In an era where AI is reshaping the landscape of customer service and personalization, the industry is undergoing a profound transformation to adapt to new interaction models.
A global study, “The State of Personalization 2023” by Twilio Segment, reveals a compelling trend. Namely that an overwhelming 92% of businesses are harnessing AI-powered personalization to spur growth, with 69% of executives ramping up their investments in this arena. This backdrop sets the stage for our own venture into Generative AI.
An example of this is the use of Generative AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. In addition to providing instant answers to customer questions, 24 hours a day, these tools act as “co-pilots” for agents. They enable everything from automatic distribution of processes to identifying the most appropriate and agile response(s) during any transaction.
AI is already playing a key role in improving the customer experience (CX). It is helping companies to better serve customers by analyzing and cross-referencing large amounts of real-time data. This allows companies to anticipate customer needs and provides valuable insights to improve products and services that align with each customer’s individual needs.
Additionally, AI-based sentiment analysis can assess the tone of conversations, allowing companies to approach customers proactively to resolve issues and prioritize more critical services and take immediate action to resolve issues or improve the experience. This is especially valuable on social media platforms where opinions can spread quickly.
Implementation and the Center of Excellence
But AI projects often do not deliver on their expectations. This is typically because companies take a piecemeal approach, and do not think of the whole.
The first step any company could take in implementing AI in its processes is to establish an AI Center of Excellence (CoE), which we did in 2023.
A CoE is an organizational unit, created at a global level, which brings together experts to promote best practices, innovation, and the development of these skills.
CoEs provide leadership, support, and resources to drive AI development, quality, and efficiency in processes and/or technology within a company, with the goal of improving their performance and competitiveness.
Our AI CoE brought together a wide variety of business and technical experts. These include data scientists, computational linguists, AI engineers, full-stack developers, business champions, prompt engineers, and scrum masters, among others, to make the development of holistic AI projects across the enterprise possible.
AI...is helping companies to better serve customers by analyzing and cross-referencing large amounts of real-time data.
The CoE allowed us to define new solutions, accelerate development of our current AI portfolio, and expand knowledge and best practices around AI in a holistic and transformative way across our regions and customers. For example, we integrated AI into our CRM process; more later about that.
The CoE was established alongside setting up a new Global AI Committee. We implemented several new company policies to ensure that all AI applications and uses comply with applicable laws and regulations, including data protection and intellectual property.
The CoE ultimately allows us to build more agile business solutions for our customers, boosting innovation in a very agile way. It collects ideas bottom-up, driving the construction of minimum viable products (MVPs) to evaluate impacts and evolve our roadmap and portfolio using all these inputs.
AI in the Contact Center
Once everyone is on board through the CoE, plans for implementing AI in the contact center can move forward.
For example, many companies have implemented customer service bots that enable everything from the automatic distribution of processes to identifying the most appropriate response during any negotiation.
Throughout the interactions, these AI bots also manage all the steps of system formalization and status updates, seamlessly integrating with the communication channels chosen by the customers.
Data security, privacy, and compliance are key components in the development of AI-based CX tools. We set dedicated environments for each client or line of business (LOB), securing customer data and ensuring information reliability, thus adhering to all confidentiality standards.
[Centers of Excellence] provide leadership, support, and resources to drive AI development, quality, and efficiency...
Overall, the integration of AI into our CRM process has proven to be very successful. For instance, we have a case study in the real estate industry that, with the help of this technology, produced excellent outcomes such as:
- Resolution times halved from 11 to five days.
- Operating costs reduced by 13%, with future automation prospects via WhatsApp promising further savings down the road.
- The customer satisfaction index (CSAT) improved by 22%.
- A 30% surge in team productivity.
- Operational errors decreased by over 19%.
- Search times for client system content dropped from 244 to 86 seconds, boosting response times and agent productivity.
- Backlog volumes were reduced by 36%.
Beyond Customer Service
The customer journey is ultimately about people, and that also means the agents who are engaging with the customers.
Generative AI can also bring significant value to the CX sector when it comes to the recruitment process, enhancing agent selection, hiring, and training.
The technology is capable of identifying candidates who best align with the company’s ethos and demands through a sophisticated analysis of aptitude and compatibility.
For example, through using Generative AI-powered tools, prospective agents can engage with the recruiting platform in realistic service simulations during the interview/training phases. This allows them to demonstrate their problem-solving and empathetic skills in real-world scenarios.
The most important lesson was that AI is no substitute for human agents. It's a partner, not a replacement.
This approach not only anticipates the practical challenges candidates will face but also significantly reduces turnover and refines the recruitment process. Here are several additional advantages.
- Enhanced efficiency and improvement in service level agreement (SLA) fulfillment.
- Immediate, comprehensive feedback facilitates informed decision-making.
- The capacity for mass interactions, allowing simultaneous candidate evaluations.
- Advanced data analytics for identifying trends, behaviors, and potential.
- A reduction in bias, offering a more objective basis for candidate selection.
- Personalized training based on AI-driven prompting and tuning.
We learned a lot in our long journey of introducing AI into our processes. The most important lesson was that AI is no substitute for human agents. It’s a partner, not a replacement. We also learned there is always room for improvement, both on the technical side and the human side.
Moving forward, it’s important for the industry to seek a balance between the experience of employees and end-users. This is done through constant improvements in how we use AI, continually working with our customers to implement AI in their own CX processes.
AI is a long journey. First companies can use it for business insights to improve current services, then to support their customer-facing agents to boost their capabilities and skills to be more efficient, and eventually as a front-end to customers.
In this way, the strategic integration of AI is not only optimizing the CX, but also profoundly transforming the way businesses operate and evolve in an increasingly digitized marketplace.