The Future Of The Customer Experience Is Flexible And Powered By AI

Our team was at the recent Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas. This is the biggest customer contact event in the world and was attended by over 5,000 people. Throughout the conference there were 350 speakers - including our Chief Growth Officer, Claas van Delden, and our Vice President of Global Customer Solutions, Verena Funke.

Claas and Verena talked about the CX of the future. They outlined our AI framework and how AI can be instrumental in shaping how modern customer service processes can be delivered in a way that drives immediate productivity and creates a business environment where continuous improvement is possible.

Although our vision was praised by many of the attendees, there was a lingering perception that any service that is designed using gig economy principles must only be designed as a short term solution.

This is entirely wrong. As our AI framework demonstrates, we firmly believe that our approach is where customer service managers will look in future for inspiration. They want flexibility and the latest innovation.

Look around at the news focused on Black Friday for a good example why. The traditional approach to Black Friday in most customer service teams is to just focus on not being overwhelmed. Workforce optimization can help, alongside the greater use of chatbots and virtual agents, but none of these strategies answers the question, how will we cope when customer contact dramatically increases?

Building a highly skilled team of talents allows you to define exactly how much support you need. This can be reduced for quiet periods and increased when facing an extremely busy period. You can even change plan in realtime if there is a surprise that was not anticipated.

This approach creates a highly flexible skilled labor pool. The talents get to choose when they work, so they enjoy much more flexibility than a traditional contact center employee. They are also paid each time they help a customer, not by the hour. Our former head of marketing, Chris Hague, explained on this recent podcast how most of our talents don’t work a traditional 40-hour week because they can earn the same amount with fewer hours.

Combine this flexibility with our AI framework and we really are exploring the future of how customers will be served in future.

Many customer service articles focused on AI explore the opportunity for improved chatbots that actually understand customers. This is a rapidly-changing area of the customer experience, but it is important to remember that even if more interactions can now be automated, there will still always be some complex issues where the customer needs to talk to a real person.

Our AI framework allows detailed ongoing analysis of each call and can identify which team members are performing better than others - and why. This creates opportunities for constant improvement in the support process. The AI is not just automating some of the customer interactions, it is helping to identify which customer interactions work best and how the entire team can benefit from this insight.

The traditional contact center is inefficient and inflexible. This inflexibility affects the way that customer service solutions can be designed and it affects the team that has to work in this environment. Our Talents know the value of flexibility and they have already chosen to engage with the future of the customer experience. It’s a long term strategy that we believe will become more common as more companies realize that new solutions can work better than those that have been deployed for many years.