Customer expectations and regulations have changed significantly since Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrase “The customer is always right” more than 100 years ago. In this continually changing environment, where companies are increasingly competing on service, contact centers can no longer handle complaints manually—to do so risks fines, reputational damage, lost customers, a missed opportunity to drive product and service improvements, and more.
With many organizations today required to identify, classify, report and remediate all complaints, a growing number of companies are moving beyond traditional complaint management and tracking processes and procedures toward more efficient, proactive complaint management driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics technology.
“To fix a problem, you need to understand it,” Mohamed Zaki, Janet R. McColl-Kennedy and Andy Neely wrote in Harvard Business Review. “When it comes to customer experience, companies can use AI-produced insights to glean not only where there are problems, but also what’s causing them.”
While AI has become pervasive across business functions—just about 86% of business leaders said last year that AI was becoming a “mainstream technology” at their company, according to a study by PwC—it holds particular promise for complaint management. AI is increasingly enabling enterprises to gain a holistic view of complaints, which allows them to not only comply with external regulators but also understand the impact of complaints on your organization. Doing so requires organizations to be able to:
- Identify: Consistently and accurate identify, classify and report on complaint risk for every interaction.
AI is enabling organizations to eliminate manual and subjective complaint capture. Automated complaint management powered by AI allows you to automatically identify and classify complaints across 100% of volume on all channels. You can classify complaint reason, escalations and sentiment to ascertain risk. These insights enable your organization to monitor trends by volume, type, location and more, while advanced reporting and dashboards make it easy to document for regulators your complaint management processes.
- Remediate: Automate remediation workflows by complaint type and track resolution.
AI allows you to auto-identify and act on gaps in complaint handling—whether it be complaints that haven’t been properly recorded or ones that should be prioritized—so you can immediately address high-risk and/or sensitive complaints. You can automate remediation with flexible workflows, including the ability to automatically assign reviews, helping you more effectively and efficiently track and report how complaints are resolved.
- Prevent: Reduce future complaints by diagnosing the root cause, prioritizing mitigation actions and tracking progress.
AI can help you understand complaint drivers that negatively impact the business—and in the process, turn customer complaints into an opportunity to strengthen CX. It gives you the ability to perform root cause analysis on centralized analytics datasets, identify broken processes and reduce employee variability. At the same time, proactive analytics help you safeguard your brand reputation with capabilities that include automatic correlation of negative topics and trends across all channels as well as early-warning systems that flag emerging or recurrent issues.
Realize real-word results with AI-driven complaint management
Organizations are already realizing the benefits of AI for complaint management, including the ability to:
- Deliver exceptional experiences: An average 33% increase in customer sentiment.
- Reduce regulatory risk: An average 25% improvement in escalation procedures.
- Improve operational efficiencies: A 15% reduction in manual analysis, tracking and reporting.
- Reduce agent performance variability: The ability to coach agents to de-escalate complaints and improve performance.
- Prevent customer churn: A 10% reduction in cancellations.
Learn more about how AI is helping leading enterprises streamline complaint management with the 360-degree approach offered by Enlighten AI for Complaint Management.
