Spring forward: 5 AI-powered strategies for real growth

Spring marks a season of rejuvenation when we look to reset and refocus. This renewed perspective extends to the annual rite of spring cleaning—it’s that time when we renovate, redecorate, and declutter things taking up unnecessary space. Our ultimate end game is to keep only what sparks joy (to borrow from Marie Kondo’s philosophy), and this allows us to create space for new possibilities and fresh perspectives.

Every industry looking to streamline customer service can apply the same principle to put artificial intelligence into practice for better organizational approaches.

Much like clutter accumulates over time, organizations build up assumptions about AI capabilities and customer service that best practices over time. These assumptions often solidify into operational truths that go unquestioned while technology and customer expectations evolve rapidly. This allows a disconnect to fester between what businesses believe they’re delivering and what customers are truly experiencing.

Recent research underscores this concerning reality. Despite substantial investments in AI and customer experience technology—with 92% of C-suite executives reporting AI deployments—just 42% saying they’re yet to realize ROI or value, according to Constellation Research.

During NICE’s recent The AI Power Shift: Redefining Customer Service webinar series, industry experts highlighted how fundamental approaches to AI implementation and customer experience strategy are too often built on outdated premises that require serious reassessment.

Spring presents the perfect opportunity to reassess and forge ahead with organizational renewal. Systematically identifying and clearing out the myths that have accumulated around AI and customer experience creates space for approaches that genuinely deliver on the promise of state-of-the-art technology.

Start to move forward with a clear vision for the true customer service end-to-end transformation you want to create by taking the following five actions.

1. Declutter your tech stack to unleash AI’s full potential

Start by clearing the clutter piling up to obstruct your business potential. Accumulating multiple AI tools without proper integration blocks the true value of technology. As Constellation Research found, 42% of executives haven’t realized ROI from AI investments. That’s due to “clutter” creating more friction points instead of streamlining experiences.

Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, and Tamsin Dollin, director of product marketing at NICE, in their The Big CX Picture: Aligning People, Processes and AI webinar broke down the importance AI as a unifier for your business.

Incorporating a single pane of glass (SPOG), or platform that provides enterprise-wide visibility into various sources of information and data to create a comprehensive, single source, can accomplish this.

“The reason you want a single pane of glass isn't just so you have visibility onto what’s on the other side of the glass. I think there’s this perception that glass is something that you can't mold and shape and make into something very different,” Liz Miller said. “For those of us in CX, grab a dry erase marker. When you get that single pane of glass, it allows us to map. Where are the broken dotted lines? Where is there a gap? Where is something completely and totally missing? Where haven’t we connected anything at all?”

Aligning employees with your whole team across your organization and supporting efficient workflows from the back office to the front office with the right technology delivers powerful experiences—including the high-quality interactions that customers demand.

2. From reactive to remarkable: How proactive AI transforms customer service

When talking about streamlining customer service, organizations can take cues from feng shui—the ancient Chinese practice of arranging spaces and objects to promote the flow of qi (or life force).

Removing obstacles in your path and brightening entryways are two of the key tenets of feng shui. That’s the same strategy organizations need to incorporate as they onboard modern customer service technology.

According to Metrigy statistics highlighted during the How to Build a Foundation for AI-Powered Service webinar, 70% of companies completed at least one CX transformation project last year with 60% using proactive outreach—showing more organizations have made the move to scale up technology. Metrigy also found two-thirds of consumers believe technology has created a positive impact on customer service interactions, up from about half the previous year.

But outdated processes can ruin interactions if new technology is poorly implemented or falls short of customer expectations.

Robin Gareiss, CEO and principal analyst of Metrigy, and Andy Traba, vice president product marketing at NICE, discussed why organizations must shift their thinking from reactive to proactive service—integrating front- and back-office operations with an AI hyper-platform.

Unfortunately, 40% of companies aren’t using proactive—and that impacts how consumers view brands. As Gareiss explained, proactive isn’t limited to notifications on shipping updates. From a management perspective, organizations can use AI to be proactive to help solve an issue or upsell in real-time.

Proactive AI can meet three core business objectives:

1. Sales and marketing with a lead gen focus: Notify consumer of opportunity for new product upgrade or access a package for more services.
2. Accounts receivable: AI can make campaigns more effective and achieve higher response rates to drive that business impact.
3. Customer care: Present opt-ins for new wellness programs or provide real time information about the customer service workflow and making sure the customer moves more seamlessly through it.

“AI knows that I call on the first of the month to order something, like dog food. Why not preempt that so I don’t have to worry about it, and just send me an SMS and ask me if I want to make the same order every month,” Gareiss said. “Another area I love is all about the analytics, alerting appropriate teams and creating scripts and workflows. Maybe there's a big warranty claim where we can have AI write a script and do a workflow for that while summarizing customer reviews—and that’s huge.”

3. Rewire your organization to adapt with evolving AI capabilities

Refreshing an organizational mindset demands more than surface-level changes. The first major step is to fundamental reimagine how technology can transform business capabilities.

The journey of AI adoption involves an evolution of thinking to challenge organizations to move beyond traditional operational constraints and embrace a more dynamic, intelligent approach to problem-solving.

Amy Stapleton, senior analyst at Opus Research and Jennifer Wilson, director of product marketing at NICE, led an insightful discussion during the CXone Mpower in Action: The Future of AI-Powered Experiences webinar around the maturity model as a framework for organizational development.

Most organizations begin with a limited perspective, treating AI as a simple tool for basic automation. At this stage, technological capabilities are constrained and customer interactions remain rigid, with rule-based systems offering minimal flexibility. Employee support tools provide only fragmented assistance—leaving significant gaps in operational efficiency.

