Improve Customer Journeys with AI-Enhanced Agents and Data 

In my previous blogs “Closing the gaps that stand in the way of an exceptional customer experience” and “Use AI to boost your cloud contact center”, I identified the gaps that could be hindering your organization’s customer experience (CX) along with some of the ways that AI could help fill these gaps. In this final blog of the series, I’m going to dive deeper into how AI can enable agents to be more valuable and empathetic to customers. I’ll also take a look at how AI can provide actionable behavior analytics and useful statistics after customer interactions.

How to understand agent productivity and customer empathy

Until now, we’ve talked about how you can maximize your customer’s satisfaction in their engagements with you. However, it’s just as important to ensure that your agents, arguably your most important (and expensive!) resources are doing their best work and feeling their best every day. Artificial intelligence can help here too.

Think of the best experiences you have when you’re shopping for something. The most delightful experiences are ones that get you what you want, when you want it, and how you want it.

Translating this to the world of the agent, this means providing your agents with as much knowledge at their fingertips as possible about the customer – what they’ve bought, what they’ve needed before, whether they hung up upset the last time they called, and hints at what they may be calling about now. A cold start phone call is not a good start. AI can guide the agent through the right actions and provide the right information to share with your customer at the right time based on the learnings from other successful consumer interactions.

Supporting the agent with more intelligent engagement tools lowers the stress that agents feel when trying to navigate complex issues with consumers. AI-powered agent tools can also speed the interaction and create lower-effort, personalized experiences that make customers feel that an organization cares enough to understand their need, respect their time, and solve their problem. Some important capabilities include:

Agent Answers: Empowers agents with context-driven suggestions and guidance in real-time as they are talking and/or chatting with a customer. This minimizes agent research time and improves First Contact Resolution.

Agent Call Transcription: Provides agents with a call transcript and summary, minimizing post-call wrap-up time, improving the accuracy of transaction and follow-up, along with overall agent efficiency.

Why post-interaction analytics and optimization matter

So you’ve addressed your customer’s needs. Are you sure they aren’t at risk of being poached by the next competitive campaign? A lower priced payment plan, shinier offer, or friendlier call may be all it takes for you to lose them. That’s why it’s critical to know how your customer is doing. And again, AI can help here.

Artificial intelligence can help to recognize patterns of behavior which provides you and your agents with a new level of insight into how things are going with your customer. This in turn helps drive both better point-in-time engagement with that customer, but also affords the opportunity for continuous improvement and reduction in customer effort.

In the past, contact center reporting would tell us how many interactions were received, abandoned, handle time, and agent performance statistics. Often, summary statistics would look great, but sentiment scores would still be low causing analysts to ask themselves “What is the real experience?”

Artificial intelligence helps us answer this question by looking beyond summary statistics to identify customer and agent behaviors that negatively impact experience. Examples such as customers getting lost in self-service, being put on hold too long by agents causing abandonment, low interaction between the agent and customer, and an agent struggling to find answers to a customer’s questions are all examples of specific behaviors that AI can identify for improvement.

How to put it all together and transform the customer experience

The expectations of our customers have changed forever. We are now in a digital-first, always-on world. Together it is our job to ensure that we give our customers what they demand – a simple, personal, and delightful experience.

Speaking businessperson-to-businessperson, we all know that our joint goal is to keep your customers happy. Because a happy customer is a retained customer. And a retained customer is good for business. AI will play a critical role in our future to help control the outcomes of our engagements, advocate on behalf of our products/services, and to ensure we consider every interaction as the best experience we ever had. Webex will be leading this transformation… but this will be a topic for an upcoming blog.

Contact us today to start the discussion. Our experts are here to help you map out your best path forward to start getting all the benefits of AI innovation for your contact center.

Learn More

• Webex Contact Center webpage
• Use AI to boost your cloud contact center
• Closing the gaps that stand in the way of an exceptional customer experience
• Webex connects customer experiences for moments that matter
• First Horizon energizes its evolution with Webex Contact Center
• A new era of customer experience: Cisco named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service