As consumer behavior continues to gravitate online, leading companies see customer experience as an opportunity to scale with technology for future growth. According to a 2022 industry report, companies that do so will increase their sales revenue by up to seven percent. “The future of growth will be experience-led and customer-centered,” the report states.
To create a better type of contact center, Webex, a global leader in collaborative technologies, is taking a new approach: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer deeper, more proactive customer experiences that solve issues before they become larger problems. This new type of contact center won’t just be a problem-solving department. It will be a customer-relationship hub that helps brands with everything from sales and marketing to product development.
“It’s exciting to reimagine the customer experience,” says Lorrissa Horton, the Chief Product Officer at Webex. “As AI becomes more proactive and sees when someone is having an issue, it can reach out to customers before they even need to call a contact center, which results in a happier experience.”
Revolutionizing Customer Experience with the Self-Learning Contact Center
In March, Webex announced the future of customer experience: the Webex Contact Center, which will combine generative AI and machine learning with a software as a service (SaaS) model to offer seamless solutions for businesses. Thanks to its self-learning capabilities, the Webex Contact Center will get better over time as a company uses it more and more, allowing businesses to transform the old-fashioned call center into a powerful customer-experience hub.
One key feature is Topic Analysis, which uses AI’s self-learning abilities to both categorize calls and identify the reasons they were made.
“This enables support centers to get a sense of emerging trends and issues that are affecting their business,” says Horton. “For example, for a travel center, Topic Analysis might notify that a high volume of support calls are originating from a city affected by weather delays, and supervisors can proactively respond in ways that are friendlier to customers.”
It can also be used to help solve many of the basic calls that are currently handled by live agents. By assessing the reason for calls and learning their common solutions—businesses can decide how to best tacke these issues either with human retraining or leaning into a virtual agent solution. Generative AI will be leveraged to quickly create these virtual agent solutions in the Webex Contact Center.
“It can look at an organization’s phones calls and tell them, ‘Here are the most important topics for your customers: here are the ones your agents are able to solve, and here are the ones we can automate,” Horton says.
For example, Topic Analysis may learn that 25 percent of callers are requesting to reset their password. It can then discover that the best way to solve the issue requires five steps, and help create an automated solution to handle those specific customer requests, eliminating a quarter of the calls that would have been directed to a live agent.
To expand its customer-experience features, the Webex Contact Center leverages the company’s long history of working in hybrid-work solutions—particularly its advanced capabilities in audio and video intelligence. For instance, Webex has an AI audio feature that eliminates background noise, which was first developed for video calls. Using it in the Webex Contact Center, human agents can more easily understand callers. The feature also helps to improve transcripts of those calls, because there are no kids or pets in the background. In addition, those computer-generated transcripts rely on closed captioning: a Webex tool first created for hybrid meetings to ensure everyone can participate and understand each other.
All of these features and services are housed within the Webex Contact Center, under one roof, which streamlines all the available communication channels—including email, text, phones, video, and social media. Taken together, this can be a game changer for a company, turning a static call center into a proactive hub that offers better customer relations and personalized experiences through virtual agents, while also reducing wait times.
The Next Progression: Empowering Human Agents to Do More
As customer-experience technology increases its self-learning capabilities, it can also help human agents become more efficient and get better at their jobs.
To aid this development, Webex Contact Center announced availability of the Agent Answers capability. It transcribes a call in real-time, then uses AI to act like an on-screen coach for the human agent, offering solutions they can instantly provide to customers. By having better virtual agents and making human agents more efficient, the Contact Center can transform a business.
For example, one of Webex’s clients is a national retail chain with pharmacies. After looking at its contact-center data, the company realized its pharmacies were missing 70 percent of their calls. The pharmacists were too busy helping people in the store to pick up the phones, even though most of the calls were simply customers checking on a prescription. Using Webex Contact Center, however, the store was able to reduce its incoming calls by 40 percent because the virtual agent could resolve the issue before it got routed to the store. This left pharmacists with more time to help customers and reduced call volumes to the contact center, allowing live agents to tackle the more challenging calls quickly.
“Not only did you make the user experience personalized and desirable in the online contact center,” says Horton, “it made the customer experience better across the board. It’s a perfect example of the kind of change and impact that we can make.”
Customer Experience Guides the Future
Going forward, human agents at contact centers will play expanding roles. They will need to be excellent communicators, and also have analytical problem-solving skills, strong project-management abilities, and even technical training. That’s because only the most unique requests will need to be addressed by a person. “It will be a problem that only happens in these small numbers of cases and it will require working across systems and tools to make the customer happy,” says Horton. “You’re probably going to have a contact center agent go from a task-based worker to a knowledge worker.”
Ultimately, contact centers will likely be staffed by many of the people who know the business best in order to offer the top customer experience. All of the basic or repetitive calls or questions—if there are any calls at all—will be handled by virtual agents.
Of course, as AI improves to the point where it can preemptively address a customer’s question or concerns, businesses must understand—and be able to share—how these new capabilities are also protecting data. Consumer trust is a top priority for brands, and given the pace of innovation in customer experience, trust and data protection need to remain strong.
“Key to building brand loyalty is building trust,” says Horton. “In our 2022 survey, 39 percent of consumers said that companies can build trust by offering data transparency in the way personal data is used and protected.’”
Assuming that trust remains at the center of AI-powered innovations in customer experience, the future looks exciting, with clunky call centers being a thing of the past.
“Depending on the situation, the perfect contact center is the one that I never have to call, because every one of my needs as a customer has been met before I’ve identified a problem,” says Horton. “AI will push us to the point where you just don’t see phones calls or texts at all—problems can be solved automatically—and customers will actually be happier because of that.”
In short, self-learning contact centers will ensure that each customer contact will be a little faster, a lot more useful, and end with happier customers. Reimagine your customer experiences with Webex
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Cisco.
