Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Transformative Power of Conversational AI
By Hardy Myers, Senior Vice President, Business Development and
Strategy, Cognigy
Over the past several years, significant
challenges have confronted contact centers and customer experience (CX) leadership.
Staffing shortages and challenges from hybrid work continue into 2023 with the additional
challenge of increased economic uncertainty. Taking these factors into account,
the need to automate has never been greater. What will be the inexorable forces
and trends for enterprise contact centers and customer experience in the new
year? How will the customer journey evolve and what innovations can we expect
in 2023?
One thing is certain: Automation driven by virtual agents and AI-based bots will
continue to play an increasingly important role in improving customer service, enabling
agent empowerment and improving customer experience.
Five predictions for 2023 that highlight the transformative power of
Conversational AI for CX and how it can also improve the experience for those
on the contact center front lines are:
1. AI will answer customer inquiries in real time. AI is rapidly evolving in how it understands what
customers want and how to customize responses and insights on the fly. The results are new and improved levels of engagement and responsiveness as the
industry learns to better leverage large language models.
2. Proactive customer engagement will
gain more traction. Instead of always
being reactive, organizations are now, more than ever before, able to proactively
initiate interactions with customers before a problem occurs. A good example of
an enterprise that has embraced proactive engagement is Toyota, who is already leveraging
Conversational AI to proactively contact customers to schedule service appointments.
3. Conversational AI will move beyond
knowledge management to agent empowerment. By
automating mundane tasks, Conversational AI will free up agents across all
industries to pursue more engaging and complex customer service tasks. The result is a customer service team that
is empowered to drive CX to the next level.
4. Conversational AI will bridge the gap between employer and employee. Conversational AI will reduce agent workload by automatically
addressing many customer requirements delivering faster resolution and a superior
customer experience. This will result in not only
accelerated resolution times and improved customer experience - but higher job
satisfaction among agents.
5. Virtual
agents and AI-based bots will become as agile and invaluable as your tenured human
workforce. Currently, a significant gap exists between what Conversational
AI could do for most contact centers and what it currently does. Recent
technological advancements have made it possible for virtual agents to become an
agile and invaluable part of your tenured workforce, augmenting and optimizing
the efforts of the human workforce, not replacing it.
In summary, 2023 will be a year when
Conversational AI is adopted by a much broader segment of the market delivering
a truly transformational shift in contact center operations. Enterprises who
embrace Conversational AI technology now will be able to continue growing and
scaling during challenging economic times while reducing costs and transforming
customer experience.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As Senior Vice President, Business Development and Strategy at
Cognigy, Hardy Myers works closely with Cognigy's co-founders and senior
management team to develop the company's strategic priorities, secure and
activate partnerships, and implement the optimal business processes to achieve
Cognigy's strategic and financial objectives. Hardy is a seasoned
leader with over 20 years of experience in the contact center and unified communications
space, including past senior leadership roles as CEO and CFO. He has also led
teams in business development, partnerships, strategy and corporate development
at industry-leading companies such as Avaya, Intradiem and AVST.