Capture AI momentum in 2024: Top CX trends – part 2

In many ways, the rapid pace of innovation in customer experience is confirming how essential it is for businesses to follow the fundamentals of CX.

Businesses face a crossroads in 2024: pursue new AI innovation that can streamline operations and prioritize excellent customer experience—or wait to implement technology and lose momentum in the race to differentiate themselves from competitors.

We asked NICE experts to weigh in on the leading trends in customer experience to help organizations prepare for the year ahead. Each of them brought insights on digital, AI, analytics, workforce engagement, and voice of the customer. This is the second part of a Q&A that encompasses key insights and priorities for businesses planning for success in 2024.

What should companies prioritize in 2024 to improve operations and efficiency? 

Elizabeth Tobey: AI certainly cannot solve all problems, but the technology has improved significantly so that accessibility and targeted, effective implementation is a reality that can immediately improve operations. Organizations need to continue to be agile and responsive to business needs to make an impact quickly.

AI is the best tool available right now to immediately improve operations and efficiency, but understanding the outcomes you want to achieve with these technologies and grounding them in measurable KPIs, will be necessary to choose the right solutions and integrate them into your organization in a way that does not further complicate or fracture workflows and your tech stack.

Organizations have to understand how they will measure successes to ensure they don’t purchase a solution that sounded great as a sales pitch but doesn't actually have the CX expertise necessary to execute as they need it to.  

Brian Mistretta: Automation will be king in 2024, as it has the capabilities to eliminate mundane tasks or repeat transactional engagements, such as resetting a password, making or confirming an appointment or checking a balance, that simply should not require a human agent anymore. 

Consider the amount of time organizations are spending solving things that could be automated, or could be pushed into self-service. CX leaders already know that self-service can deliver meaningful CX that customers crave and want. This is a perfectly aligned opportunity where implementing meaningful self-service can improve CX, reduce agent effort (allowing them to focus on more complex tasks) and lower costs.

Brooke Phillips: Companies should prioritize identifying the internal manual processes that are costing them time as well as money. Note-taking is a prime example of a necessary process that has traditionally been performed by agents manually typing, or even handwriting notes for every customer interaction or call. Agents typically compose notes during a call—by placing the customer on hold, therefore likely decreasing CSAT while increasing AHT. Or they write their notes after the call, therefore increasing their after-call-work (ACW). Furthermore, these manually captured notes are often not accurate, difficult to understand and inconsistently performed. On average, the yearly cost of manual note-taking for a contact center with 1,000 agents who perform 60 seconds of ACW is $14 million. This is an outmoded, yet important, part of agent responsibility that directly impacts CX and is ripe for improvement.

Automated summaries deliver reliable, accurate data-driven narratives that include intents, actions, outcomes and sentiment on every interaction by using an extensive array of purpose-built, industry-specific AI for CX models and generative AI technology. Automated summaries save valuable time for the agent and frees them to focus on delivering personalized service to the customer at hand. Further, if that same customer calls back and gets a different agent, they are practically guaranteed seamless CX because that new agent will have access to clear, detailed notes about what happened in the last interaction.

What significant shifts in workforce (if any) should CX leaders plan for in coming year? 

Dana Shalev: With the heightened levels of complexity and stress contact center employees face and their evolving nature wanting to be more recognized and becoming more tech-savvy, leaders shouldbalance the investment in technology with investment in human employees for a more future-proof approach. Here are a few examples:

1. With digital becoming a mainstream, organizations should invest more in adding best practices into the digital space, such as relevant digital KPIs and attributes for performance and quality plans, training, and coaching tailored for digital interaction's unique needs. Organizations should also be able to forecast and plan accurately for a blended voice and digital environment. By enhancing digital employees and customer experience with the following actions, organizations can deepen workforce performance across the board.
   
2. Identify ways to decrease levels of agent stress largely driven by increased expectations from customers and increasing volumes of customer contacts.  
   
3. Empower employees with AI-powered tools and encourage them to adopt AI, to ease the stress and burden on them without fear that it could take over their jobs.
   
4. Anticipate skills shortages and plan for upskilling and reskilling initiatives to deliver exceptional customer experiences. 
   
5. Manage agents as talents and invest in creating a career roadmap for them to attract high performers.  

Brian Mistretta: The need to care for agents and employees has become paramount for organizations. After all, anyone would argue that you can’t have meaningful customer experience without making meaningful adjustments to agent experience.

