“When it comes to customer experience (CX) predictions, there’s an elephant in the room that’s dominating our thinking this year: money. Why? Because proving that CX delivers business results has turned into a career-defining issue for people who work in this (still very new) field,” said Harley Manning, vice president, research director, Forrester.
If you speak to a CEO or a CFO these days – every initiative boils down to revenue. However we sugar coat it – you can call it customer-centricity, digital transformation, process automation – every investment by a CEO or CFO boils down to “what is the revenue we can expect from this investment.”
And this is natural. Except for governments and NGOs, the role of businesses is to generate revenue.
Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, lead analyst at Forrester, said it: “Good customer experience is good for business. It’s not a feel-good thing. Experience-driven businesses are achieving higher revenue, higher retention, higher customer lifetime value, higher employee satisfaction. There is a tremendous ROI investing in customer experience. There is no endless supply of customers for any company. If you don’t provide the right experiences, you’re not going to acquire. retain those customers.”
FutureCIO spoke to Ravi Saraogi, co-founder and president of Uniphore APAC, to understand how conversational AI is influencing the future of customer experience through the contact centre.
Conversational what?
You know the technology by many names: Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant to name a few. These are applications that use conversational AI to execute commands. A more generic name you see is the chatbot you interact with when you log-in to your online retailer or bank, or when you call the customer service number of your mobile operator.
Saraogi defined conversational AI as “a process of enabling machines to have a conversation with the customers, with the end customers and human beings, and the machine should be capable enough.”
He further goes on to say that conversational AI is technology that would automate conversations between human to machine to human. During the part of the human-to-human conversational, the AI not only provides support during the human-assisted conversations, but also executes those transactions on the back end.
Saraogi made it clear that in most virtual customer engagements, over the phone or via app or website, technology is used to automate many of the pieces of the conversational – be in the lodging a complaint or inquiry or trying to resolve a customer problem.
“About 90% of conversations happen over voice medium with the contact centre taking those conversations. AI takes over conversations that are simple, such as balance inquiry, order delivery follow-up, or even how to use a product. The AI is smart enough to redirect a call to a human agent for more complex transaction,” he added.
Adding AI in the engagement
Businesses that are serious about good customer service will have deployed an intelligent voice response system. They are also likely to have a call centre setup either in-house or outsourced to a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm.
Saraogi is adamant that adding a conversational AI solution should not (a) break the bank; (b) should not disrupt the existing system; and (c) should not involve replacing any of the existing system.
“It should run on top of the existing infrastructure interacting via application programming interface (API) call. The change will come in the form of a more intelligent routing of higher-types of customer engagements to the humans in a contact centre,” he said.
The hold-up in conversational AI adoption
Saraogi acknowledged new customers often want to see a proof-of-concept before agreeing to take the discussion to the next level. “There is also this lingering perception that a chatbot is conversational AI, and vice-versa. Basically, you need to walk them through the different mediums of communication – chatbots, emails, messenger, contact centre – to explain each’s role in the customer conversation,” he continued.
It is about figuring out impact of each of these technologies to their overall reach in terms of customer experience. He conceded that challenges remain. In Asia, he alluded to other issues like language and culture, and the fear of investing in technologies that will be outdated in six months.
Conversational AI according to the CEO
According to Saraogi the CEO is typically focused largely towards two or three business areas. One of course is the revenue and overall business growth, which basically links to profitability. That’s number one.
Number two, CEOs are clearly concerned about the security operations and the security of data. In these days, with the advent of all new regulations around GDPR, this is only further increased.
The third of course is the growing base of customers – are the customers growing, which leads to more revenue, are we optimized enough in our operations and optimize enough in our investments, so that the profitability constantly increases, are my customers data safe enough.
And if it is ticking all three boxes, then that leads to the CEO making a decision for sure.
“So it creates business impact, it keeps information secured. It certainly impacts the profitability, and most of the large enterprises that we’re talking to are all listed organizations. If they have an impact on revenue and profitability that obviously has a large impact on the overall shareholders and that’s what the CEO will be mostly concerned about,” he explained.
Conversational AI according to the CFO
To the CFO, it’s the same first two as the CEO. The third is profitability, how this is going to impact overall profit after tax. And that basically also is a factor of how effective the billing model is of the product – can it be linked to regular operations in if it is, then for every penny being invested, how much return are you making.
“The cost benefit analysis certainly has a lot of impact for the CFOs. We have always done that because end of the day, the CFO needs to know for every money spent, how much return are they going to get back,” he added.
Conversational AI according to the CIO
The CIO is mostly interested in security, including how it impacts existing infrastructure. The CIO is also interested in how much impact conversational AI will have in terms of efficiency and overall infrastructure.
“The third critical factor for them is overall data risk and security around data,” said Saraogi.
