When most people hear AI, they think tech, not humans. And that’s the first (and biggest) misstep most companies make in their AI strategy. Even in today’s technology-fueled, digitally saturated AI era, humans are the heart of CX.
AI can enhance the capabilities of your agents and customers, helping them do more, better and faster. But only if you build your AI strategy around people, not tech.
Forrester's Ground your workforce AI strategy in human experience report found the most successful AI initiatives begin with employees: building trust, enabling behavioral change, reducing burnout, and creating confidence. Piece of cake, right?
We’ve all lived through enough digital transformation initiatives to know that solid implementation, change management, and successful adoption take deliberate planning and effort. Here are four key ways to design AI that “just gets it,” working alongside your employees to make every customer interaction a NiCE one.
1. Understand what employees need, instantly
Picture this: You hire someone to help you around the house. They’re there to lighten your load and make your homelife easier so you have more time to focus on what really matters---your dog. Or maybe your family. Either way, they’re there to help.
However, instead of taking things off your plate, they just follow you around, watching you do the dishes and fold the laundry. If you want them to do anything, you have to proactively ask and show them, or even worse, sometimes you have to go look for them.
That’s what AI that doesn’t understand your employees feels like. It gets in their way, makes their processes longer, and feels “not worth it.” What was intended to help actually hinders, throwing your goals for ROI and adoption out the window.
AI should feel less like a machine (or housekeeper who misses the mark) and more like a teammate who listens, knows what you need, and does it. It should feel natural and trustworthy. Enter a human-centered approach. Research shows
64% of customers believe having people involved and/or available within AI processes would improve their customer experience.
Here are some examples of what this looks like in action by role.
- Agents: Empower agents with next-best statements and contextual knowledge during their customer interactions. AI can give agents the right response right when they need it because it’s trained to understand the situation at hand. This guidance cuts the time spent searching and helps them resolve issues more quickly
- Supervisors: Proactively alert supervisors of potential problems, whether it’s customer frustration, a struggling agent, or an urgent business need. Human-centered AI understands where supervisors need to focus, provides the context of why it matters, and tells them how to fix it.
- Leaders: Help leaders see the big picture instantly. AI can turn complex data into clear actions, notify leaders of potential issues before they grow, and propose fixes.
When AI understands your employees’ intents, needs, and goals, it removes friction, builds trust, and helps teams focus on what matters most.
2. Fix problems before being asked
CX is the business of fixing problems, big and small. But all those problems can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and burned out. AI can lessen the load. Predictive AI can anticipate issues, and AI-powered agents can proactively solve problems before employees even raise their hands. For example,
CXone Mpower Agents can apply real-time reasoning, using your business data and process intelligence, to trigger actions, update records, and resolve issues automatically across front- and back-office workflows.
Let’s use a
banking scenario to illustrate. AI detects some unusual behavior on Sarah Brown’s credit card and proactively sends her an SMS message to confirm the purchase. Sarah responds she didn’t make that purchase, at which point she’s prompted to connect with a live agent, Juan. Juan has full context of the situation, and his
AI copilot guides him through the interaction with Sarah.
Instead of Juan having to access multiple systems to issue Sarah a temporary credit card, an AI agent proactively completes the process before he even asks. It issues both a new physical card and a digital card, and Juan just has to confirm the mailing address with Sarah. After the interaction, AI also creates an
automated summary of the interaction for future context and reference (again, without Juan asking.) This makes the process smoother for Sarah and eliminates a rote process for Juan, freeing him to focus on relationship building and empathy with the customer.
When you use AI to fix problems before employees even ask, you create a supportive, burnout-free environment that feels calm, connected, and human-first.
3. Put the spotlight on your team
At the end of the day, we all just want to feel seen. Too often, however, customer interactions focus more on processes and issues rather than the people involved. Most of us have vented to a customer service agent about something at some point: how many times we’ve tried to get this issue fixed, how long we were on hold, how this current issue is an unwelcome inconvenience, etc. We know it’s not the agents’ fault, but we have to get it off our chests.
That’s because sometimes it’s less about the solution and more about having someone acknowledge and validate your feelings. But agents can’t demonstrate genuine personal connections when they’re juggling screens, fumbling through processes, and listening with one ear. It’s the equivalent of someone looking at their phone while you tell them a story. They’re nodding along, “Uh huh, uh huh, yeah,” but their eyes never leave the screen. You feel like screaming, “Are you even listening?!”
AI helps agents be present during interactions to show the genuine personal connections that customers crave. Moreover, when you use
AI-powered self-service and
proactive engagement to handle simpler interactions, you can decrease the total volume of inbound contacts for human agents. This shifts the relentless pace of back to back calls in the contact center, giving agents time for a breath, reducing overall agent stress, which helps customers get the best service on each interaction.
When AI takes care of transactional interactions, employees have more bandwidth for creativity, and high-value conversations. These are the moments where humans shine brightest.
4. Keep improving, continuously
Exceptional CX has always been a moving target because customers’ wants, needs, and behaviors never. stop. changing. Then, once you add in the pace of technology innovation, CX leaders can’t afford to hit the pause button on improvement (ever). Though that sounds daunting and exhausting, the good news is that AI can help you continuously keep pace.
Human-centered AI has a compounding effect via feedback loops. The more people use it and provide feedback, the more the AI learns from them. The better the AI gets, the more it supports them---and so the process continues. But this flywheel relies on businesses using AI. That’s where the AI design process, establishing trust, and building digital skills comes into play.
A recent
McKinsey & Company report highlights the importance of adopting “human-centric development practices such as design-thinking and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).” Doing so will help ensure your AI tools and use cases bring value to the business at all levels.
Learn from our Chief NiCEness Officer
Great AI isn’t cold or robotic. It’s warm, human-centered, and effortlessly helpful. And nobody embodies that better than our
Chief NiCEness Officer, Kristen Bell. Her video series showcases how human-centered AI acts like a teammate, making life NiCEr for your whole organization.
A NiCE world ahead
When AI is built around the human experience, it transforms the way we work, and it just works better. In a NiCE world, every experience feels human, every interaction creates value, and every customer journey is seamless, smart, and personal. The power of AI is in its ability to proactively turn knowledge into action, fuse automation and human connections, and deliver impactful experiences.
That’s the NiCEness factor: service that anticipates, assists, and amplifies people at every moment.
Watch this webinar to start putting people at the center of your AI strategy.
