Making Your CX Organization More Efficient and Effective With the Help of AI

Summary

The webinar focused on using artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience (CX) organization efficiency and effectiveness. The host and special guest, Kate Leggett from Forrester Research, stress the importance of understanding and meeting customer expectations to create loyalty and revenue growth. Kate emphasizes that great customer service is vital for customer satisfaction and retention. The webinar emphasizes the correlation between better customer experiences and increased top-line revenue. The talk underscores the significance of providing excellent customer service, including pre- and post-purchase interactions, even during challenging times like the pandemic, as it directly impacts business success.

Key Takeaways

1. Importance of Meeting Customer Expectations: The transcript highlights the significance of understanding and meeting customer expectations to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. By providing experiences that align with customer preferences and needs, companies can retain customers and drive increased revenue.
2. Customer Service as a Key Component: Customer service plays a crucial role in the overall customer experience strategy and operations of a company. It is not limited to post-purchase support but also includes pre-purchase interactions, onboarding assistance, and buying advice. Delivering excellent customer service fosters longer-lasting relationships with customers.
3. AI’s Role in Enhancing CX Efficiency: The webinar focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) to make CX organizations more efficient and effective. By leveraging AI technologies, like chatbots and data analytics, companies can automate certain processes, provide personalized experiences, and improve response times.
4. Revenue Impact of Great Customer Experiences: The transcript highlights research conducted by Forrester that shows a clear correlation between better customer experiences and increased top-line revenue for businesses. Satisfying customers and meeting their expectations directly contributes to improved financial outcomes.
5. Balancing Cost and CX: While cost control measures are important, the speakers emphasize the strategic balance between delivering a great customer experience and optimizing costs. Investing in customer service enhancements, even during challenging times like the pandemic, is crucial to maintaining customer loyalty and revenue growth.

Transcript

Alrighty. Well, we are excited to get going today. Gonna be talking about making your CX organization more efficient and more effective with artificial intelligence. I’m excited about this one. It’s been a couple weeks coming.
We’ve been planning to dive into this. Wanna make sure we do some introductions and, talk about a couple housekeeping items as people trickle in. Housekeeping items first. So, this is gonna be about a forty five minute webinar.
If you have to jump early, let us know, we can make sure you get access to some of the the pieces that you did miss.
Number two, we do want this to be interactive. So please feel free. Grab your Q and A or your question, ask questions. We’ll make sure we tally those either during the session or at the end.
In fact, it would be awesome right now as you trickle in. If you actually grabbed your, your Q and A or your chatbot there. We’re gonna be talking about chat bots, not and you just told me your name and where you’re from there, your name and where you’re from.
Just so you can get used to using that chat tool as we do want this to be interactive and fun. Okay. So with that, let’s go ahead and jump in.
I’m Gabe Larson. I run growth over here at customer. And then we have a special guest, Kate Leggett. She’s joining us from Forrester Research.
Kate, thanks so much for joining. And how are you? I am good, and thanks for having me. Looking forward to this webinar.
Yeah. I think this will be fun. So, before we jump in, and again, people still trickling in just a little bit. Kate, can you tell us something about yourself and your background? What you do over there at Forrester?
I’m a VP principal analyst at Forrester, and I do all things customer service and CRM.
And that is what we are gonna be talking about today. So with no further ado, let’s turn it over to Kate. And then again, his quest pop up. We’ll see if we can bring those in certainly at the end. Kate, over to you.
Okay. Thank you.
And again, thanks to everybody who’s taken an hour out of your busy days to listen to Gabe and I.
Instead of doing a deep dive, right off the bat into AI. I really wanna take a step back, and talk about customers’ expectations for service and why understanding your customer’s expectations is so important.
And the way I’d like to start this conversation I think just like look all around you. Look, we’re surrounded by brands to make engagement easy.
I think about the day before the pandemic on the ride sharing apps I used to take, that would take anxiety out of me being able to get to where I needed to be. Or these days, I think about the, the shopping apps, entertainment apps that know what I’ve watched, what I’ve bought, and proactively recommend products that are best fit for me.
I think about, like, all the hotel chains that we used to use that would make engagement easy, like booking a room or getting service. And, you know, why do you think about all of these experiences?
It’s because it’s these experiences have done a good job at up leveling our expectations for engagement. And it’s like what’s on the screen here. We expect any information to be available on any device. At the moment of need. We’re really impatient. We want our time to be valued.
But there’s another element. To this. It means that customers, you are in control of the conversation that you have with friends, you hold the power in the relationship.
