The Gist
- Empowering human agents: AI alleviates routine tasks, freeing agents for complex interactions requiring human touch.
- Seamless omnichannel experience? AI synchronizes multi-platform customer service, ensuring consistent and personalized interactions.
- Predictive customer engagement: AI anticipates needs and offers proactive solutions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Contact centers. Customer service and support. Business process outsourcing for contact centers.
No matter the frontline customer experience entity, it’s undeniable these enterprise functions are moving from cost centers to value centers.
What’s more important than customer experience today? And who are the guardians of that experience for brands? Hint: it ain’t the CEO. It’s the contact center agent on the other end of that 1-800 call or the one behind the conversational AI bot trying to solve your problem, ready to jump in when AI hits the brick customer service wall.
Our bot friends dominated the themes around contact centers and customer support for us in 2024: how AI impacts the frontlines and how it’s the top opportunity for brands infusing AI. Gartner in a report last month found predicted that by 2027, 40% of all customer service issues will be fully resolved by unofficial third-party tools powered by generative AI.
That’s a pretty big chunk of those 1-800 calls and customer service chatbot chats.
“There is a transformation in customer behavior and a reset in their expectations with GenAI continuing to reshape the customer service landscape,” Daniel O’Sullivan, senior director analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice, said in a Dec. 16 press release. “As customers increasingly self-solve issues through GenAI-enabled tools, there will be diminished demand for official first-party service. When customers do have to engage with first-party service, their expectations will be higher.”
Let’s explore some of the top dialogue, commentary and insights around customer service and support and contact centers we had in 2024 on CMSWire.com and take a peek into the future.
We know AI will continue to have an impact, for sure. AI is enhancing contact center agent capabilities, enabling them to focus on complex and emotionally nuanced interactions. This shift not only increases operational efficiency but also significantly can improve customer satisfaction.
Table of Contents
Enhancing Agent Efficiency with AI
AI can improve agent efficiency in contact centers by automating repetitive tasks such as ticket categorization, data entry and initial customer inquiries. This shift allows agents to concentrate on more complex issues that require human empathy and judgment.
AI isn’t about replacing jobs; it’s about enhancing the roles of contact center agents, enabling them to become more akin to problem solvers and relationship managers than call handlers.
Related Article: 21 Important Call Center Statistics to Know About
Integration of Omnichannel Customer Service
The integration of AI across multiple service channels — phone, email, chat and social media — ensures that customer service is helpful to consumers, regardless of how or where a customer reaches out.
AI helps to maintain context and continuity across these channels, preventing the common frustration of repeated information. AI-driven platforms can synchronize interaction history and preferences across channels, offering a unified view to agents and a seamless experience to customers.
That’s the promise. Execution is up to the data inputs of the contact center leaders and technical teams, of course.
Predictive Analytics for Proactive Service
Predictive analytics in AI uses historical data and real-time insights to preempt customer issues before they escalate. This capability transforms reactive customer service models into proactive engagement hubs.
With predictive analytics, contact centers can anticipate customer needs and initiate contact, offering solutions before the customer is even aware of a problem.
Related Article: Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Customer Retention
Overcoming Implementation Challenges
Implementing AI in contact centers comes with its set of challenges, including the integration of technology with existing systems, ensuring data privacy and managing customer consent.
Training AI to accurately capture and interpret human emotions is also crucial. The biggest hurdle is not just technical but also involves preparing our workforce for AI interaction, a nuanced blend of empathy and efficiency.
Broadening the Scope of AI Applications
AI’s role is expanding beyond traditional tasks to include strategic functions such as market analysis, customer segmentation and even direct marketing initiatives within contact centers. AI’s capability to analyze vast amounts of data can also be leveraged to craft more targeted up-selling strategies.
The Role of AI in Training and Development
AI-driven training tools help new contact center agents learn and adapt to their roles. These tools use performance data to create personalized learning experiences, significantly reducing the learning curve.
AI can simulate a variety of customer interaction scenarios, providing agents with valuable experience before they handle real cases.
Enhancing Customer Data Security
As AI systems handle more customer data, ensuring robust security protocols is paramount. AI can detect anomalies in data access or usage that might indicate a security breach.
Leveraging AI for real-time threat detection ensures that customer data is protected more effectively.
Related Article: From Analytics to Action: How Contact Centers Are Getting Smarter
AI’s Impact on Customer Loyalty and Retention
AI enhances the customer journey by personalizing interactions and reducing effort, thereby increasing customer loyalty and retention. Customers appreciate when their time is valued. AI helps by ensuring that solutions are both timely and relevant.
Future Trends in AI and Contact Centers
Looking ahead, AI is set to deepen its impact by facilitating real-time decision-making and enhancing personalization. Future AI technologies will likely involve more sophisticated machine learning models that can predict customer behavior with even greater accuracy.
Summarizing the potential impact of AI in customer service and support and contact centers, Emily Wengert, executive principal of experience innovation at Huge, told us in 2024 that most customer service bots that predate generative AI are modeled after a concept similar to phone systems (“press 1 for hours of operation, etc.”) — and nobody likes those.
“We all feel our problems are unique and those deterministic systems never felt all that good. Generative AI is like a beautiful rainstorm in a drought for customer service,” she said. “OpenAI’s 4o announcement continues to show us the increasing complexity of how these systems can respond through visual, voice and text. It’s pretty incredible.”
Generative AI such as GPT4o opens the possibility, she said, of more exhaustive customer service capabilities, covering the long tail of what people might need or ask.
“To take advantage of generative AI’s ability to understand customer intent, brands need to have content that can respond to that long tail,” said Wengert. “What should be keeping brands up at night isn’t the maturity of the data they already have, but the data and content they don’t have.”
Top Contact Center Articles
Check out our top articles on contact centers from 2024:
