Call Center Management Featured Article
Piecing Together Proactive Customer Service
What is the future of customer service? Is it chatbots? Is it conversational AI? IVR? Is it omnichannel? Yes, yes, yes and yes, but the shift taking place is about so much more. Big picture, the customer journey should be seamless, smooth, in other words, unsiloed and holistic.
As NICE VP Marketing Chris Bauserman noted in a recent interview with TMC (News - Alert), “How do we bring together a single journey? How do we get down to a single view for the end customers across all interactions…guiding them toward the best self-service or agent assisted solution? Take a holistic view of the end to end customer journey?”
For NICE, the next five years will be focused on Customer Experience Interactions (News - Alert) (CXI), and Bauserman unpacked for service provider’s proactive approach to achieving its expectations.
NICE built CXone as a unified platform that pulls together all the attributes of an end-to-end contact center solution (Automation, omnichannel, analytics, WFO, APIs, etc.). Bauserman explained, “Over the past year and a half we’ve added all the self-service best in class for mobile apps, knowledge management, with SEO-friendly structured responses. Your Google (News - Alert) search may have just solved your problem.”
Furthermore, the platform’s AI possesses the ability to understand customer intent. It can explore the customer’s profile to better guide resolution. The solution merges self-service, agent and chatbot in a unique way to better connect the entire customer journey and drive resolution across all touch points.
CXone is able to use AI throughout the entire journey. Bauserman continued, “We launched our latent AI engine of framework of models, which provides intelligence to help orchestrate routing guidance.” The engine is able to apply real time assistance, give next best action insight, next best answer with real time transcription and listening.
Bauserman boiled the winning CX formula down to “Being fast, right and making people feel good.” The making people feel good part should be underscored. Core soft skills like active listening and empathy when paired with AI can go a long way toward customer satisfaction.
NICE leverages its view of CX data across industries and each customer to optimize the self-service experience. One of its new products, Enlighten XO, is the “secret sauce to make the right self-service experiences, and make them better and faster,” noted Bauserman.
He illustrated his point using the example of a website search. When a customer can’t seem to find what they’re looking for or a chatbot hits a dead end, the engagement should seamlessly switch to a live agent. This is a baseline.
Bauserman continued, “How do you build better bots? The answer is in your data. We run AI against customer data sets and we’re able to look at all the topics and categories of issues that pop up, and can tell our customers, ‘here’s your stack ranked list of topics to automate’.” Additionally, by analyzing language, the platform begins to understand language nuance, such as the multitude of ways customers ask for the same thing, and gain better insight on how customer express intent. Then, armed with this data, a contact is equipped with sequential steps for dialogue flow to build into AI self-service – What to automate, a roadmap for automation, etc.
What’s interesting, in addition to the CX platform itself, is what the data makes visible. Specifically, the factors driving customer satisfaction and prevent churn in different regions of the world. Bauserman noted Japanese businesses require a few extra behaviors in comparison to North America and Europe, but the vast majority of NICE’s models of commonality work swimmingly. Stating, a lot of the time the same approaches are successful, because a key to positive results is personalization.
“AI from a proactive outbound perspective is very powerful… CXI is really about meeting customers where the journey begins,” exclaimed Bauserman, “what’s even better than starting the journey with Google search, is reaching out before you know what’s going to happen.” All made possible by AI.
Speaking of proactivity, the platform can tap into an ERP and CRM systems, analyze underlying processes and operations, predict future system failures and solve a customer’s issues before it arises. The only contact with the customer is an automated message making them aware of what could have happened, and how that outcome is avoided. That’s how ROI really adds up.
Bauserman explained, “I want you to think about if every customer used NICE we’d all have a lot more smiles on our face…ultimately we’re removing the friction between consumers and businesses,” and in doing so, NICE is setting a benchmark for modern customer service.
While the future of customer service is still taking shape, I can say two things confidently: AI will be a key part and NICE will remain at the fore.
Edited by Luke Bellos