Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, it should be obvious that artificial intelligence is all the rage. Though there are many use cases and industries that AI could affect, customer experience, CX for short, is considered by many to be the low-hanging fruit of AI. However, the potential for AI to enable CX solutions is fraught with high risk and high reward.
Communications provider Mitel Networks Corp. today is rolling out a new artificial intelligence-powered customer experience platform to help businesses optimize customer interactions by integrating with existing communication tools.
Over the past two decades, the contact center industry has promised capabilities that will significantly improve customer experience. This is important because CX is now the top brand differentiator, with many consumers switching loyalties because of a single bad experience. Though it’s true that the contact center providers have delivered new capabilities such as omnichannel communications, self-service tools and more, consumer satisfaction with contact centers remains low.
Customer experience improvement remains a top initiative for business and information technology leaders. The stakes are high in CX. My research has found that 95% of companies now compete on CX and, last year, two-thirds of millennials admitted to switching brands because of a single bad experience. Contact centers and the customer experience professionals who staff them are the unsung heroes of many businesses.
Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas this week, has evolved from focusing on hard-core contact centers to a broader customer experience event. This aligns with the contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS providers’ direction, where their products have expanded beyond the traditional agent to other customer-facing roles.