The Pervasiveness of AI in the Customer Service Experience

by Andy Leach, Sr. Account Executive, PTP

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gained such significant ground over the past few years, it is now pervasive in customer experience. Although very recent advances have grabbed the headlines, AI dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century. The concept garnered enough interest and attention to be named in the 1950s. During the 1955 Dartmouth Conference, computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. At the conference, which was a two-month summer research project to explore the possibility of creating machines that could simulate human intelligence, he defined AI as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”

McCarthy and his colleagues were early leaders in predicting that this formidable technology could be as smart as humans. With every development and application, their prediction gets closer to reality. This transformational technology has millions of applications across hundreds of industries and its momentum is skyrocketing. ChatGPT, anyone?

At PTP, we help our clients harness the power of this technology to improve the customer experience. Over the past few years, we’ve watched in awe as advances in AI supercharge the technology stacks that support customer service interactions. These innovations have led to remarkable improvements in tools that assist and enhance both the agent and the customer experience as well as drive business outcomes.

The Most Common Uses of AI in Customer Service

AI Helps Your Agents

Customer experience is only as good as the teams who design and deliver it, and the most important member of these teams is the frontline agent. These employees, more so than any other, can make or break a customer service interaction. They need the most relevant training, comprehensive support, and cutting-edge tools to consistently deliver stellar service.

AI to the rescue in the form of agent assist offers real-time support for these teams!

Reducing rote processes and mundane tasks is one of the many ways AI can support agents and free them up to focus on moments that matter with customers or more complex issues.

From authentication to post-contact wrap-up notes, AI can take on simple but necessary tasks to improve efficiency and accuracy. Consider that on average, call center agents spend 10.2 minutes of every hour on post-call wrap-up; using AI for this task can give that time back to agents for more productive activities, such as helping another customer.

Another impressive use of agent assist is sentiment analysis, a machine-learning technique that recognizes and interprets natural language to track the emotion of the agent during a contact. (This also applies to customers, but more on that later in the article.) If the emotion is too heightened, the supervisor is alerted and can assist. This AI-powered speech analytics technology can also be used to help an agent during a live interaction by analyzing the conversation and suggesting the “next best action” for the agent to take based on that analysis. Although this is not widely used currently, the potential for greatly enhancing agent efficiency, increasing consistency in customer handling, and speeding resolution is limitless.

AI also powers targeted and customized agent training and coaching. AI analyzes contact transcripts to identify agent strengths and opportunities in this case. It collects and shares top performers’ best practices, identifies training gaps, and continuously improves to stay relevant, current, and effective. This impressive capability can be applied to individuals, teams, and departments to help organizations level up based on analysis of actual performance. The customization it offers increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the investment in upskilling agents through improved training and coaching.

While there are many use cases for AI to assist agents, agents can also help improve the AI. With AI-powered knowledge bases becoming more prevalent in the contact center, it is important to remember that they are only as good as what they “know” and require time to learn and improve. Who better to train this technology than the agents themselves? Agents using the tool can review, suggest edits, and upvote knowledge base content, acting as a training ground for the AI.

Agent involvement can also be used to identify improvements like new articles or missing details that were exposed during the interaction. This benefit doubles when content that is agent-approved is visible to customers. Imagine the operational impact when you consider that the average customer service call lasts six minutes and 75% percent of that time is spent by agents manually looking for the right information.

AI Helps Your Customers

Overall, agent-facing AI tools dramatically improve operational performance and increase contact-to-contact consistency. What happens when AI is put in front of customers? Let’s start with the beginning of a typical interaction: routing. The key to effective routing is swiftly and effectively getting the customer to the right place. AI can interact with a customer in need to simplify intent questions and/or proactively provide information based on customer context and data.

AI uses speech recognition and natural language understanding to gather customer intent and route the caller appropriately. Machine learning is becoming increasingly effective at detecting the nuances of conversations and helping guide callers to the correct place. When married with customer data, a conversational interactive voice response (IVR) can create the dynamic personalized interactions that customers crave. These AI-powered experiences can reduce the frustration and dissatisfaction of transfers and repeating information, reducing the overall cost to serve.

AI can also help customers with resolution — arguably the most critical part of the journey — in at least two ways: self-service and information sharing with agents during required transfers. Starting with self-service, AI can now easily learn to help customers complete basic tasks like updating billing addresses, changing payment methods, and checking on orders. Intelligent virtual agents (or bots) can handle tasks in various customer-facing channels, including voice, chat, SMS/text, and social media, which is a blessing to 80% of customers who prefer trying self-service options before contacting live support.

While AI is getting better and better at handling more complex tasks, plenty of opportunity still exists for it to assist in live support contacts. In cases where AI cannot resolve the customer’s issue, it can be used to collect necessary information and route the interaction to the best available agent; that agent is then much better equipped to handle the customer’s need faster and more effectively. Authentication is a great example of how AI can support an interaction, making it easier for the customer and the agent that receives the contact. Training AI on the necessary steps to authenticate a contactor cuts down on the customer-agent interaction time and helps that customer get attention and resolution faster.

AI is also a powerful support to customer service teams during interactions as it monitors customer sentiment. Speech analytics technology can detect emotions and sentiments to ensure the customer’s issue is being resolved swiftly. These natural language tools can identify when customers are frustrated, upset, confrontational, or even more stressed than when the interaction began.

Like the way AI supports agents, it also can monitor the customer, notifying a manager to intervene to help the agent or take over to resolve the issue. This real-time capability is ideal for in-the-moment help. However, AI can also be used for recorded contacts, revealing coaching opportunities and process improvements that need to be addressed. These capabilities are applicable to both the bots and agent portions of an interaction.

AI Helps Your Business

As uses for AI continue to expand in customer service experiences, the benefits also increase. AI can be a dream for a contact center leader as it offers improved operational performance. Average handle time, cost per contact, and first contact resolution are three examples of efficiency metrics that can improve with AI.

Effectiveness metrics can also offer improved customer experience as AI surfaces the next best actions and creates consistency as it offers the same actions, talking points, and solutions to all agents. It powers personalization for customers and agents, leading to higher satisfaction, loyalty, and retention among both groups.

Understanding AI starts with the knowledge that it doesn’t work well in all instances and takes some effort to train, operationalize, and benefit the CX. Companies may need outside expertise to know when and where to use AI to get business value from its inception. Be aware that consequences exist for companies that have gotten it wrong: agents and customers lose faith quickly and ignore it.

Conversely, when done well, AI gets better and more powerful; the more you use it, the better it gets. Establishing a lab environment for testing and learning is a great first step in your AI strategy. With a solid understanding of the customer and employee journey, a well-designed strategy, an implementation plan, and a continuous improvement process, the pervasiveness of AI in customer service experiences will continue to flourish.

Andy Leach Sr. Account Executive

About the Author: After 20+ years in the Enterprise Software space, the most personally rewarding achievements come from providing ideas, solutions, and value that make a significant impact on my client’s business. I joined PTP four years ago because they partner with organizations to provide innovative CX solutions that transform customer engagement across marketing, sales, and contact center. Being technology agnostic, PTP brings a unique perspective across people, process, and technology solutions. I’d love to share more about PTP and our experience helping our clients implement AI to improve the CX. PTP is a professional services firm delivering innovative customer service solutions across contact center infrastructure platforms that cut costs, enhance investments, and improve customer satisfaction. Learn more at ptpinc.com