Is Your CX Program Ready for AI?
Artificial Intelligence for customer support is evolving rapidly and finally delivering on its promise of creating digital interactions that don’t just save companies money, but also create effortless customer experiences. Companies like Klarna, who reported they replaced 700 agents with an AI chatbot, are seeing great success leveraging these advancements. As a result, your executives are probably asking you to launch your own AI for CX. It might be tempting to immediately start evaluating vendors, but there are important preparations your organization should undertake to get the most out of your AI for CX strategy. In this article I cover the top areas that need your attention before embarking on an AI implementation and unlocking the power of this technology.
Take my NextGen CX Readiness Assessment to see where your program StANDS.
1. Deeply Understand Your Customers' Needs
Even in the age of AI, the foundation of your customer experience program is the Voice of the Customer. It's important to have a deep understanding of your customers' common questions, pain points, and feedback. This will allow you to design and build source content and AI journeys that address their needs and answer their questions effectively. This involves:
Consolidating VoC Inputs: Gather explicit feedback through surveys, social media, focus groups, and interviews. Then combine it with implicit sources of feedback like support interactions and sales conversations. Seek to have all sources consolidated into one system like Enterpret. Even a spreadsheet is good enough if your feedback volume isn’t very high. The important thing is consolidation.
Taxonomy and Tagging: Develop a comprehensive taxonomy and tag feedback to categorize and understand customer issues better. Tools like Enterpret can automate this tagging process using AI to identify patterns and categorize feedback accurately. For more details on how to build a Customer Experience Taxonomy, click here.
Review Often: Review your customer feedback often, at least once a month to understand changes in trends. New expectations and pain points can emerge quickly, so staying on top of what your customers are telling you is very important.
Build a CX Taxonomy and ensure both implicit and explicit sources of feedback are organized and analyzed. Identify the top issues that AI can handle.
2. Create High-Quality Content
AI solutions rely heavily on high-quality content to train and provide accurate responses. Without this, your AI's effectiveness and the success of your implementation will be limited. After understanding your customers’ most common questions and needs, ensure you have:
Help Center Articles: Comprehensive and easy-to-understand articles addressing common questions. Make sure you also have processes in place to handle those common issues. This will be the backbone of your AI implementation.
Videos and Tutorials: Engaging visual content that can help customers resolve issues independently.
Internal Knowledge: Even internal knowledge can be leveraged by AI to provide answers and guidance to customers. Guardrails can be added to make sure sensitive or private information isn’t given out.
Take action: Audit your current content and identify gaps. Prioritize creating and updating content to address the most frequent customer needs. If you haven’t already, make sure you’ve hired a Content Guru.
3. Empower Your CX Agents
As AI handles routine questions and reduces the inquiries that come to your support team, your CX agents will need to focus on fewer, more complex issues and providing more high-leverage help. This shift requires:
Advanced Training: Ensure agents are trained in problem-solving, communication, and handling high-touch interactions. Read about the NextGen skills your agents will need here.
AI Collaboration: Train agents to use internal AI tools effectively, including writing prompts and adjusting AI-generated responses. AI won’t only be used by your customers. Internal AI bots will be utilized more and more to craft responses and take actions. Agents who can comfortably work with AI tools will thrive in the future.
Take Action: Develop training programs focused on advanced customer service skills and AI collaboration techniques. Launching AI internally can also be a good way to test it before exposing it directly to your customers.
4. Cultivate the Right Culture
Your company’s culture plays a critical role in the successful implementation of AI in your CX program. Related to the point above, your customers won’t tolerate robotic or frustrating interactions with agents after they’ve had smooth AI experiences. Along with equipping your teams with the skills needed to thrive, you also need to create the right environment for them. Key cultural elements include:
Empowerment: Ensure agents are empowered to resolve issues creatively and decisively with access to tools and information they need to get the job done.
Encouragement: Foster a culture that encourages agents to go above and beyond in customer interactions. Reward creative solutions, highlight when agents do it right, and coach agents on the skills that will enable it.
Take Action: Assess your company culture and policies to ensure they support agent empowerment and creative problem-solving.
5. Ensure System Integration
AI solutions must integrate seamlessly with your existing support and business systems to understand customers and take action on their behalf. Consider:
Current Support System: Evaluate whether your current support system has built-in AI capabilities or can integrate well with third-party AI chatbots. Popular options like Zendesk have a built-in AI solution and integrate well with third-party options.
Compatibility: Ensure that the chosen AI solution is compatible with your existing tools and platforms.
Business Data & Tool Integration: Autonomous AI agents should be integrated with databases and systems that allow them to consume information about the customer and take action on their behalf. Without this, your AI will be limited to only summarizing and explaining content.
Take Action: Conduct a technical and data assessment of your support systems and identify any integration requirements or potential issues.
6. Be Ready to Design
AI experiences are simply another digital experience. CX programs have in the past under-invested in the resources to build digital experiences right. We’re now seeing companies hiring product managers, researchers, and designers focused on building these digital support services, including AI experience. Have a strategy to:
Conduct Customer Research: This might be a new skill for many CX programs who don’t often do targeted customer research about customer support preferences and usability.
Include Design Sprints: This tool has been used for years by companies to build great product experience, but is rarely used in customer support. With the move to digital-first support, this should change.
Design Journeys: An AI can answer questions and provide information as long as the source content is accurate, but to truly resolve issues effortlessly, those journeys should be deliberately designed. Use journey mapping and human-centered design principles to build experiences that will exceed customer expectations.
Take Action: Build the design skills of your CX team or hire people who can add this expertise. I’m here to help.
Conclusion
Implementing CX AI for your customer support, customer success, and customer engagement can significantly enhance satisfaction and operational efficiency. However, proper preparation is critical. By understanding your customers' needs, developing quality content, equipping your agents, fostering the right culture, ensuring system integration, and designing journeys, you can set the stage for a successful AI-driven CX transformation.