And if you don’t get the experiences that you expect, You’re gonna walk away from that brand. And so what it means is that companies have to be really laser focused on what their customers expect out of engagement, and be able to meet those expectations. Because if they don’t, your customers are gonna walk away from you.
And on the next screen here, we actually quantify the value of great engagement.
If your customers are satisfied with the service that they get, or with the interactions that they get, they’re gonna be more loyal to you. And what this means is that they’re going to keep their business with you for a longer amount of time. They’re going to buy more from you, like another product or cross sell off sell and this increases their lifetime value. And they’re also gonna serve as an advocate for your products or your company, which drives second order sales.
And on the next screen, is what we do at Forrester, we actually go a step further. And we try to quantify the impact of great customer experiences to top line revenue.
And we’ve been doing this for a decade or more, twelve years.
And what we do is we go out and we measure the experience that hundreds and hundreds of companies, deliver. And then we take these companies, and we, we organize them into dozens and dozens of industries.
And what we do is we calculate the revenue impact that these companies could get if they delivered just an incrementally better customer experience than they do today. And those are the figures actually that you’re seeing in the right hand column, which is called total revenue, which is the revenue impact that these companies that are organizing these verticals would be able to get if they did a just a slightly better job at being able to deliver great experiences.
And so we’ve go ahead and validate these models with case studies from brands that have gone through customer experience transformations.
And with all our research that we’ve been doing for over a decade at Forrester.
The big takeaway is is that in every company that we have data off, in every industry that we have data on, there’s a correlation between better customer experience and increased top line revenue. And ultimately, that’s why you care about meeting your customer’s expectations. It’s because it’s it’s ultimately good for for your business.
So what does this all have to do with the customer service?
And so what it is is that Customer service is a key component of the company’s customer experience strategy and operations.
I had, one of our clients tell me that customer service is the longest relationship that a customer has with a brand. Because it’s not only for post purchase service. It’s, for example, when you’re trying to decide, like, what products to buy, and you reach out to the company to get advice.
Or you need some onboarding help, or you need some help filling out a form to be able to to to apply for, a new insurance policy, new mortgage, That’s all customer service. It’s not only for post purchase service. It’s, again, but it’s that hand holding before you make a purchase to be able to make sure that you’re making the right decision, help ease your buyers’ anxiety. It’s the buying assistance also onboarded.
And so when we went, last year, and and pulled, the, customer service decision makers, what their top priorities were for the last twelve months, top priority was like it’s highlighted in the screen here is improving the experience of our customers. Because contact center decision makers, customer service organizations realize that you do a better job at supporting your customers, they’re gonna stay with you longer, and it’s gonna have that revenue impact that we talked about. And I know that we’re in the dates of the pandemic and this data was taken prior to the pandemic.
But even now, where cost control measures are becoming really important It’s not only about optimizing costs. It’s this, strategic balance of delivering a great customer experience, especially to your customers today that may be anxious or angry or even devastated or at best inconvenience by the pandemic. It’s being able to improve that experience at a cost that makes sense to your risk.
So diving into this a little bit more, trying to distill what your customers expect from you.
And on the next screen, we have some data from dimension data, which is the probably the best source of contact center data, that this organization goes out and surveys thousands and thousands of contact center to makers around the world to understand, what, customers want out of the service interaction.
And so at Forrester, we say that customers want three things out of the service interaction.
They want an easy interaction. They wanna be able to reach in over the channel of your of their choice, touch one of their choice and get connected connected to an answer, connect to an agent who can help them out. They want effective service, meaning an answer that’s a complete answer.
Or a complete resolution to their problem, which is personal and in context to their actions, to what they’re doing.
They also wanna walk away from having done business with the company feeling good about having had that interaction, feeling that the customer cares about them. They’re looking out for their best interests.
So we talk at force that we talk about ease effectiveness and emotion. And what’s interesting is, the data that you’re looking at on the screen here is from dimension data. And it’s It’s aligned with what Forrester says. First of all, in terms of what customers want, is, again, that customer effort ease of resolution.
What’s also important is they want to be effectively supportive. They want to be connected to the right age and or the right piece of content that’s got the right knowledge to be able to, or to support them.
And again, in number three and number four, the these are all characteristics attributes of ease, ease of contact, again, over the channel choice.
Being able to have customer service easily accessible.
And then valuing a customer’s time, time taken to resolve. Queries.
So again, what customers expect at a high level is that ease of engagement a full answer to their question in steps communicated in a personal way and in context of their actions.
