Today’s contact centers face a series of pressures – rising labor costs, staffing challenges, understanding the voice of the customer, and technology needs are everyday realities. At the same time, customers’ expectations of service experience continue to elevate. To keep pace, contact centers have undergone a rapid transformation over the last several years in the evolution toward a digital-first contact center.
The Rise of CCAAS: Enhancing Customer Engagement
Call Center as A Service (CCAAS) is becoming more mainstream among contact centers. CCAAS allows for “any channel” engagement and the introduction of artificial intelligence as a tool to optimize the customer experience and the agent experience. A 2023 study done by the Metrigy call center research firm shows that 32% of businesses surveyed worldwide are using CCAAS. While still growing in adoption, organizations can integrate cloud-based technology with their premise-based solutions. It’s not just the tool that’s important; it’s the tactics as well.
Beyond Traditional Voice of Customer Surveys
For many years, companies have evaluated customer satisfaction using Voice of the Customer (VOC) surveys. While a commonly used tool to “understand” the customer, VOC surveys are not representative of the entire customer base. In fact, often, the respondents are very happy or very upset, so results are polarized. Even more important, these tools typically only reach about 7% of your customer base.
Embracing AI: The Future of Customer Experience
There is an alternative. Consider this soundbite: 95% of Customer data is found in the form of unstructured data—email, chat, text, and voice. Our customer experience efforts should focus on this to drive greater insight.
Customers are looking for a seamless/connected experience across channels. Nearly ¾ of Customers surveyed by Salesforce in The State of The Connected Customer stated they use multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. While customers use multiple channels, at least 50% still use voice!
AI in Action: Transforming Contact Center Operations
Natural Language Processing (NLP) puts the voice in the voice of the customer. NLP enables the contact center to identify intent and by identifying intent, this allows for greater personalization. Sentiment analysis is another means of personalization and empathetic engagement.
For example, NLP can recognize when a customer expresses frustration about long hold times, allowing the system to prioritize their call or offer a callback option. This approach can significantly reduce abandon rates and improve customer satisfaction.
Generative AI: Empowering Agents and Improving Efficiency
Generative AI not only enables agent assist capabilities but also allows for summarizing conversations between the agent and customer. This effort to capture voice of the customer serves several significant benefits:
- More efficient call handling. A different Metrigy study revealed that companies using Agent Assist saw a 27% drop in average handle time and a 16% improvement in customer ratings. In addition, agents save an average of 5.8 minutes per call when using AI, and supervisors save nearly two hours per week when using AI for agent scheduling and capacity planning.
- Eliminating after-call work frees up agents faster to be available for the customer (quicker service)
- Eliminating selective transcription – getting the full picture of the call
- Quality coaching and scoring are based on a nearly 100% sample set.
- Call trending based on contextual reasoning allows companies to anticipate potential situations impacting a larger base of customers.
These AI-powered tools can also help address high turnover rates by making the agent’s job easier and more rewarding. By handling routine tasks and providing real-time assistance, AI can help agents focus on more complex and fulfilling customer interactions, potentially improving job satisfaction and retention.
Implementing AI: A Strategic Approach
The introduction of AI into your efforts to capture the voice of the customer is not plug–and–play, but it is well worth it. The benefits of leveraging conversational and generative AI into your customer experience strategy are many, but adopting an AI solution and expecting quick ROI is not a reality. AI needs design, tuning, and adaptation. Effective AI implementation takes time to learn and onboard—it is not a silver bullet.
Start with your customers in mind. What are their pain points and concerns? Focus on operational gaps that impact experience—ASA, self-service rate, cart abandons, transfers, and first contact resolution. Consider piloting AI solutions in areas with the highest impact on hold times and abandon rates to demonstrate value quickly.
Once implemented and “on-boarded,” an AI solution can deliver real differentiation to your customer experience capabilities. It can help reduce hold times, lower abandon rates, and even mitigate the effects of high turnover by making your contact center operations more efficient and effective.
Karl Fischer, CCXP, is vice president for Customer Solutions at BSD Enterprises in Wilmington, DE. With more than two decades of experience in customer experience optimization, Karl helps healthcare providers and municipal services navigate the complexities of digital transformation while maintaining a human-centric approach.