Not Just Chatbots: How AI Is Helping Organizations Better Serve Their Customers – Forbes

Chatbot On Mobile App

When the pandemic required that retailers shut their doors, consumers still needed a way to reach the brands they use and interact with every day. Due to the need to go remote, the contact center quickly took the place of in-person retailing, enabling consumers to connect to brands by phone, chat, email and more.

Contact centers had long been run on-premise, but these resources also had to change to accommodate the remote nature of daily life, and many retailers quickly shifted those systems to the cloud. In addition to enabling agents to service customers remotely, the cloud-enabled contact center also allows brands to harness data from all those interactions and make them smarter and more effective.

I recently connected with Genefa Murphy, CMO of Five9, an intelligent cloud contact center solution, who spoke to me about how brands are reimagining the customer experience and the technology they use to facilitate it. She explained that AI is a massive part of that, helping retailers to connect with their customers more successfully beyond chatbots, across all channels.

Gary Drenik: Customer service has been hugely important for companies during the pandemic. What types of channels are consumers relying on most?

Genefa Murphy: The pandemic has driven a surge of customer service traffic to the digital store front of enterprises. When customers couldnt engage with businesses in person, they increasingly looked to digital channels, such as email, web chat, SMS, and social messaging, to resolve their requests before picking up the phone. New research from Prosper Insight & Analytics exploring the importance of various services when shopping online found that 81% of adult consumers believe its very important to have a website thats easy to use, while just over half (52%) rate toll free live assistance as very important. The importance of an easy-to-use website is even greater among Gen X (83%) and Boomers (84%) according to the research.

Prosper - Importance of Services When Shopping Online

With more consumers reaching out across more channels than ever before, businesses are looking for solutions to help them quickly scale their service teams to keep up with the demand. They are not just deploying AI-powered self-service applications like Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) to automate the more routine and repetitive service tasks. They are also looking to AI and automation to help with dynamic interaction routing, matching customer demand with contact center supply. In some cases that supply comes in the form of a live agent, in many cases that comes from IVA and online digital support. The key thing is that customers are asking for these channels, and they are fast becoming the norm. In fact, our own research has found that 82% of consumers are now comfortable using digital channels. Therefore, the change has moved from a push to a pull.

Drenik: What about chatbots? Why arent they as popular as some may have anticipated just a few years ago?

Murphy: The first generation of chatbots were somewhat underwhelming because most of them lacked the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to intelligently process and respond to customer requests. This in turn led to more frustration. However, as conversational AI technology has matured, chatbots have evolved from that limited scope. They can now handle more complex tasks and transactions and actually provide a better customer experience. Today, many chatbots have the intelligence and context they need to respond in a much more conversational manner. The tooling and training of AI have also improved. This is important because it enables chatbots to engage with greater accuracy. Given this, we are starting to see a major uptick in chatbot usage and value for both the business and the end customer.

Drenik: Are there any other channels where AI is playing a big role currently? Which ones?

Murphy: AI is not just for digital channels; AI is being increasingly adopted over the voice channel. Consumers are getting used to having conversations with their smart devices, and the same technology that powers those devices is now more available and accessible in the cloud. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023,customers will prefer to use speech interfacesto initiate 70% of self-service interactions, rising from 40% in 2019. Today, companies can launch cost-effective IVAs to provide conversational self-service over the phone with minimal investment and a faster time to value than ever before.

Were also seeing AI play a big role in agent-facing support applications. Intelligent assistants can utilize machine learning and Natural Language Processing to automate call transcriptions and notetaking, quickly surface the data agents need to resolve customer requests or even to drive more business and provide real-time coaching and reminders that can improve the overall customer experience.

Drenik: How is AI playing a role in these channels?

Murphy: AI is enabling businesses to reimagine the kind of customer experience they can provide across voice, web, and messaging channels. IVAs allow businesses to quickly scale their service operations, empowering customers to engage on their channel of choice any time of day or night and resolve many requests without waiting for live assistance. As a result, live agents have more time to focus on conversations where they create value by applying their human touch. Additionally, because IVAs integrate so easily into CRM systems, knowledgebases and other back-end systems, service interactions can be more personalized and escalate across every support channel more seamlessly.

For all these reasons, AI-powered service automation is helping businesses boost interaction handling efficiencies, customer loyalty, agent satisfaction, and overall cost savings and revenue. This is especially true when IVAs are connected into the broader contact center eco-system so that context and data can be preserved especially when there is a need to escalate to a live agent.

Drenik: Whats important for businesses to know about using AI in their customer service strategies?

Murphy: Businesses can reap huge rewards by implementing AI across the customer journey, as long as they choose a practical approach to deploying and managing the technology. AI isnt pixie dust. They should look for platforms and tools that are self-managed, simple and intuitive, and that will easily integrate across the channels and back-end-systems that are most essential to their customer journey. They should also adopt strategies that allow them to implement these solutions incrementally, so they achieve quick wins, drive tangible results and solve real business challenges. We call this practical AI.

The most forward-thinking service organizations understand the potential of AI and automation to work alongside their human teams, rather than as a means of replacing them to cut costs. The workforce of the future is multi-modal.It works across channels, it leverages AI and automation, its digital and human, and it enables work from anywhere. Using AI to automate more of the routine, repetitive service tasks, and to provide real-time assistance during calls can also go a long way to improve the agent experience, which is a key factor in providing great CX especially as we all know employee experience often reflects in the customer experience.

Drenik: Thank you, Genefa, for taking the time to share your insights on how AI is helping brands to better serve their customers across channels. Its exciting to learn about the ways businesses are using technology to help bolster the customer experience.

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Not Just Chatbots: How AI Is Helping Organizations Better Serve Their Customers - Forbes