So on the next screen, is a little bit more information about how your customers want to interact with you. And again, this is from, dimension data’s benchmarking reports from last year.
And what we see is that eighty eight percent of contact center decision makers believe that their automated volumes will increase this year.
And it goes back to what I had on that first slide in the webinar is, again, your customers want their time to be valued.
They want that any does any information to be available to them on any device when they need it. Okay? And so what we find is that customers are using self-service as a first point of contact with a company.
For example, self-service FAQs, doing a search pulling up the right knowledge, chat box, or processes being able to file a claim online. And why is self-service so important? It’s because it does a great job at valuing your time. It gives you that easy access to the answer or to that process to be able to get something done.
What we also see is that seventy seven percent of decision makers think that their digital agent volume will go up. And this is really important because for the easy inquiries, you don’t wanna have to pick up the phone, sit in queue, and then get connected to an agent. Being able to to text, being able to, web chat with an agent kept through all that clutter of getting connected to the answer, getting connected to the agent.
And what you see is that you make engagement easier and the overall interactions like your company gets. Is going to go up. Sixty five percent say that their overall volume will go up. You open up more channels to your customers. It’s not that your customers move from one channel to another. They just wanna interact with you more. And that’s a good thing because you’re building that relationship that you have with your, customer.
So let’s go to the next slide.
Because what’s happening that this one’s really interesting.
What’s happening to the phone channel?
And what we see is that six almost sixty four percent of customers say or contact center decision makers say that their phone volumes will decrease. And it’s not that the phone is going away anytime soon. But the phone is being seen more and more as that escalation point.
You go to self-service as a first point of contact. You’re not able to find what you look you’re looking for. And at that point, you pick up the phone and call the contact center. And so what happens is all the easy reproducible inquiries are getting picked up over the, over, the self-service channels and even the digital channels. So the harder work is being routed to the voice channel. It’s that escalation point.
And then there’s another dimension to this.
Is your customers again are using the phone as an escalation point. But what about the emotional state of your customer? Your customer at best they’re a little frustrated because they’ve tried to self serve, haven’t been able to to get the the the answer to their question.
And then they’ve had to pick up the phone, wait in queue and get connected to an agent.
So at best, they’re frustrated.
At worst, they could be angry or they could be anxious.
For example, you’ve got a customer who’s been hit with a surcharge on their bill, and they don’t understand it. Or medication that’s been denied, And and so they’re anxious because they know that their doctor has prescribed a certain medication that’s not covered by their insurance. So agents have to not only solve the harder work that’s getting into the contact center, but also understand the emotional state of the customer. And, again, be able to do the right thing for the customer, turn the conversation around so support the customer and deliver the right answer again with a full understanding of the customer the emotions where they are in their journey.
Okay. Let’s look at the next slide.
So I walk into a lot of contact centers. And in one of the contact centers, I walked into their IT manager or handed me this diagram and tried to explain what the tool set that their agents were using.
And he told me that their agents use over twenty different disconnected systems during the course of their work day. They have to hunt and peck between applications.
It takes about nine months for their agents to get fully trained up, but they turn over every six months. So for this company, customer calling in, is never really connected to an agent that is fully trained up because their technology ecosystem that the agent test up is so complicated and it takes so long to train, their agents and managers can’t enforce consistent processes. So, again, it’s hard to deliver that quality of service that customers. It’s So on the next screen, is there’s a, a vendor that collected information about how agents are spending their time. And so what we found is thirty-five percent of the time, your agents are react actively searching for information from a knowledge base or from a CRM.
And again, this is think about it. It’s it if this is happening during a phone call, this is when you put on hold, for the agent to look up the information that they need to be able to to solve their problem.
Fifteen percent of the time, your agents are performing manual tasks, like cutting and pasting, your information from one system to to another system. And again, this is when you’re being put on hold or or it’s adding to to your handle times.
Ten percent of the time, your agents have to reach out to other agents or subject matter experts to find answers to their question.
So what we find is that agents spend a lot of time reactively looking for information or performing manual tasks or they’re not skilled properly, and they have to find an answer somewhere else. So sixty percent of the time, they’re not concentrated on the conversation at hand and the customer.
So what does all this have to do? With AI, which is our theme of our webinar.
What we see is that organizations are using or deploying a trove of AI and automation technologies to be able to up level the quality of service that their customers receive because customer service organizations understand the value of great experiences.
Our data shows that again contact center decision makers think that improving the customer experience is their top priority.
And they’re looking for to use AI and automation to be able to give customers easy access to answers, to resolutions to their issues, and to be able to be effectively supported during their customer service journey.
