GenAI Can Help Companies Do More with Customer Feedback

GenAI empowers agents to become instant experts in the consumer they’re serving and the specific questions they’re handling. For example, 61 percent of customer service and support leaders expect headcount reductions of only five percent or less due to GenAI. It should also be able to analyze historical customer service conversations with AI to discover what priorities the brand should address. For example, a customer messages a company’s support chatbot and is upset about a delayed refund for shoes that the customer returned. The chatbot would recognize the negative sentiment, gather relevant information on the message, and initiate an expedited refund process for the shoes.

The role of AI in contact centers today has evolved from a supplementary tool to a core component of delivering superior customer service. As consumer expectations rise for fast, personalized and seamless interactions, contact centers have turned to AI to remain competitive. Generative AI directly elevates the customer experience by facilitating highly-personalized interactions that make customers feel valued and understood.

So you and I could listen to the same call, and we could have very different viewpoints of how the call went. And agents, it’s difficult for them to get conflicting feedback on their performance. And so artificial intelligence can listen to the call, extract data points baseline, and consistently evaluate every single interaction that’s coming into a contact center. It can also help with reporting after the fact, to see how all of the calls are trending, is there high sentiment or low sentiment? And also in the quality management aspect of managing a contact center, every single call is evaluated for compliance, for greeting, for how the agent resolved the call. And one of the big challenges in quality management without artificial intelligence is that it’s very subjective.

Extracting Insights from Customer Feedback

Initial generative AI solutions only allowed companies to provide immersive, personalized experiences through text. They can deliver more creative, personalized, and human-like responses to customer questions and even help create engaging self-help resources, such as articles and FAQs. The rise of tools for developing powerful gen-AI agents in the contact center will give business leaders more freedom to augment their existing human teams. So I think when you’re thinking about things like real-time guidance, and coaching and training, this is where it becomes really crucial. I mentioned this being interaction-centric and having everything on one platform, but having the ability to use that sentiment data or customer satisfaction data in multiple places can be very powerful.

Here’s your guide to the best ways you can leverage AI to enhance customer support, without falling victim to common implementation issues. On the one hand, its Enlighten Copilot technology supports agents in every step of their journey, guiding them through real-time interactions with contextual guidance to drive optimal outcomes. Avaya also allows customers to choose which large language model (LLM) they want to power the GenAI agent assist use cases across the platform. But, with agents dealing with difficult situations more frequently, it also creates a need for them to show more empathy and creativity, which can drain their energy. Moreover, as bot-led interactions become more prevalent, agents will play a role in training bots so they deliver a similar level of service. As such, new agents will feel more confident and require less training since agent assist lifts the burden of performing specific tasks.

As companies progress in their journey, GenAI can be used to address more complex use cases. One of the most significant additions to Sprinklr’s AI strategy is its Conversational AI+ capability, launched in 2023. A dynamic capability introduced to amplify self-service functionalities, Conversational AI+ allows enterprises to tailor solutions to their business’s AI maturity level. The third pillar is agent interactions – cases where a real human being is still required.

Optimizing Self-Service Experiences

Our initial journey involved an extensive startup phase, featuring a meticulous market scan and evaluation of multiple technologies and vendors over a year. The right speech-to-text technology and vendor were chosen through careful assessment, including live tests and simulations, ensuring a seamless implementation phase and saving precious resources. In that frenzy, contact center vendors pumped out many GenAI-fuelled features to seize the initial media attention and convince customers that it’s finally time to embrace AI. At its heart, the solution contains a wealth of anonymized contact center conversation data that NICE has pulled together and used to develop sector-specific benchmarks for many metrics. Also, customers don’t like filling in surveys; they generally prefer low-effort experiences.

The company claims that Z-FIRE can derive specific insights into an individual’s property. With these insights, Metlife could understand what mitigation activities the owner engaged in and if the property was constructed using less combustible materials, potentially mitigating fire damage. Natural disaster risk more broadly further prompted MetLife to pursue emerging technology to accelerate underwriting operations, leading to their partnership with ZestyAI. Zesty AI is a software development company that offers property risk analytics via deep learning models. Humans may not have the upper hand on reading, understanding, and predicting emotions, but machines are a step ahead of humans in this paradigm.

