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Artificial Intelligence is transforming how enterprises everywhere operate, collaborate and connect with their customers. This is particularly evident for customer service, where domain-specific AI for the contact center is enabling organizations to deliver consistently positive, personalized experiences at scale. New developments, like generative AI for contact centers, unlock a host of new capabilities, augmenting agent skills with data-driven intelligence and helping companies understand their customers like never before.
Let’s take a closer look at how this new breed of enterprise AI, specifically generative AI in customer service use cases, is acting as a catalyst for transforming the contact center space and helping enterprises solve their biggest customer-related challenges enterprise-wide.
Tackling customer turnover
Among the strongest cases for deploying enterprise AI in contact centers is its ability to minimize customer turnover and its potential to pull more value from existing customers. As we discussed in an earlier article, bringing in a new customer can be between five and 25 times more expensive than growing an existing one. What’s more, existing customers often spend more than new customers. By deploying AI in customer service use cases, organizations can quickly adapt to shifting customer trends and behaviors—including improved digital experiences and heightened demands and expectations of contact center agents.
Human-augmented AI for customer service
Human representatives, or agents, are the backbone of customer service operations. While the use of self-service AI (such as chatbots) in customer service has grown exponentially in recent years, research by McKinsey shows that a significant number of customers still prefer the personal touch of live phone interactions. That includes Gen Z (71%), Millennials (81%), Gen X (86%) and Baby Boomers (94%). While improving digital containment remains a chief business goal, enterprises struggle to deliver a personalized experience that rivals that of real people.
As a result, a major focus of AI in contact centers remains on the agent side. AI-powered agent assist software can accelerate onboarding, boost agent performance and improve resolution rates and, consequently, customer satisfaction. Acting as an in-call copilot, programs like U-Assist by Uniphore guide agents through live interactions with next-gen capabilities like next-best action prompts and automated notetaking, augmenting human skills with the power of AI. Enterprises deploying agent-assisted AI for customer service have reported double-digit improvements in error rate reduction (80%), agent onboarding time (50%), average handle time (35%) and first contact resolution (20%).
How AI is changing the future of customer service
The Generative AI Era has ushered in a wealth of new capabilities and applications of AI in customer service. These include exciting new features—and future possibilities—for contact center self-service, agent guidance and more.
Generative AI for self-service
With its ability to create novel, natural-sounding content, generative AI is quickly transforming the self-service experience. Chatbots and virtual assistants can now respond in even more human-like ways, learning and adapting from each interaction. As a result, enterprises deploying generative AI in customer service self-service applications are creating an elevated experience capable of solving increasingly complex customer issues.
Generative AI for agent guidance
Enterprises are also turning to generative AI for next-level agent guidance during live customer interactions. Generative AI-powered agent assist software provides agents with a real-time AI copilot, augmenting their skills with enhanced capabilities like intelligent knowledge searching, generative next-best action prompts and data-driven customer insights to help them deliver a more personal touch.
Unifying AI in customer service under one roof
One of the biggest changes brought on by generative AI is the realization that enterprises need a comprehensive, unified platform that connects all their AI, data and knowledge needs. As a result, organizations are turning to enterprise AI platforms that can ingest, analyze and connect data from multiple sources in various formats (i.e., multimodal) from every corner of the organization. This unified approach is revolutionizing AI in customer service, arming contact centers with the sum of enterprise knowledge. Enterprises can now create hyper-personalized customer experiences, highly tailored agent training and next-generation customer service applications that are exponentially more effective than anything before.
How Uniphore can help
Uniphore’s comprehensive multimodal AI and data platform offers enterprises undergoing AI transformation a proven foundation for successfully building, testing and deploying AI in customer service applications. And, in the Generative AI Era, that foundation is critical.
Research shows that only about 5% of generative AI deployments are delivering notable financial returns, with 28% of decision-makers struggling to integrate the technology effectively. Uniphore’s platform is built to seamlessly integrate AI throughout the enterprise. Featuring a four-layer architecture—which includes data lake storage, data-to-AI-ready-knowledge, flexible AI modeling and AI-native applications—the platform enables enterprises to start driving ROI from day one while providing the flexibility to adapt and scale AI applications as the technology evolves.
At the customer service level, that translates to significantly better outcomes. For example, a major telecom reduced agent call volumes by 50% by integrating our platform-based generative AI in customer service (vs. using a standalone AI chatbot). And they’re not alone. By incorporating AI into core processes, emphasizing user experience and real business outcomes, organizations everywhere can realize the full potential and long-term sustainability of AI in customer service—and throughout the entire enterprise.
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