How AI Redefines Self-Service

Today’s most sophisticated enterprises are investing in technologies to better understand what makes for successful customer interactions. Customers are taking command of their digital tools of choice creating millions (if not billions) of asynchronous conversations with companies.

Businesses are challenged to meet these growing demands and increasingly aware that every customer touchpoint yields valuable data to better serve customer needs. AI-informed tools can share information beyond the contact center across business units, assist agents in real time, and, ultimately, help redefine self-service. Let me count the ways, starting with these five:

1. Conversational AI puts customers in control with their own words.
We’re not talking about “General AI,” the prohibitively expensive, data intensive sweet spot of the small cohort of cloud-based “hyper-scalers.” Instead, we’re finding that specific flavors of conversational analytics, natural language understanding, and machine learning are being put into practice to improve customer experience across the full range of channels and modalities.

2. Customer Experience (CX) no longer resides exclusively in contact centers.
The same AI that understands and derives the intent of each customer from his or her own words can ingest the content of millions of conversations and extract insights that are of value throughout the enterprise. We hear of thousands of instances where defects or deficiencies in newly released products or weather-related disruptions are described in the course of conversations—and are then shared with product development or support personnel to remediate problems that might otherwise go undetected for days or weeks.

3. Everything takes place all happening in “real time.”-
More accurately, while it may take multiple milliseconds, understanding utterances and recognizing intent takes place in the course of a conversation. This is a vast improvement over the age-old approaches that involved batch processing that often took place overnight and often did not render results for days. Now, agent workspaces and administrator dashboards routinely highlight the detected intent of the customer, recommend the best action for an agent or intelligent virtual assistant (voicebot or chatbot) to take in the moment.

4. It has become both predictive and proactive.
AI is great at pattern matching. It can quickly identify who’s calling, process past history, ingest conversational content (past and present), derive intent, and match that intent with the resource that can resolve the recognized issue. From the customer’s point of view, it feels like “command and control.” But it also lays the foundation for AI to trigger outbound calls or messages when a company finds it necessary to initiate an action on behalf of a customer, like rebooking a flight when a traveler’s plans have been disrupted.

5. What’s sauce for the customer is special sauce for the agent.
In the world of digital CX and self-service, it is vitally important to give both customers and agents access to the same tools, information, and resources. Companies are literally putting the customer in charge of every interaction. Often it feels like co-browsing a website or collaborating in real time. Both agent and customer benefit when they’re actions are informed by Conversational AI

These five important pillars are representative of a myriad of attributes that make Conversational AI a necessity, especially amid the accelerating migration of IT infrastructure to the cloud. In either public or private clouds, AI-infused resources can more rapidly:

• Recognize callers and determine the intent of their calls
• Inform intelligent routing systems so that customers are quickly put in touch with the correct agent or resource
• Provide insights to both live agents and automated virtual agents to resolve customer issues
• Detect trends and extract insights that can be shared throughout the company to improve products, services and customer satisfaction

These are the measurable changes in the metrics that describe both customer and employee experience, as well as every company’s bottom line.

Customer Experience interactions (CXi) take place over a multiplicity of devices and channels. Successful brands encourage their customers to reach to them at their time of choice, using their device of choice using their choice of voice or text. Using technologies like NICE’s AI-powered CXone platform, they can capture 100% of those conversations, digitize them, and analyze content in real time to extract insights and provide accurate responses at a massive scale.