So, you’re excited about the prospect of leveraging Artificial Intelligence to provide a better customer experience. You’re not alone– AI seems to be everywhere all of a sudden. It is worth pointing out there has been a fundamental shift this year from AI as a replacement for live agent interactions to AI that actually supports your agents. This change puts the pressure on customer care leaders to determine the right balance and approach and highlights the need to find the right technology partner to truly realize the value of AI for customer care.
Agents: Leverage Their Experience
Nobody knows more about your enterprise’s customer inquiries than your front-line agents. Start by investing time talking to them and evaluating some of their calls, chats, and other interactions to determine what repetitive tasks might be automated with properly designed agent-facing automation workflows. This is one of the early wins you should pursue as you look to design and deploy your AI strategy. It also better aligns you with today’s younger agent pool. They have grown accustomed to self service and automation in their lives as consumers. This means they would readily benefit from having these types of agent facing tools available to them.
Agent & Customer Retention
Of course, happy agents and customers are worth your time, effort, and focus. We know that these intangible measures often translate directly to your bottom line. You can and should expect loyalty on both fronts as a result of deploying AI agent facing tools. Of course, you’ll need to quantify results with KPIs that fit your business. As we have discussed before, some clear measurable goals you could set as you map out your AI & customer care strategy: reduce customer frustration (NPS and other metrics), increase productivity (FCR, AHT), and improve agent retention and automated decisioning. In the end, you want to see these data points improve as your AI program evolves. This will truly show you where you are getting your best value with both constituents.
Don’t Put AI in a Silo
If you are going to commit to AI and agent facing automation, now is the right time to assess modern CCaaS solutions. You want one that offers extremely flexible and powerful AI as part of workflow automation capabilities and that is core to an omnichannel package. The worst case scenario is to opt for siloed solutions that only touch one or two channels and that don’t enable out of the box automation across your entire CX operation. Don’t be alarmed if you find your current solution provider does not provide you with the flexibility to easily implement the type of agent facing AI and workflow automation that will raise the bar in your customer care center. There are newer, more modern solutions in the market built from the ground up with very flexible and powerful AI driven workflow engine capabilities to enable a wide array of efficient automations from day one. Embracing new CCaaS vendors should make embracing and leveraging AI so much easier for you.