So one of the main technologies that we started hearing about a couple of years ago, that contact center decision makers or customer service organizations were adopting were chatbots.
And during the days of the pandemic, chatbot use has gone gangbusters. I mean, we have vendors telling us that their chatbot technology is like power airlines hotel sites that are seeing a four hundred percent interaction volume as customers during the For example, the early days of the pandemic or, we’re changing their hotel reservations or their flight reservations or canceling verification plan.
As employees moved home, they needed to add more internet services, telcos. Internet service providers are telling us that their volumes skyrocketed.
Again, because of this that’s, a shift in working conditions.
And so many companies look to checkbox to be able to deflect incoming, imports like repetitive questions that they were getting from their customers.
And right now, chatbots do a really good job at being able to answer the straightforward, reproducible questions.
We call them like the one step types of tasks, like an inventory search or an informational request, or being able to collect customer information or tell you when your purchases will be delivered or very, like, simple tasks. We call them, again, three step tasks. But all the AI and machine learning natural language understanding that’s powering these chatbots is getting better and better. And so what we believe is in a couple years. And this line of what’s chatbot appropriate is moving pretty rapidly. I mean, on the screen here, you see where we put it twenty seventeen and where it is today.
It means that chat bots are getting more and more adept at being able to solve the, the harder work, the, and answered them much more complicated questions.
And what this is doing, it’s offloading those inquiries getting into your contact center agents. And it’s allowing your contact center agents to focus on the harder work at hand. And this harder work has a disproportionate impact to satisfaction and being able to nurture customer relationships.
So to dive a little bit into chatbots, on the next screen.
As you design chatbot interactions, what you have to do is establish trust with your customers.
And you have to become, confident that your chat bot will actually help customer.
And what you wanna do is be fully transparent when the conversation is automated.
And let your customers know that they’re talking to an automated assistance.
But as well always offer your customers a way out so that they’re never trapped in this digital waste blend that could be a chatbot interaction that doesn’t have a way out. So what you wanna do is you wanted to design, like, live agent escalation paths, at every step of the process, giving your customers a way to reach in and talk to a human agent And what you also wanna do is we wanna monitor the the the customer conversation that they’re having with the chatbot. And if you send any type of frustration or negative words or emotion, you wanna take those automated interactions and transfer them directly. To an agent. And again, as you transfer them to an agent, you have to respect your customers’ time. Don’t ask your customers to repeat information that’s already been communicated to the chatbot.
Pass all that information over to the agent so that they can start the conversation where they left off.
Okay. And also, on the next screen here, it’s don’t think about chatbots only as customer phasing. I mean, sure most deployments, chatbot deployments that we see are customer phasing.
But chatbots have a tremendous amount of value to support agents in doing their work. So the interaction that’s happening is still it’s a live agent interaction with a customer and a live agent. But the agent is being supported on their desktop with a chatbot who may be looking for the information or hand-holding them through a process, to give the agent more confidence that they’re doing the right thing for the customer.
And then, there’s chat bots that are also, deployed in a way where they work together with agents. For example, you’re applying for a new insurance. The chatbot can go ahead and collect all your information, perhaps It’s for car insurance, your, your vehicle information, pass all that information to the agent who’s able to come up with a policy for you And then for closing, you can pass the interaction back to the chatbot. So more and more gives an interplay between an assist an automate interaction, to an assisted interaction, and back to an automated interaction.
Okay.
So in terms of chat box, it’s not about agents versus chat box. It’s not one or the other. It’s both working together to do the right thing for the customer.
And so what you to be able to have chat bots and agents working together, and you can even expand this to all automation and AI. Working together to assist the agent to deliver that great quality of service to your customer. So you have to understand what automation and AI and chat bots are good at and what your agents are good at. Again, I know it’s a bit of a complicated diagram, but on the, where you see machine, this is where automation and AI and chatbots self. They’re great at pattern matching for data, repetitive data entry, executing tasks They’re less great at being able to understand your customer, understand their emotion, their frustration, their anxiety, their anger.
They’re not all that good at being able to shift direction.
In terms of if a if a customer has a set of questions instead of just one or being able to understand the best words and the best terms to use as you’re talking to your customers, as you’re emotionally supporting them, not only getting them the answer, but nurturing and building on that customer relationship.
So again, understand what agents are really good at, understand what automation is good at, and use both of them together to best support your customers.
And, understand that checkbox as well. I don’t know. I’ve got a funny picture on the, next screen.
