3 Customer Experience Problems That AI Can Fix

We’ve all experienced awkward, bad or just plain cringe-worthy customer experience situations — both with human and automated interactions. Maybe it’s the interactive voice response (IVR) system that makes you listen to an endless array of options. It could be the chatbot that just doesn’t understand your question and offers completely irrelevant answers. It might even be the chain of human agents who keep asking you to repeat the same information again and again.

These types of customer experiences aren’t unique to the retail industry, but in a world where online reviews carry a lot of weight, these experiences can cause serious brand damage. The good news is that advancements in the accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) mean there’s a lot you can do to make positive impacts in these channels and in your customer experience overall.

By intelligently automating parts of the customer journey, you’ll naturally reduce costs while increasing employee and customer satisfaction. The key is to automate intelligently, which really requires a strong foundation in CX (customer experience) principles as well as a deep understanding of the technology. The following are three uses cases where AI can help:

1. Frustrating IVR Systems

When customers call your helpline, are they walked through an endless series of scenarios? If that’s the case, you have a frustrating IVR. Traditional IVR systems follow a pre-determined sequence, so they can’t respond intelligently to customer requests. This leads to frustration with the IVR that causes customers to yell, “SPEAK WITH REPRESENTATIVE!”

The truth is that most customers want to self-serve and quickly resolve problems on their own. Unfortunately, because of design shortcomings, the IVR system often leads customers to want to speak with a person who might be able to resolve their problem.

With conversational AI, IVR systems can get a big boost. An AI-enabled IVR, or intelligent virtual agent, can more quickly and accurately help your customers resolve issues without human intervention. Conversational AI built with natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI can interpret customer inquiries even if they’re spoken in a conversational tone. Furthermore, AI-powered IVR systems can greatly simplify their menu of options. Instead of including a prompt for a laundry list of questions, the customer can state their problem and the IVR will give them the correct response or route them to an agent. Even better, some AI-powered IVR systems use advanced analytics to predict the question before the customer even asks it.

2. Unhelpful Chatbots

Just like outdated IVR systems, chatbots can be incredibly frustrating. That’s because traditional bots are based on a set of rules. When a customer asks a question, the bot searches for the right rule and responds with a scripted reply based on a set of known keywords — and that often leads to customer frustration.

The latest generation of chatbots, powered by conversational AI, aren’t limited by keywords or rules. Instead, they use data, machine learning (ML), NLU and NLP to recognize speech and text inputs. This helps the bots understand and interpret the subtleties of human language and engage in more natural and fluid conversations with customers.

Chatbots powered by conversational AI and ML can also identify common user issues and proactively provide solutions, resulting in a more helpful user experience. These chatbots can even draw from past interactions and use that information to provide personalized recommendations and responses.

3. Agent Turnover

By the time a guest reaches your customer service agent they’re often already fed up. Being on the receiving end of these calls is stressful and compounding that is the fact that agents often have high call volumes and lack the tools they need to quickly solve problems. This leads to high turnover rates.

While AI can’t eliminate all agent stressors, it can help alleviate them by making workloads more manageable and giving agents the tools they need for success. If you use conversational AI to improve your IVR and chatbots, you’ll go a long way in reducing call volumes by making it easier for customers to problem-solve on their own. AI can also help you predict peak call times so that you can staff your contact center appropriately to meet high demand.

AI can also give agents the problem-solving tools they need with interactive knowledge centers that draw on knowledge bases, manuals, and FAQs to deliver answers to agents via tools in their contact center technology. In addition, automatic conversation summarization can replace a great deal of post-call work.

Improving IVRs and chatbots and reducing agent turnover is really just the beginning when it comes to what AI can do for your customer service. You can automate many interactions, but you must be strategic about how you do it so that you never make it harder for customers to interact with your brand. If you’d like to explore your readiness to use AI in your customer experience, take this 10-question readiness assessment.

Mark Eichten is executive director, voice, and AI bot professional services, at TTEC Digital, a global leader in customer experience orchestration, combining technology and empathy at the point of conversation.