How can CX organizations leverage technologies like video and AI to remove friction and create great customer and employee experience (CX & EX)?

CX platforms like contact centers, have traditionally been thought of as cost centers. Zoom’s Head of Contact Center, Chris Morrissey, explained that this approach does not really work anymore and in fact, the view is evolving to see contact centers as strategic to achieving good financial metrics like customer retention and revenue growth.

“There are also metrics which you will often see in customer experience (CX) organizations, like CSAT or customer satisfaction measurements, and NPS or Net Promoter Scores; these measure the outcome of good experiences,” he explained adding that these CX metrics are influenced by other measurements like first contact resolution, time-to-resolution, and even how personalized, and the availability of channels for customers to reach a contact agent.

Three key areas

Chris outlined three areas of opportunity for AI in customer service. “A consumer can actually resolve issues in a self-service way, without live interaction with a human being. In this scenario, it is important that the capability is available in the channel of choice of the customer.” This could be email, or whatsapp, or chat, or even an in-app function.

AI is also useful as an agent assist tool to provide real-time guidance and answers to agents as they handle customer queries to potentially improve speed and accuracy of responses. The third equally important area is the generation of a post-call wrap up that automatically summarizes the conversation and “feeds notes” to customer relationship systems (CRM) and effectively reduce the administrative burden for agents.

Convergence for force multiplier effect on experiences

“The mindset of a lot of the brands in the world today is pivoting because they understand the strategic importance of customer experiences of cutomers. I think they are treaing people that handle those interactions with maybe, a higher degree of importance.”

Chris observed more communication with employees about how integral they are to the brand experience of customers, and that this gets translated into technology tools where AI is a key driver. He wanted to point out also that a metric most directly correlated to customer satisfaction is employee satisfaction, and now thanks to technology tools it is possible for agents to have better experiences.

AI has a major impact on how these agents do their work, but convergence of up to seven different applications into a single, easy-to-use, convenient-to-refer-to screen, also plays a significant role. 

This indirectly improves customer experience because happier employees provide better customer service. He also mentioned the convergence of tools, with the same interface now used for customer interactions, internal meetings, and communication to streamline the employee experience across contexts.

“It’s the same interface whether it’s a phone interaction, or an SMS interaction, or Whatsapp interaction, and I no longer need to do searches of knowledge bases because generative AI will do it and put the answers right in front of me to give to the customer.”

Omnichannel advantage for context awareness

Customers want a choice of channels when engaging with brands. The more options you give consumers to interact with a brand, especially options which they already use to communicate with friends and family, the happier they are, Chris said.

“Take your time, AI isn’t a product. It is a capability that you have to infuse onto your workflows and is going to change processes. So take your time to do it right.”

Customer agents do not necessarily need to equip themselves with the same number of tools to engage them, however. Less is more from the agent’s perspective and an agent desktop like the Zoom Contact Center can actually help to integrate data from different sources and provide them to agents via a single pane of glass and in real-time regardless of the type of interaction.

This allows for consistent resolution of issues for customers contacting via various contact points while leveraging a centralized knowledge base.

This solution is also carving out innovative use cases for itself like the one shared by Lenskart – to address the challenge of unevenly distributed optometrists across India, the company used Zoom Contact Center to carry out remote eye tests for customers via video. Besides filling a gap for eye care, the solution created an opportunity for Lenskart to enhance customer experience outcomes (monitoring if optometrists conducted eye tests according to guidelines) while scaling their services to remote parts of India. 

Zoom saw a nearly 3 times year-on-year increase in Zoom Contact Center licenses.

What are the must-dos for  AI-first CX strategies in 2024?

“There’s so much you can do but don’t try to boil the ocean on day one… you are going to spread your resources thin, then you are going to have subpar results,” Chris cautioned, recommending a crawl, walk, run approach instead when implementing AI-first CX strategies. 

Organizations could start with use cases that they really want to solve, and support that with resources like very good knowledge articles, and large language models with words that reflect your brand.

“Take your time, AI isn’t a product. It is a capability that you have to infuse onto your workflows and is going to change processes. So take your time to do it right, and when done right it will absolutely change your agents’ experience and your customer experience. And you will love it.”