An AI Customer Journey Initiative Requires Some Soul Searching

Voice-activated devices like Alexa, Cortana and Google Voice are ubiquitous. It’s not surprising to see kids engaging in conversations with these devices for hours. And those kids are your future customers; they’ll open bank accounts, shop online and make travel plans. Using a voicebot or chatbot to find the answer to a question will be second nature to them. And will take precedence over looking on a website or app for that answer. The power of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as advances in speech and context recognition, demonstrate the promise to deliver the customer experience to the next generation.

The Genesys Self-Service Automation Team includes experts who’ve been a part of the evolution of the customer experience industry for more than 20 years. We’ve seen some corporate initiatives succeed beyond expectations and we’ve seen some fail. A big indicator of the expected result is around the type of questions you ask before the onset of an engagement. And even though AI technology is cool, it’s still nascent. Getting into it for the right reasons will drive long-term success.

In this blog series, we’ll explore issues you need to consider as you travel your AI-driven customer experience journey. It’s important to strategize exactly what your company and business unit wants to do with AI. Our professional services team can assist through this journey and partner with you to drive expected results and share lessons we’ve learned along the way.

3 Reasons to Embark on an AI-Driven Journey

1. Your exploratory in-house project aims to gain learning experience before creating a formal strategy around using AI-driven voicebots and chatbots for your customer experience. For an exploratory in-house project, Genesys Services Teams partners up for a technology introduction, consults on feasibility analysis, provides best practices based on the nascent AI chatbot and chatbot industry, and provides AI education around specific technology roles and responsibilities needed within your organization to succeed.
2. You want to build a prototype and release it to a limited audience for a customer experience that’s already identified by corporate. You believe it’s a best candidate to deliver on the initial AI promise to get internal buy-in. For a prototyping engagement, Genesys Services Teams work with you to create a working prototype with minimal upfront cost with just enough depth of scope so you can help business units gauge the possibilities with AI-driven self-service experience. We’ll also evaluate if this is a good fit for your longer-term strategy.
3. You have a conventional IVR and contact center, but you need to build something completely new to address either a new brand or a more tech-savvy customer segment. We partner with you to provide insights into domain-specific expertise to evaluate functionality that’s best suited with an AI-driven voicebot to create better adoption and a positive customer experience.

Because the success of an initiative is measured by its ROI, identify and address the top priority and expected value add specifically from AI-driven voicebot and chatbot.

Identify AI Drivers to Ensure Success
Creating the best customer experience with minimal cost is always a lofty and unreasonable target. Getting more granular about specific drivers creates a better services strategy with higher chances of success.

1. You want to create a more human-like, richer customer experience, but don’t want to invest and be tied to traditional speech recognition licensing costs and long contracts. This could mean there’s more emphasis on creating richer utterances, intent mapping, speech tuning and a more extensive setup initially — without being tied to a specific vendor for licensing. Cutting corners on upfront services investments could create a poor customer experience and, ultimately, dilute the potential of your AI project.
2. You want to save costs and have AI take care of most common low-service items, freeing up live agents so they can focus on more complex items. These situations require a lot more thought in identifying the right functionality that can be used as a candidate for the AI experience; modifying the process flow, if needed, to simplify the workflow and drive cost savings via AI; and drive lesser chat/call diversions to live agents.
3. This is your gateway and introduction to the cloud. While starting with AI-driven voicebot and chatbot would be the easiest way to get your foot in the door, you must carefully consider your long-term drivers, compatibility with nascent technologies and your migration strategy.

Getting into the AI journey for the right reasons sets the stage for a more successful long-term strategy — with the potential to revolutionize your customer experience. Read this ebook to find out three ways chatbots and AI can improve your customer experience.