Realize that, chat bots, it’s that they’re don’t only look at them for cost control measures.
Many contact center decision makers want to invest in chatbots to because it helps control costs.
It helps them offload agents, from all the repetitive work. It helps them reduce ultimately reduce agent headcount.
And that’s true for some companies that get a whole slew of the easy reproduce questions from their customers.
And chatbots can take over that type of work, that, that, those reproducible questions.
And they do have a real return on investment in being able to deflect all these these questions But the story about chat box is it’s not only just for cost control.
Because your age, unfortunately, they don’t wanna be competing with chat box. They don’t wanna feel that their job’s at stake if they start working with chat box on their agent desktop.
Thinking about chat box, you gotta do it a lot more strategically.
And so on the next screen here, I have some, of chat box that go much beyond the cost control measures to also helping companies deliver great experiences for customers and for your agents.
For example, chatbots can when you escalate to an agent, you can help uncover these friction points in your customer journey and take that information and craft better journeys.
You can help your agents. For example, your chat agents work on a greater number of chat interactions. At the same time, make them more productive, offload all the repetitive work, let your agents work on the more complicated work, on the work that matters to them where your agents feel that they’re having a real impact to the customer.
You can mine chatbot chat conversations and being able to understand what your customers are talking about. You know, what are issues? What is your customer’s sentiment? Use that information to optimize your customer service processes or your products, even, being able to understand frustrations that your customers have with your products and being able to deliver you’ve had information to to deliver better product that are more aligned to to what your customers expect.
So again, The takeaway here is don’t only think of chat bots as a way to deflect inquiries for cost control measures. Chat bots actually do. A lot more.
And to broaden the conversation around AI, which is the topic of our webinar, on the next screen is, I have a, what we call, the value chain of Forrester. For AI and automation.
The store that’s AI and automation, it’s just not a chatbot store. It’s being able to use AI and automation technologies in, pervasively through your customer service operations.
To make your agents more productive and more effective at delivering customer service in line with your customer’s expectations.
And so at the low end, and so what you’re looking at here is our value. Chain, for, for, for AI and automation in, customer service. So at the low end, AI and automation can help increase efficiency. For example, understanding the intent of a customer and routing that interaction to the right agent queue or automatically classify an inquiry, which, shades off a couple second of agent work. And more than that, you get much more accurate data.
It can be used, AI and automation can be used again to reduce friction and customer journey based on the sentiment of the customer, like automatically escalating to the right agent, queue. Or again, empowering not only chatbots, but knowledge management to be able to power for example, the the content that you pop up proactively on an agent desktop.
It can also help understand customer journeys and where a customer is getting stuck in their journey and perhaps proactively engage with that customer to to help, educate them. For example, they may be comparing two products. Help educate them. Make sure that they’re making the right decision.
It helps ease further anxiety that they, in what purchase to make. So again, AI and automation. It’s not only about efficiency and productivity. It’s also being able to better understand the customer of their journey and proactively, even preemptively intervene to do the right thing for the customer.
And so on the next screen here, I just have a snapshot of a couple automation technologies that we see within, customer service organizations, for example, business process management, which we is known as well as dynamic process automation, which helps automate, like, rigid processes, like like claims management, or, and what business process management does is it, it, it enforces these rigid processes that adhere to, to regulations, or, or company policies.
And they, again, provide all the tools to be able to, to do the optimization of the steps in the process. CRM customer service solutions, that that that include process guidance, which handhold agents, through looser processes where agents can can can deviate, from a, a a predefined to do the right thing for the customers, robotic process automation, which helps, that what we’re seeing physical gangbusters in in contact centers. Again, to be able to automate repetitive agent tasks, like cutting and pasting from one application to another, or all the swivel care tasks. That we’d see in the contact center. And then we’ve talked about chat box. So the takeaway here is that AI and automation, it can give you this wealth benefits, but it’s not one technology. It’s a set of different technologies and use cases that you can that that you can roll out to your customer service operations to make them more effective.
So before I turn it over to Gabe, I got, I think, one or two last slides.
When we look at what customer service organizations need. We think about them, needing a set of applications to be able to deliver great customer service.
And we say for companies should start off by implementing deploying a customer service, a modern customer service application, where conversations are organized around the customer, where a customer is not a ticket, but has Again, you’re doing the right thing for the customers and irrespective of how your customers interact with you, you’re supporting that customer. So modern customer service solutions have, for example, support omnichannel experiences have built in knowledge management, are able to, again, understand who the customer is, so the agent has the right thing to do. But modern customer service solutions also can include, for example, some process guidance to handhold the agents through processes or tie into back-end systems to pull up like order information.
