Beyond the obvious channel of chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to change the game in customer experience (CX) behind the scenes in striking, innovative ways.
Dynamic interaction routing
Today’s consumers still prefer to handle their concerns through live conversations conducted by human CX agents. But often, these days, connected by AI, which can instantly analyze individual customer data, agent performance stats, and current trending issues to match the best pairing of customer and agent.
For instance, if a customer calls from the US with a question about their cable service, the AI might pair them with the available agent who has the best track record of managing US customers and cable concerns. This can go a long way toward enabling, if not quite ensuring, a successful customer experience.
Real-time guidance
Machine learning—or ML, a subset of AI—has been able to decipher and flag callers’ emotional cues for some time, and now AI cannot just offer but anticipate the guidance a CX agent needs, moment by moment.
AI can supply alerts to let agents know if they’re speaking too quickly or talking over the customer. It can identify keywords and phrases, instantly providing relevant research and/or recommended responses. It can review similar recent calls and/or complaints, helping agents get to the root of the matter and ultimately reach a positive resolution.
Smart quality assurance
In the remote work environment, AI can fill in some aspects of direct supervision. Through the agent’s camera, for example, AI can advise them whether they’re sitting too close or too far from the camera or microphone and whether they’re presenting themselves in a put-together, professional way to represent their client and company.
AI can also supply managers and supervisors with graphical representations of ongoing calls, allowing them to monitor several at a time, quickly noticing lengthy silences or abrupt mood shifts. This is an improvement over pre-pandemic standards, where quality managers were typically able to listen in on only two or so calls a week.
All these are intended as collaboration tools, helping managers, agents, clients, and customers cooperate more effectively and efficiently in any environment. AI is continuing to make CX better, and more and more, it seems that imagination—not technology—is the only real limit to how it can help us help others.