Agents are being pulled in many different directions today. They span numerous channels from real-time to asynchronous, are being asked a broader array of questions and need to have the right toolset available to ensure that they can solve customer problems without spending enormous amounts of time and effort. 

As many agents are remote or hybrid-workers, it becomes harder for agents to “swivel their chair” and ask a neighbor how to best solve a certain issue. This puts agent tools, such as intelligent knowledge management at the forefront, in addition AI powered capabilities can help supervisors deliver unintrusive coaching at scale—regardless of where an agent works.

What challenges or barriers in 2024 should operational leaders plan for? 

Heather Hughes: Two challenges that will likely accelerate into 2024 are closely related: exploding complexity and agent burnout.

1. Exploding complexity—The ultimate customer experience happens when each and every interaction is personalized, conversations are in context, and issues are resolved quickly and painlessly. This may seem like a tall order, but it is possible to personalize every experience while acting in real-time on customer intent and sentiment.

   First, look for an interaction-centric cloud platform that eliminates data silos and unifies customer experiences across the continuum. Second, ensure that it converges knowledge, data, channels, and CX capabilities for all types of interactions—voice and digital, attended and unattended, inbound and outbound. Third, see that it infuses purpose-built AI across the platform to predict intent, provide real-time guidance and conversational knowledge, and automate mundane tasks like call summarization for agents.

2. Agent burnout—Agents not having what they need when they need it leads to frustration and burnout, let’s make their lives easier! Next to waiting on hold, customers most dislike having to repeat information. I’m sure agents equally hate having to ask questions that have already been asked and answered. This can be improved with a cloud platform that provides context for agents as consumers move between channels or are transferred to different departments. Serve up info on the customer at start of interaction, and include previous interaction summarization: intents, actions, outcome and sentiment.

   For this, take advantage of generative AI combined with purpose-built AI models. Further, agents are frustrated because they spend at least 12% of their time looking for information,   according to Aberdeen’s 2023 CX Leaders’ Agenda survey. Provide conversational knowledge for agent assistance, which quickly searches and retrieves relevant data points and re-writes the information using a large language model (LLM) into the context of an optimized agent response. This type of conversational knowledge reduces the agent’s cognitive load while improving their response accuracy. Relevant knowledge is provided in a conversational manner, so that the agent can respond quickly and accurately and continue the conversation.

   Further, use purpose-built AI to derive sentiment in real-time for agent guidance. Guide agents in the moment, help alleviate stress, and get into positive sentiment. Incorporate conversational knowledge, automated contact summarization, and real-time behavioral guidance in an all-in-one solution on one unified desktop to help agents better serve customers, stay on track and ease the agent load. Many technology shortcomings that lead to agent burnout can be overcome.

Michele Carlson: When adopting AI in 2024, operational leaders should plan for potential challenges around data, integration, and change management. The key is taking a strategic approach to AI implementation.

First, ensure you have quality data to train AI. Work to consolidate data sources and invest in a platform that supports interaction complexities, including attended and unattended, digital or voice, and synchronous or asynchronous. Poor data – that’s either incomplete or siloed – will lead to poor performing AI.

Second, plan for integration complexities. Achieving the full benefit of AI requires connecting systems and data flows across the organization. Consider a cloud-native platform to simplify integration points, which enables you and your team to overcome data and system barriers, and instead focus on realizing results.

Third, lead a robust change management effort. Introducing AI changes processes and workflows. Provide training and communication to help employees understand the benefits of AI and be prepared to iterate as you learn what works.

Realizing meaningful adoption requires teams to align across the organization. To build momentum, focus first on high-impact use cases to demonstrate ROI. Also, look for AI solutions purpose-built for your specific business goals. With the right strategy, operational leaders can minimize barriers and transform operations with AI.

Dana Shalev: There are still global economic challenges, creating uncertainty affecting technology investment decisions. Organizations may be falling short in prioritizing CX as a result of prioritizing short-term financial gains over long-term customer relationships—which, in the end deliver better business results.

Leaders will need, more than ever, to navigate changes in the regulation landscape related to AI, digital solutions and data security issues. A CX solution that is trusted and offers unparalleled security and reliability is critical to keeping pace with an industry amid constant innovation.

For brands adopting generative AI technologies, a key challenge will be maintaining the unique brand identity and unique offerings of that specific brand. Adapting quickly and leveraging the technology to achieve tone of voice and language style to stay true to the brand will require sophisticated management of AI so the technology works with you as a valuable “team member.”

Read more insights in the first part of our 2024 CX trends series.