inferences, etc, as of today (Oct. 2024).
Customer Journey: Provided that the underlying data is accurate, AI can offer specific insights on customer buying process, paint points, concerns, questions, needs and wants. These insights can help people understand customer psychology, map the customer journey, prevent churn, base pricing on demand and competitive landscape, and orchestrate to optimize the customer journey.
Predictive and prescriptive analytics and insights: Again, if the underlying data is correct and current, AI can assist contact center agents to ”identify the likelihood of future outcomes and to prescribe next best actions to ensure those outcomes are achieved.”
“AI will certainly streamline processes, allowing you to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors and deliver a personalized experience while doing it in real-time and in a scalable manner.” https://martech.org/how-to-transform-customer-experience-with-ai/
As many as “65% of CX leaders see AI as a strategic necessity that has made previous CX operations obsolete and dated,” according to Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report 2024.
Not many CX leaders are thinking and acting from a long term, comprehensive AI strategy. If the end goal is to anticipate, in a proactive manner, customer experiences, and to make human experience more human rather than more machine-like, leaders need to first focus on up-skilling and uplifting employees’ overall skill set and mind set with AI EX.
Based on the premise that humans will always prefer interacting with real and authentic humans rather than machine avatars, CX leaders need to plan and execute a vision-driven game plan, to first implement AI EX at contact centers in order to get CX agents ready for the next level of hyper-personalized interactions.
Vionary CX leaders also need to align AI EX and AI CX with brand experience. If leadership needs to refresh what exact brand experience a company is striving to achieve through customer experience, what is needed first is a brand audit – to see what are the unique value propositions of a brand – “brand DNA decoding”, where its brand position is in the current market, and if its customer base is going through changes, according to 10 Plus Brand.
Once a company is firmly grounded in what its brand stands for, its leadership can then create consistent brand experiences with AI EX and AI CX.
“With generative AI, businesses can create a chatbot persona that matches their brand identity. This helps to maintain a consistent tone and personality across all customer interactions. It also makes your brand stand out, enhancing your brand image and increasing customer satisfaction,” said the same Zendesk article.
“AI can be an agent’s coach and assistant in real time, to suggest wording, tone, and fine-tune messaging based on a particular customer’s purchasing history. In the process, agents get better at personalizing customer experience, and the company enhances brand experience for both employees and their customers”, said Jerry Briggs, ApexCX CEO.
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As a leader in the customer experience support services, ApexCX helps customer-facing companies excel with both technology and human-centered, customer-led CX assessment, design, implementation, and contact center management, from end to end. Please contact us for further information. Thank you.
©Jerry Briggs all rights reserved.