You may wanna layer on, for example, automation technologies. Robotic process automation to to to automate agent actions. You may want to deploy chatbots, customer facing, and agent facing. And then there’s a whole set of predictive, technologies that feel, for example, next best action or behavioral better be able understanding of your customers to be able to to to better understand their emotions, and pop that information to your customers. So, again, there’s lots of AI and automation, scenarios that many customer service vendors support in virtual And so my last slide is about what it means, AI automation.
Taught tell your agents, make your agents who are fielding the, the inquiries who are on the front lines, fielding inquiries from your customers.
Communicate to them the value of delivering great customer experiences.
Because it has a quantifiable impact to a company’s top-line revenue.
Look at automation and AI technologies like checkbox, for example, to, to make your operations more efficient, to be able to deflect those imports, those routine coming into the contact center.
It can be used agent-facing to make agents more productive. Ultimately, if your agents are more productive and they’re being supported with the right technology, they’re gonna be happier in their job, and they’re gonna stay longer.
It’s like that, that, that spaghetti diagram I showed you of an agent desktop. No agent wants to be fighting their tool set. They want to be forwarded to to do the right thing for their customers.
And realize that it’s not about AI and automation or agents It’s AI and automation and agents together, working together to do the right thing for the customers. And again, There’s a whole wealth of AI and automation scenarios that can be supported, with then customer service organizations.
Use them. It’s the only way that you’re gonna be able to differentiate your service offering.
And it will make you more competitive. Because again, that longest relationship that a customer has with a company, it’s through a customer service, department. Okay. Kate.
I love it. Thank you, Kate. Turning to you. An overview of AI chatbots in the current landscape or be, living it at the moment. Just wanted to add a couple, couple pieces, my two cents. You know, the first is I love Kate your idea of this idea of AI playing a role in the entire customer me.
And boy, are we seeing that? Whether it’s in the self-service and the routing and the interaction, and all these different places that AI can ultimately play a role.
One that we’ve experienced recently. I was actually on the phone, with a a gentleman from a company called Globen. They’re a customer of ours, was really trying to figure out how can we work through a lot of those minimal or initial interactions that feel like they’re taking a lot of time, but ultimately could potentially be moved out, moved to a bot, or moved to an interaction where the agent didn’t have to handle all of them. And you can see some of the numbers they experienced across global, more of a global rollout.
Now this number isn’t always the case. Eighty-four percent. Was that right? Eighty four?
Wow. Normally, we’re seeing more in the forty, forty forty one, forty two percent. But eighty four percent deflection rate able to really say, Hey, we wanna prioritize those conversations.
A lot of them can be answered through self serve through the bot, knowledge base, and email deflection. And then a lot of those then that are more important or a little bit more difficult as Kate was referred to go a little bit higher. And ultimately, they’re the ones that go to the consumer or to the agent, and you would you deal with it as such. So Really appreciate you guys coming.
They want to get into questions. And Kate, I’ve got a plethora of I’ve been writing them down here. I got about fifteen of them. I don’t know if we’ll get to all of them, but Feel free to add more questions.
Please, please, please do, continue the conversation with myself and Kate on LinkedIn. But let’s dive into a couple of these questions, and I’m gonna mix these up just a little bit. And I apologize if I forgot some of those, you who am asked these as I was trying to take them down as we went here. So the first one, Kate, was just about AI in general, and it is a high-level question, but it’s interesting.
I think this was Mary that asked this. She just said, I’m hearing the word AI all the time. It’s a little bit of a buzz word. What is what is it x mean from a definitional standpoint in customer service?
Like, how would you define AI in customer service?
So AI, it’s a collection of technologies, natural language understanding, natural language processing, machine learning. That’s taking inputs, to be able to optimize an action And the AI part instead of automation is these technologies get deliver outcomes that get better over time.
For example, you do a search in the knowledge base. Machine, and you get recommended say a set of answers.
And the customer views or picks one a the answers. Your machine learning algorithms will be able to refine that feedback loop to be able to, present the absolute best answer that it’s learned, which is that that that that optimizing your outcome.
What would you have, Gabe? Perfect. No. I think that’s right. I mean, you know, sometimes we try to make it more complicated than it needs to be.
You know, it’s Sometimes I like to say it’s just a machine that helps us do our job a little more appropriately. Right? It’s, and I love this idea that it’s not eliminating. It’s enabling.
