Transforming Your CX Strategy with the Power of AI
When the iPhone was launched in 2007, it was followed by a significant shift in how we communicated. It changed how customers interact with businesses, from buying online anywhere to engaging customer support. Today, we can’t operate in a world without mobile phones.
Generative AI has the ability to be just as game-changing as mobile phones, especially for the customer experience industry.
From better support for agents to more reliable self-service, customer support leaders can build towards their ideal customer experience without skyrocketing operational costs.
Driving efficiency with AI-assisted super agents
We can agree that humans are great at many things.
Building trust, being creative, making judgments, and understanding social cues are critical skills when working with customers. And they’re also all things that AI is not good at.
Support teams need humans for these things, but hiring customer support agents is harder than ever. The thought of being yelled at by customers, the mountain of monotonous tasks, and often the lackluster pay make customer service low on the desired list of jobs. It’s even harder to retain skilled agents – at 30-45% turnover rates, you need to be constantly hiring to replace these agents.
It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.
What if you could be more selective in who you hire and could help them become the super agents you need them to be? Let AI take care of the mundane stuff, and let your agents’ genius shine.
For example, when a call comes in, AI integrated into an IVR system or chatbot can collect the necessary information from the customer, route the call to the right agent, and provide a summary of the issue and the customer’s sentiment to set your agent up for success.
During a call, agents can use an AI-powered knowledge base or CRM tools to get automated response suggestions, use semantic search to find the information they need faster and intuitively, and follow the right protocol with confidence as they solve customer problems.
After a call, there’s none of that dreaded follow up work. The AI system can automatically generate a call summary, resolutions, and tag cases, so your agent can move onto the next call – or even take a quick break!
This AI assistance also extends to agents on email. Generative AI solutions can create email responses, match your brand’s voice and tone, and check your grammar. Instead of relying on hundreds of stale macros, every agent can respond quickly and effectively to a customer without being a professional copywriter or expert.
Finally, as a leader, you can leverage AI’s superior data analysis capabilities—built into your CRM or contact center platform—to generate agent activity reports, performance summaries, and other valuable insights that will help you optimize your operations.
As you implement these AI solutions, you’ll find that it can boost your bottom line in a meaningful way. Your team will achieve lower average handle times, faster first call resolutions, improved customer satisfaction, and happier agents who have the right tools to do their job leading to higher retention rates.
Finally, the cycle of burning through agents can be broken, and investing in super agents can actually yield greater efficiency for your business.
Delivering ROI with a new self-service approach
Many CX leaders are cautious about this new wave of AI technology. After all, they were burned previously by the first AI chatbot craze. That chatbot promised to reduce customer contacts, replace agents, and lower costs significantly. But it was too good to be true.
“The previous AI company we worked with went bankrupt and the service went down a lot. Their chatbot wouldn’t use our ticketing system or knowledge base. We had to create all the conversations and possible branches, to train it. It was a lot of work. Even working with proprietary systems like Answerbot, which uses your knowledge base, articles, and tickets to offer answers, has a low success rate, around 10%” - Mariliam Semidey, Director of Support & Localization, PicsArt Inc.
Are chatbots better with the new generative AI technology?
With its natural conversational ability, generative AI chatbots can sound less robotic to customers, even straight out of the box. But they’re still prone to mistakes. There’s a well-known issue with Generative AI creating completely false information, commonly called AI hallucinations. This is usually due to data quality, confusing inputs, or other unknown reasons. That’s why using chatbots for less critical tasks with plenty of oversight is still the recommended approach.
Experienced CX leaders are instead looking at innovative ways to save costs and improve their self-service customer experience with new AI technology.
First, they’re using chatbots to directly help their agents, not replace them. The chatbots collect information from customers in a friendly conversational manner. This information is used to route the call to the right agent, and summarized to help the agent understand and resolve the issue faster.
Second, they’re augmenting their FAQ/article-based help centers to allow customers to resolve their own issues. A more powerful AI-enhanced semantic search experience in the help center can understand exactly what users are looking for, without relying on exact keywords and key phrases.
So where is the ROI? When you significantly improve agent productivity and allow more customers to help themselves, the truth is that fewer agents are needed to complete the work.
“Traditionally, the need for agents has scaled linearly with the volume of customer tickets. However, the adoption of AI has disrupted this linear relationship, allowing for greater support capacity with fewer agents. AI is seen as the next wave in self-service, taking efficiency to a new level beyond traditional methods.” - Larry Barker, Senior Customer Experience & Operations Manager, Teamshares
Replacing your agents with a chatbot is a short-sighted approach. While it may initially feel like you’re saving money, the negative impact on your brand and on your customer’s experience is immeasurable. AI is no magic bullet to solve all your customer issues.
A better approach is to view it as a tool to supercharge your customer experience operations for a greater return on your investment.
Saving time and money with multilingual support
Parles-tu français? No, I can’t speak French, but generative AI can.
Currently, ChatGPT has the ability to detect, translate, and create content in more than 95 languages. Leveraging the same predictive text patterns processed by the LLM, ChatGPT can produce high-quality text translations, making it far better than a Google Translate replacement.
For businesses with agents supporting customers all over the world, this multilingual functionality of Generative AI is a cost-saving game changer.
Traditionally, basic translation costs range from $0.04 to $0.10 per word per language with a turnaround time of days. Translation services were slow and costly, but they were a necessity that CX leaders were forced to grit their teeth and pay since there was no alternative.
Luckily, that’s no longer the case. Translating 10 simple knowledge articles with roughly 400 words into 5 languages would have cost $2000 with the traditional method, not including the additional internal reviews to ensure its accuracy. Using an app running ChatGPT will not only produce the translated articles in mere minutes, but the costs would be cheaper due to AI’s efficiencies.
“When it comes to calculating the ROI of AI implementation, they mentioned using a comparison between the costs of human translation services and AI-powered translation services. The AI translation service provided significant cost savings, costing less than a cent per word compared to human translators who charge an average of seven to eight cents per word.” - Mariliam Semidey, Director of Support & Localization, PicsArt Inc.
There are more opportunities to leverage ChatGPT and similar apps to scale your customer experience team’s multilingual capabilities:
- Advanced Translation: Translate articles, web pages, documents from one language to another language that your agents or customers speak.
- Multilingual Communication: Agents and/or chatbots can communicate with customers in their language over text, chat, and email.
- Content Summarization: Generate a concise summary of any text into the language your customer or agent speaks.