As organizations mature, its mindset begins to shift. Large language models (LLMs) become catalysts for more conversational and intelligent interactions. The approach evolves from mechanical task completion to nuanced problem-solving. Analytics move beyond simple data collection—uncovering deeper insights and revealing previously hidden organizational patterns. Employees start to see AI not as a replacement, but as a powerful collaborator that enhances their capabilities.

At the most advanced stage, AI becomes fully integrated into the organizational DNA. Systems can now perform complex tasks with remarkable sophistication—real-time translation, automated quality assurance and personalized employee training become standard capabilities.

The organizational mindset goes from reactive to proactive, with AI serving as a strategic partner in continuous improvement.

The most compelling perspective comes from viewing this progression as a musical journey.

“When you first start out, your goal is to delight an audience, but you only know a few chords. As you get better, you can put chords together and play songs,” Stapleton said. “Eventually, you become a skilled musician with capabilities at your disposal to truly please your audience.”

4. Uncover treasures with AI to realize ROI

We’ve all heard stories—whether firsthand or secondhand—about how cleaning an attic uncovered a treasure, like an old family photo or an antique or artifact worthy of the “Antiques Roadshow” TV show.

Embracing a new season of AI-powered transformation with a renewed focus on workflow optimization can reveal unexpected treasures in ROI potential. Like spring cleaning can reveal treasures, restructuring enterprise workflows brings value to any organization.

In insights from How to Build a Foundation for AI-Powered Service webinar, Andy Traba, vice president product marketing at NICE, highlighted the findings of The State of CX report. The report analyzed customer interactions to find companies with higher customer sentiment scores consistently outperform their competitors in stock value. Over five years of driving higher customer satisfaction as measured by sentiment, top brands saw a stock appreciation of about 70%—confirming that exceptional customer experience directly translates to bottom-line results.

That should be inspiration for any forward-thinking enterprise to shift focus from enhancing isolated interactions to optimizing complete workflows—the operational backbone of any organization. By strategically automating these workflows, companies can eliminate bottlenecks, reduce manual intervention and accelerate processes across departments.

The most substantial returns come from orchestrating both AI and human agents on a unified platform and centralizing knowledge—creating streamlined operations where each handles the tasks they perform best. This operational efficiency results in:

• Reduced average handle time (AHT)
• Lower operational costs
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Enhanced precision to eliminate errors

Only organizations that collaborate with a technology partner providing an AI platform for customer service automation can shed inefficient processes to discover the treasure trove of a more robust ROI.

5. Your 5-step AI spring cleaning blueprint: From friction to flow

Amid an era when customer expectations are skyrocketing and operational pressures are intensifying, traditional approaches to customer service no longer yield the results organizations need. This spring, consider a comprehensive cleaning of your CX strategy—not just applying a fresh coat of paint, but fundamentally renovating how you serve customers through AI-enabled capabilities.

Begin your transformation efforts with this checklist:

1. Operations assessment: Evaluate if current systems can effectively integrate AI capabilities. Look beyond surface compatibility to identify structural limitations that might prevent optimal AI performance.
2. Workflow audit: Identify high-friction areas in customer journeys where inefficiencies have accumulated over time. These friction points often block significant ROI potential.
3. Data organization: Unify information sources for better AI performance. Like organizing cluttered closets, consolidating fragmented data resources creates a foundation for effective AI implementation.
4. Capability prioritization: Focus on improvements with highest customer impact. Just as spring cleaning requires deciding which areas need immediate attention, prioritize AI capabilities that address your most significant customer pain points.
5. Continuous monitoring: Implement observability to track effectiveness. Even the most thorough spring cleaning requires ongoing maintenance; establish metrics to ensure your refreshed AI capabilities continue delivering value.

By conducting this thorough spring refresh, organizations can create a foundation for sustainable growth and customer satisfaction.

Spring into action: Refresh CX with AI

The message to business leaders is clear: investing in superior customer experiences drives tangible financial treasures. Each percentage point improvement in customer sentiment represents real monetary value waiting to be claimed.

NICE CXone Mpower helps organizations unearth this hidden wealth by analyzing 100% of customer interactions across all channels—from agent conversations to self-service digital touchpoints and multi-channel journeys. By capturing this comprehensive interaction data and processing it through specialized AI models built specifically for customer experience analysis, the platform reveals valuable insights that might otherwise remain hidden.

These insights become your treasure map, highlighting problematic areas to address and successful strategies to expand. With this intelligence, you can continuously enhance customer experiences, establish new CX benchmarks, and most importantly—unlock the ROI treasures that your competitors may be leaving undiscovered.

This approach to customer experience is so much more than a fresh coat of paint. While superficial changes might temporarily brighten appearances, a true transformation of your CX strategy involves examining the foundation, reinforcing load-bearing walls and rebuilding from the inside out. The ROI treasures resulting from this process pave the way for fundamental enhancements to your business architecture.

The AI Power Shift: Redefining Customer Service webinar series demonstrated how organizations that dig deeper—beyond cosmetic fixes—discover sustainable value that superficial changes could never reveal. This thorough cleaning approach involves examining every corner of the customer journey, removing outdated systems rather than just masking inefficiencies, and ensuring that people, processes and technology are coordinated.

The rewards of a thorough refresh extend beyond aesthetics. A complete renovation delivers functionality, efficiency and value. The organizations that thrive tomorrow will be those who take decisive action today—implementing this comprehensive AI refresh to uncover hidden efficiencies, eliminate friction points and transform customer satisfaction into measurable financial returns that can increase with each interaction.