As the Senior Director of Client Engagement and Solutions at CCC for the past 14 years, I spend a lot of time looking for ways to improve our customers’ experience. In fact, our entire company does, thanks to our “Customer Experience First” (CX1) program. Since its inception several years ago, this program has been an incredible vehicle to ensure the “voice of the customer” stays at the forefront of everything we do here at CCC; from the way we look critically at how we operate to how we deliver our products and services.
With a singular focus on satisfying customers we serve in various industries, we are determined to keep finding ways we can improve their experience at every turn. This includes leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).
With the recent AI technology boom, customer service as we know it is in the midst of a major upgrade, which will result in benefits for both customers and service representatives alike. I was fortunate enough to attend the recent Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco and was thrilled to see the next generation of customer service and what it will mean for our customers’ experience.
Traditional approaches to customer experience have been very tactical and reactive; the primary goal to address specific issue(s) when raised by a customer. But with the help of AI, customer service teams today have the potential to be more proactive, strategic, and capable.
Did you know that 85% of customers are unsatisfied with self-service options? Using clunky chatbots that deliver a list of links to sift through is no longer enough. With new AI technology, the chatbots of today comb through a company’s knowledge base and present a summarized response that specifically addresses customer questions, saving them from the hassle of scouring for a simple answer.
Enhancing the customer experience like this requires a significant amount of customer data and analytics, which is why we are investing in predictive modeling, customer health scores, resource centers, and agent-assist models. So, whether our customer is a professor working on their next lecture plan or an oncologist exploring the latest in cancer research, our service model—both the human and AI branches of it—is designed to better anticipate customer needs.
AI is blurring the lines—in the best of ways—between numerous customer experience touchpoints. It is enabling award-winning customer service teams like ours to not only address immediate challenges, but to continue anticipating what is ahead and suggest ways to help, which is critical to the success of customers.