On a quest to revamp their customer service expertise, U.S. enterprises are embracing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and cloud technologies, a new report shows.
Let’s review.
The report comes to us from Information Services Group (ISG). With 1,600 digital-ready professionals operating in more than 20 countries and 900 clients, ISG (as a global tech research and advisory firm) studies rapidly changing industries and helps clients realize operational excellence and the value of digital investments at scale. That’s why this ISG report, in turn, proves valuable.
The “2023 ISG Provider Lens Contact Center – Customer Experience Services report” for the U.S., specifically, finds that companies have a renewed and sharpened focus: CXs, or customer experiences, and how they’re as vital for growth as they are for competitive differentiators. To improve CX capabilities, some companies are producing a breadth of positive outcomes through generative AI and other forms of business automation, plus cloud migration strategies and advanced analytics tools.
The report’s top takeaways:
- Cloud-based contact center operations (and cloud migration experts, as well) will thrive over the next decade. The U.S., in particular (which, per ISG, is “leading the world in cloud migration”), has also made AI mainstream. It’s becoming the real, standard part of customer experience toolkits that analysts predicted it would.
- ISG notes that chatbots and smart virtual assistants are commonplace, but many other enterprise-grade AI are being utilized as useful, transparently trained, and well-controlled tools. This is happening more in the U.S. than in Europe thus far, ISG reports, as European organizations (i.e. not all, but plenty) are less enthused about AI, given mass privacy concerns and other potential long-term risks.
- Analytics tools, as mentioned, are playing a growing role in CX optimization and contact center modernization in the U.S. These tools can integrate data from multiple sources to provide CX agents as much immediate insight as possible so they can gauge customers’ query specifics, past interaction logs, general moods, and additional patterns and factors before and during a call. (AI often upgrades these tools, too.)
- Customer care across multiple channels is a necessity; operations are essentially non-starters without recognition of consumers’ impressions from one channel to the next. This includes social media, chatrooms, company websites, and even the types of websites created mainly to impugn a company, according to ISG.
Two quotes from the ISG sum these takeaways up quite well:
“To modernize contact centers, enterprises need to bring a wide range of technologies to bear,” said Wayne Butterfield, ISG Partner, Digital Solutions. “Contact centers are the perfect place for AI-enabled technologies to add real incremental value. And beyond efficiencies, these technologies deliver deeper levels of understanding of customers’ wants, and real-time views of what is happening in your contact center operation.”
“Customers today expect more than to have their queries resolved,” said Jan Erik Aase, Partner and Global Leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “They want holistic experiences across all their contacts with the company, and service providers are really making that possible.”
Read more here.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
