If you’re still hungry for generative AI use cases, look no further than customer experience (CX) to be one of the largest potential applications set to impact current business models, operational norms & workforces for enterprises. The full impact of which was on full display at NICE’s recent “Interactions: CX In The City” customer event in New York City earlier this month.
For a firm at the cutting edge of CX transformation for a number of years now and with ChatGPT hype at perhaps its highest point to date, it’s no surprise that AI would be part of the conversation, to display the “art of the possible”, attract an audience of clients and prospects to their first in-person conference since 2019, and to generate some excitement.
And the room was indeed buzzing. Maybe it was the excitement of AI’s possibilities; maybe the anxious energy of 2,500+ people who haven’t attended an in-person conference in 3+ years; or just the raw anticipation for the entertainment-packed special effects, a CEO coming out to “New York New York” while throwing merchandise to attendees and performances from Broadway, Grammy-winning musical artist Train and a keynote by Sarah Jessica Parker.
Whatever the reason, one thing was clear: AI was at the center of their go-forward strategy, along with recommendations around accelerating cloud adoption and “starting over your digital transformation plans”, as per NICE’s CEO Barak Eilam in his opening session. Because, says Eilam, “Digital CX as deployed in the past decade did not live up to its promise. To achieve fluid consumer journeys, there is no such thing as stand-alone digital transformation. It needs to be an inherent part of your overall CX strategy. This is now coupled with AI which supercharges digital, serving as the natural mediator to the digital world.”
AI for real-time analytics, management/training and next-best-action are just the beginning. AI acting as an agent’s co-pilot, augmenting their workload and automating low-value/high-frequency tasks and interactions is already available in the short-term. And with the promise of improving customer satisfaction levels, loyalty, and generating new revenue opportunities, may for the first time generate a positive ROI for technology investments.
But in a world where brand loyalty is waning and commodization is prevalent, does AI really help? “Yes”, says NICE’s President of the CX Division Barry Cooper, by better “embedding” with customers via asynchronous communication and customer service. “Once CX goes beyond the traditional capturing service and is used in all aspects of ordering, changes and the full life cycle of the customer, CX becomes a conduit to bring other things in, like other products or upsells as well,” says Cooper.
NICE, through a combination of innovation and acquisitions, have the benefit of huge amounts of contact center and customer data organized by client policies and parameters, and a head start on use of tagging data, large language models and machine learning. That, along with recent advances in generative AI and the benefits of better interfaces, seem poised to accelerate CX innovation. “For us, digital is a platform that can handle all channel interactions that can be measured, reported on, leveraged by AI, and where any kind of automation can be done on top of it. From the furthest point that you could connect with somebody or a proactive notification, all the way to a pure chat, all on one platform,” says John Willcutts, General Manager of Digital at NICE. “And AI for us is outcomes, not inputs. We're an outcome-based provider, and that is agent performance and automation.”
The 800-pound gorilla in the room though is the same here as everywhere else where people are talking about ChatGPT and the like: Will jobs go away? Not anytime soon, according to Willcutts. “AI is making a huge difference to the work that humans do. Even with good metadata and good modeling, there are still complex interactions and right now, I’m not convinced that agents can go away.” The bigger issue, he says, is getting agents to show up to work. Turnover’s huge. And the jobs in this space aren’t always desirable. “Today there’s a huge amount of work that’s not getting done, which is why we’re excited about this platform. “
Large organizations, however, are still overwhelmingly doing things the old way as it relates to contact center, continue to see it as a cost center, and are often just throwing bodies at it, instead of investing in innovative technology. “It's the last resort and what happens when you don't have a strategy and you're reacting to every situation,” says Cooper. And because the industry has evolved over time with various 1-off platforms around chat, self-service, bots, website etc., the agent is trying to navigate a “franken-stack” as he calls it, with 20 different systems and very siloed data. “This is the basis for our vision that now is the time to replace your current stack with a single solution where all the data is in one place, along with all the agent applications and self-service tools. And you make all of that work with AI,” Cooper added. “The contact center is moving to a more highly skilled set of business processes that don’t start and stop in that one interaction.”
And for those of you who have not yet embraced cloud, you’re behind. Some estimates are that 70% of large enterprises, including big banks, insurance companies and healthcare firms, will have moved to the cloud within the next 2-3 years. And if you’re not, you’re at a disadvantage, as those on platforms like NICE benefit from the ongoing innovation and dozens of free updates that are built in every year. According to Willcutts, firms that are still on-prem will be progressively less sustainable because they're going to lose pieces of their stack that they won’t be able to support and have renewals that are going to be prohibitively expensive.
As Barak Eilam said at the opening of the event, “organizations who learn to successfully ride the right technology wave at the right time, become victorious and the new leaders of their respective industries… If you’re not part of the steam roller, you’re part of the road.”
Originally posted in the IRPA AI Network — CX Transformation