AI is a powerful tool for companies who want to gather more insights into their target audience, and the opportunities they have to grow. AI solutions can process huge volumes of data from thousands of conversations across different channels, offering insights into topic trends and customer preferences. Perhaps one of the biggest use cases for AI in customer support, is that it allows companies to offer 24/7 assistance to customers on a range of channels. AI chatbots, for instance, are available to answer questions and deliver self-service resources to customers around the clock.

High-priority issues, especially those expressing strong negative sentiments, can be escalated to ensure they are handled promptly and effectively. At this stage, most contact centers still use a combination of AI IVR, chatbots, virtual assistants and human agents. But, when it comes to the human aspect of the contact center, a different form of AI is improving the customer service experience.

AI can absolutely create new efficiencies, and we do need them in healthcare contact centers. But we’re talking about conversations that can be deeply personal, and some of them always require human interaction. We designed Talkdesk Autopilot to perform tasks patients request, but also to seamlessly bring in human agents when necessary. We make it easy for nontechnical staff to monitor and optimize how genAI works in their contact centers, training and augmenting the model as new opportunities or challenges arise with clicks, not code. AI is listening in as a copilot for the agent, pulling up recommendations and suggesting answers based on the organization’s knowledge base.

The 3 Pillars of GenAI in Contact Centers

There’ll be a growing focus on securing and protecting the data fed to generative AI bots and ensuring these systems can align with existing compliance standards. Additionally, businesses may need to invest extra time and resources into monitoring the responses of the generative AI systems. Watching for signs of AI hallucinations will be crucial to preserving brand reputations. Alongside consistent omnichannel experiences, today’s consumers expect high levels of personalization.

We’d love to hear about your challenges and share how AI can galvanise your business. With real-time generative AI translations, contact centers can deliver culturally nuanced and consistent support to customers ai use cases in contact center worldwide, without additional costs. Managing a comprehensive contact center is becoming increasingly challenging in today’s world, as consumers connect with businesses through a wide range of channels.

Overall, BPOs offer other industries a look inside their potential futures with AI adoption — especially after the outpouring of interest in GenAI when ChatGPT was launched in late 2022. Metrigy found AI adoption was lower than anticipated in 2023, with 36% of all organizations using AI in their contact centers, compared to 70% of BPOs. This experience puts BPOs in a position to aid other organizations — including their own clients — in their own AI adoption strategies. Many BPOs also report using generative AI in their workflows for tasks like meeting transcripts, content creation for self-service channels or summaries for customer feedback.

By leveraging data analytics, businesses can pinpoint underlying issues and take proactive measures to address them, enhancing overall customer satisfaction. Sprinklr, a leader in Unified Customer Experience Management, harnesses the power of GenAI by integrating their own proprietary AI, built specifically for customer experience, with ChatGPT App Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and OpenAI’s GPT models. This enables Sprinklr to redefine the customer experience for their enterprise clients; offering various capabilities tailored to different use cases and business phases. Word processing and spreadsheets revolutionized workplace productivity across all parts of the organization.

Excessively focusing on AI might lead to insufficient human oversight, resulting in errors during customer interactions or a failure to empathize with customers’ needs. Real-time insights and analytics from GenAI systems help organizations fine-tune operations through consistent monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs). By having immediate data access, managers can spot issues as they arise, such as service levels declining due to low staffing, and take corrective actions promptly. This enables contact centers to make proactive adjustments for better service delivery and optimized operations. Automated customer service interactions sometimes break down when customers change their intent halfway through a conversation – confusing the virtual agent. Our sister community, Reworked, gathers the world’s leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals.

That is a proposition that appeals to SMBs and Enterprise customers, in addition to the partner community. For instance, the traditional “Press One for… Press Two for…” IVR is transitioning to fluid, intelligent voice bots. However, the second wave of contact center platforms did little to inspire enterprises to take them on. There are several reasons, including tricky migration loads, regulatory quagmires, and data security concerns. Managers need to be guided on how to leverage these features, helping them understand and activate the value.

As such, businesses may now fundamentally rethink how they solve customer queries – which will, hopefully, entice more of those wave one contact centers to take the CCaaS leap of faith. Currently, though, many businesses lack the data discipline to leverage this potential fully. Contact center work relies on the natural language and information retrieval capabilities that genAI is designed for, notes Senior Analyst Christina McAllister. This week on What It Means, McAllister discusses how genAI could transform contact centers and what leaders need to do to capitalize on its potential. Generative AI cannot fully replace humans because it lacks the insight, oversight, and judgment that people provide.

