How often do people try your self-service channels, like chatbots, but end up wanting a real person to help them?
This can frustrate customers, making them feel they’ve wasted time with implementing the bot, which might make them upset with the representative later on. Besides, you have duplicated costs associated with self-service and assisted service.
Ever reached out to a brand on social media for help and been told to call their helpline?
Once, after tweeting a brand, their best advice was to email my number and wait for a callback.
Honestly, I’d prefer calling their helpline directly than taking such a detour.
But what happens if I don’t call after that? You’ve now lost track of my concern.
Introducing new ways for customers to reach out without proper planning can lead to unforeseen challenges in managing customer experiences.
Meeting Customers Where They Are
In the 2000s, there was a popular saying: “Meet customers where they are.” At first, contact centers started mushrooming, the only channel was telephony, and contact centers were focused on handling phone calls better.
That helped in improving the customer service and customer satisfaction.
But then, email and chat came into play, and businesses began to use them for support too. So, customers had more ways to reach out. However, these different methods didn’t talk to each other. If you spoke to someone on the phone and then emailed, the email team wouldn’t know about the phone call.
That’s a problem. It meant customers had to keep explaining their issues over and over. They didn’t enjoy that, and their happiness with the service dropped.
So, just having more ways to connect isn’t always the best answer.
Is AI the Cure for All Problems?
You might have heard this alarming statement:
AI will take over the human race and will replace human beings.
But is this truly gonna be our future?
I doubt it very much.
The first to adopt AI applications is the contact centers. The contact centers began with chatbots to streamline customer interactions and provide customers with self-service options. In their rush to use AI, they’ve focused more on short-term plans than long-term strategies.
I’ve seen impressive AI-driven videos where the software smoothly handles a car sales call. It genuinely left an impression.
The video’s common sentiment was that AI would replace salespeople. Is this the beginning of the end for salespeople?
I also doubt this, AI, while advanced, might still struggle to grasp the nuances of customer interactions and might lack the genuine human touch and empathy.
How Should AI Be Used in Contact Centers?
The most important understanding is that not all of your organization’s requirements can be addressed by a single AI application. Besides, AI would add complexities to your contact center operations by adding data siloes.
So, wouldn’t you find benefits from AI in contact center software?
While AI can simplify some tasks like call routing and analyzing feelings, it can’t replace human touch.
Besides these, it can answer transactional queries and handle all repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing the agents to address complex questions requiring empathy.
AI has the capability to analyze complex information. It can make sense of a humongous amount of data and create insights for the agents that can be used the customer conversations.
AI doesn’t have to be 100% correct when it tries to assist agents – It can guide agents in the right direction or present suitable options, enabling them to deliver the most apt resolution to customers, leveraging the insights provided by AI.
However, caution is essential. Without careful planning, AI could disrupt services, causing more calls, mistakes, and even agent fatigue.
A mismanaged AI can be a problem as it may not understand the context and would find it challenging to provide authentic answers.
It would be best to look at AI as an helpful colleague for agents and self-help platforms, rather than their replacement.
Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience
With AI’s help, customers can quickly get answers for common questions. This means our human helpers can spend time on trickier problems.
AI can assist agents by offering real-time suggestions, relevant information, and recommended responses during interactions. This makes our support faster and better.
As a customer experience function, you can offer the choice to the customers to choose between AI-assisted self-service for routine matters or interacting with a knowledgeable agent when the situation requires more in-depth assistance.
Conclusion
The integration of Artificial Intelligence into the customer experience must be strategic, considering the necessities of both customers and agents within a call center environment.
Leveraging AI to enhance self-service capabilities and agent capabilities creates a comprehensive and responsive customer service ecosystem. This will improve the brand image and also make everyone’s job easier.
AI is gonna stay here for a long time and it will help you do your jobs better.