To keep it on that in the presentation. It’s about how do we do this together rather than try to eliminate everything we can do. Get you brought up at the beginning, the Forrester CX index, I think. Think.
I think that’s what it was called. Yep. And question, I think it was from Peter. He just said, are you seeing in general customer satisfaction moving up or down.
You showed it by industries that he highlighted. And he said, are you seeing that it is in call it in America or globally? We’re getting better or worse at the way we treat our customers. So that’s really hard because as you get better, Your customers get more used to that level of service.
So It’s a moving benchmark.
So actually, we did a lot of research around this topic. And for years, We’ve said that customer experience has stagnated. It’s not getting better. But we just put out a report two days ago that said for the first time in, I think it was, like, six or seven years that we’re actually seeing an uptick in customer experience.
And, again, I I I don’t have that reporter, the data in front of me. But it is for the first time in a very long time, we’ve seen it actually get better. And I think it’s because all of the automation and AI technologies that are infusing data. We’re doing a much better job at collecting not only customer data, but like second party, third party data, and you think the data to fuel AI and automation, to be able to incrementally, deliver better experiences to to your customers.
So that’s a long-winded way of saying we’ve done a lot of research on it, and we’re starting see for the first time in a very long time, experience is getting better. No. Interesting. Well, I might have to hit you up after Kate Peter, maybe we’ll get you a link for that because I think that that would be an issue.
Yeah. Happy happy to give you that report.
Yeah. So this one and I’m gonna jump here because you just kind of answered it, but Susie talked about we wanna provide better personalization to our customers. The problem we’re having the system. I think she highlighted the system diagram. He showed that it was confusing. We have a hard time bringing the disparate data sources together. Recommendations on how you can bring data from different systems together to really provide a different or personalized experience.
That might be a loaded question, but quick thoughts on that one. That’s a loaded question.
First of all, it’s being able to collect that first-party data, who your customer is, preferred channels, hooking back to, like, your order management systems being able to pull up like transactional history and for action history, that only gets you so far.
It’s not ultimately about only support. It’s about that customer three sixty. So marketing campaigns that they have been engaged with sales, being able to understand the health of the customer, their lifetime value.
And then you can even go a step further. And this is where like customer data platforms to be able to understand demographic and behavioral variables and layered that onto first-party data. And so that is a whole data management strategy with applications that understand your customer and then feed it into CRM, but That’s a full-ever conversation. Yeah. Yeah. That might be another webinar. We’ll have to bring Kate back for him, but I do find it interesting.
On this one, Susie, that, you know, we have we’ve had CRM for a long time. Cloud-based CRM is around for a long time, but we’re still talking about customer relationship management. How do you put the customer at the center of it and doing it in a way that’s appropriate, and so you’re not alone in that bringing together disparate systems first party data, second-party data. It is a challenge, but it makes a world of a difference. When you can bring to bear past interactions, order data, and then use in in a way that, you know, is helpful and makes it more personalized to your customer. So I definitely would advise you to continue down that path, although I don’t know if I have all the answers on the best way to do it. Couple more here.
I thought this one was interesting. It’s more just a you talked a little bit about the channel of choice, and we had a few people mentioned that, Kate. I I really like that word.
One person here just said, hey, we’ve been mostly focused on email and phone. We don’t have any data to determine What is the customer’s channel of choice? How would you advise us really determining or figure out what the channels we should be using in our customer service organization. Yeah. That’s a good question. On average, companies have seven channels deployed to their customers, and I think it’s supposed to go up to twelve, by twenty twenty-three.
And the channel of choice is gonna be different for different industries. If you’re in youth retail, You know, your Instagram and other social channels may be the most important channels compared to if you’re in wealth management where phone, email, video, co browsing may be of interest.
So a couple things. First of all, look at all the benchmark data for your particular industry.
There’s lots of sources for into, oh, and geography as well, because for, like, asynchronous messaging, channels, it’s different dependent on geography.
So there’s a bunch of benchmarking sources for channel data, benchmark portal, dimension data, or two, that have industry-specific data. Then, secondly, just ask your customers, survey your customers. How else would you want to communicate?
And putting the triangulating on those sources should give you the channels that you should be deploying. And there’s lots of maturity models. I mean, we have one at Forrester that show if you start off with phone and email, How do you layer on channels? Because you don’t wanna do it in a silo. You wanna do it in a way that a customer can move from channel to channel and not have to restart the conversation.
Yeah. I love that. And this goes to maybe I’ll just do two more here But Brent asked a question, just about starting and you hit this, there was a great slide, Brent. You might need to reference that but you talked about so much and there’s so much we could do with routing and self-service and segmentation and, you know, sentiment analysis and the list goes Where do you start on your AI journey?