Spotting Gaps In the Knowledge Base

Finally, one of the key areas where AI excels in the contact center, is in processing data, and making insights more accessible to teams and business leaders. With the right AI tools, companies can collect valuable information about customer experiences, sentiment, and employee performance across every touchpoint and channel. The shift toward AI is driven by both the need to handle increasing interaction volumes and the desire to provide a better overall customer experience. AI-powered chatbots, intelligent automation and predictive analytics enable contact centers to operate around the clock, offering instant responses to common queries and predicting customer needs before they arise. This has been especially valuable in an era where digital channels such as chat and social media have become as crucial as traditional voice support, providing customers with self service options around the clock.

Conversational AI is emerging as a critical component of most modern contact center operations. Rapidly evolving algorithms are offering companies a range of ways to improve customer experiences, boost efficiency, cut costs, and even access more valuable data. Transparency is crucial in the ethical development of generative AI systems for contact centers. Customers need to be made aware when interactions are mediated or augmented by artificial intelligence.

And that lens, in having the data, is more powerful in keeping this customer-centric approach, or this customer-centric mindset. “There’s such an enormous amount of data available that without artificial intelligence as this driving force for better customer experiences, it would be impossible to meet customer’s expectations today.” With AR in customer support, customers can use their smartphones or AR glasses to overlay digital information onto the real world. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. For example, in a technical support scenario, AR can guide a customer through a product setup or troubleshoot process by visually demonstrating steps directly on the device they are trying to set up. This kind of interactive guidance can significantly reduce the complexity and time required to resolve issues.

Rather than just automating tasks, AI actively supports human agents by suggesting next-best actions, providing real-time translation, and instantly retrieving knowledge. That enables faster, more accurate responses while elevating the quality of customer conversations. In this approach, virtual agents not only handle customer queries but also trigger and manage backend processes across different platforms. With conversational AI, it’s easy to boil the ocean – especially as the latest GenAI-powered chatbots connect with the business’s knowledge stores and autonomously handle various customer queries.

• This feature, for example, could be configured to report information about the purchasing history of a customer making an inbound call so the agent taking the call will have potentially valuable information when servicing the customer.
• You should be able to create multiple versions of your voice solution, to suit various needs.
• With the advent of AI-backed IVR, however, these automated voice systems are lowering call center wait times, assisting with unique caller problems, and improving overall customer call center and contact center efficiency rates.
• Some of the most advanced generative AI solutions today, such as Google’s new “Gemini” model, can understand and respond to content in various forms.

Google’s final innovation utilizes the CCAI insights solution that sits inside the CCaaS platform to enhance and modernize a company’s FAQ section. The Knowledge Assist tracks the conversation between customers and agents, determines what the customer’s intent and what the agent needs to resolve the query. Whether that’s by mapping customer intents, generating testing data, or enabling more contextual responses to customer queries.

The CommBox AI chatbot leverages conversational and generative AI to measure customer sentiment and uses this analysis to inform responses and action pathways, like generating a unique return label. To address this, they implemented a conversation intelligence solution to automate QA and drive more efficient, detailed, data-driven analysis. Significantly, conversational intelligence can also identify patterns faster – or better than an agent could – which means they can identify and offer the customer relevant opportunities, upsells, or recommendations. This process can be managed end-to-end, without involving human agents, saving time without compromising on tailored support. From there, they can use the conversational intelligence platform to spot pain points and address them via technology, process, or coaching changes.

In the future, CCaaS platforms will offer more of these use cases to enhance data quality for sales, customer success, and contact centers. The episode concludes with McAllister’s advice on actions that contact center leaders should take and tech investments that they should make now to ready their organizations for success with genAI in the future. Understanding agents’ workflows and where their sticking points ChatGPT are, she says, could surface near-term opportunities for improvement. Generative AI models can be trained to detect subtle patterns of equipment failures, which is valuable in predictive maintenance. Instead of relying on scheduled maintenance or waiting for problems to occur, manufacturers can use GenAI solutions to forecast issues and carry out maintenance only when necessary, reducing unplanned downtime.