Customer Care: Get It Done Fast and Easy With AI
Artificial intelligence focused on customer care, when applied strategically, can enhance a consumer’s interaction with your company and, in some cases, even humanize it. We also know that customer sentiment is the most significant driver of consumer satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve positive consumer sentiment outcomes, AI must be leveraged real-time for both self and live service inquiries. Of course, for AI to be this effective, it has to be built into your customer care solution. Third-party integrations that merely sit as a bolt-on to your contact center solution simply won’t cut it.
Achieving the Perfect Balance Between AI and Live Assistance
Let’s face it: customer service is the most human resource-intensive part of the customer experience. There are many strategic ways to apply AI to better support your agents on the front line to interact with customers or to enable repetitive inquiries to be handled swiftly without human interaction. It’s all about AI being able to make real-time determinations in a workflow engine that solves the consumer inquiry or that arms the agent with the information they need to help customers right away. Today, you need to consider how both agents and customers experience their interactions.
Take Nothing For Granted: It’s About Your Customers and Your Agents
You may believe that the best place to embrace AI and start your customer care transformation would be with chatbots to handle routine customer service inquiries. This is due to the sheer magnitude of frequent or repetitive inquires where a bot may provide the same service as a live agent. In the end, this can result in a faster and easier consumer experience and a way for companies to gain efficiencies and focus agents on more complex inquiries that need human interaction. But let’s not write off agents. With today’s demanding customers, more than ever agents need to be armed and properly prepared for when a self-service inquiry escalates to live-service. And this handoff needs to be simple, seamless, and context-rich.
AI Is A Two-Way Street: Happy Customers, Happy Agents
Today, the most strategic place where AI can be of value is supporting your agents. There are many ways this can occur. First, AI can be used to understand who the consumer is and what the agent needs to fundamentally best serve them. This is accomplished with AI being the brains to serve up real-time personalized agent scripting & data displays, consumer personality insights and tone/sentiment analysis. And make no mistake, results in these domains are measurable and quantifiable. The best way to measure how AI moves the needle on the customer experience is to tie it to how it improves your agents first contact resolution performance.
Start By Solving a Few Practical Problems
The customer care game has changed. Today’s consumer is much smarter and has unlimited information available to them right at their fingertips with their smartphones. They have been conditioned to look first (self-service) and call only if they can’t find the answer to their inquiry. This leads to customers who expect their issues to be resolved right away, regardless of the complexity of the inquiry. In these cases, AI powered agent-facing knowledge base tools can transform customer care and support operations. Serving agents with the information they may need before the interaction starts saves time and can increase customer satisfaction. If you are like most of us, AI is still a buzz word and not yet part of your current customer care strategy, but certainly on the radar. For you, the best place to start may be to look for solutions with turnkey embedded AI. This will let you offer practical AI for customer care, so you don’t have to do any heavy lifting or integration work.