Do you start with the bot? Do you is it each person different? How would you kinda double click on this for Brent? Yeah.
I think it’s each person each company is different. And where’s your pain point? Where’s the biggest area for opportunity? Like, your global case study.
You have a ton of repetitive inquiries, perhaps force my order.
What’s the late fee?
And if you have all these repetitive inquiries over and over again. First of all, agents aren’t very happy at answering those repetitive inquiries. And secondly, those are absolute best candidates for automation for chatbots. In that case, having a chatbot is It’s great. Think of if you are a company that has very complex customer service where you need lots of agents and subject matter, employees to be able to collaborate around a resolution.
In that case, there are other cognitive technologies that may be the most important. So I think it’s being able to benchmark your operations and understand your, your areas of opportunity. And again, customer can help you with that Forrester can help you with that, lots of models to use.
I love it. I love it. Alright. One more, you guys.
I didn’t I if there were a couple more, but I think I actually kinda wanted to ask this one myself. And this comes from Michael.
This was a high-level question. You showed some data at the first, and I didn’t write it down who you were sourcing there, but you talked about some of the biggest challenges in the space. But I liked how this was framed by Michael. Said Kate, you know, you deal with a lot of companies like customer and and other vendors. You deal with a lot of end consumers.
What do you personally think is the thing that’s stopping companies from delivering that world class experience in your kind of own point of view. What’s the biggest problem stopping us from being, you know, it’s technology because there’s some absolute fabulous technology out there. I think it’s strategy and operations where many companies customer service is still seen as that stepchild, and seen as a cost factor. Yeah.
They’re just not the sales team, are they? They’re just not. And, and it’s around strategy, and it’s around many companies have little fiefdoms where you have sales and marketing and support, and they’re each doing their own thing, and there’s no orchestration around the customer. So it’s not technology.
It’s It’s like, oh, is the company itself organized around the customer? Or do you have the processes to organize around customer. Are you aligned?
I mean, what do you see?
You know, the thing I’ve been noticing lately, and I probably changed my tune every once in a while, but It is it is I almost feel like it’s a new way of thinking that that is required, and it’s the last part you said there. I just feel like as I’ve gone into organizations There’s so much focus on business efficiencies, and I don’t wanna place that as a bad thing because it is good to do business efficiencies.
Handle time and improve these different metrics, call metrics, etcetera, response time. But with that improvement, sometimes we have left the customer down at the bottom kind of on the side. And if there was a way to put the customer at the center and then look at efficiencies around that or look at efficiencies through the customer’s eyes, It’s so that may sound obvious, but I just feel like there for some reason, it feels like we we’ve kinda lost that. And I love that idea of putting the customer at the center and really trying to add efficiencies around that or look at it through the customer eyes rather than always trying to just go efficiency efficiency efficiency, that obviously can get you maybe stuck in a bad place.
So that’s my latest thinking, but I could change that too late. And, Gabe, I wanna make one, point as well, not around the data that that I used. I did reference dimension data in many cases. It’s NTT, has now acquired dementia data.
So the organization is NTT, and we’re licensed to use the data and, NTT, other, formerly known or the, the, the report used to be dimension data is the absolute best trove of contact center data that I’ve been, able to to come across.
And I can see in the chat, there is a, a link to the NTP benchmarking study.
Twenty twenty. I’m always looking. We’re always have people asking for some of this benchmark stuff. Yeah. It’s just fabulous data.
So so much that we covered. We just have a couple minutes left. Kate, if you had to summarize kind of closing remarks from the legal counsel here. And kinda last words you’d leave for the audience?
Well, I think what you said, it’s not about the technology. It’s around being obsessed with your customer, understanding that your customer has the power in the conversation. And if they’re not happy with you, they’re just gonna go somewhere else, and they’re gonna talk about, what a poor job you didn’t supporting them. So understand the value of a customer organize around your customer. That’s all about strategy, and then try to work cross functionally to be able to support the customer in their end-to-end journey to be able to get them to achieve what they’re trying to do, and then use technology to support your processes and operations.
Yeah. I love that. I love that. Alright, you guys. Well, so fun, Kate. It’s always fun to have you for the audience really appreciate the participation and the questions.
I know I’ve got a couple outstanding. We’ll try to add those maybe on LinkedIn. Do connect with us. It’s always fun to continue the conversation.
And with that, will say, thank you and have a fantastic day.