AI and Knowledge: Bread and Butter for Digital Experience Transformation

Digital experiences (DX) apply to customers (CX), customer service agents (AX), and a variety of business audiences (BX)—executives, managers, knowledge authors, and systems administrators, to name a few. Businesses have to balance AX, BX, and CX in their DX transformation initiative to improve its odds of success. In other words, AX+BX+CX=DX™—we call it the Theory of Experiences™.

This may sound orthogonal but AI and knowledge or simply AI knowledge is critical to improving all these three elements of experiences.

AI Knowledge and the Digital Customer (CX)

Customers reach out to contact centers to get answers. Yet, that is where businesses are failing them. Consumers mention the lack and inconsistency of knowledge among agents to be their biggest pain point in getting customer service, followed by the inability of websites to deliver answers through digital self-service. No wonder CX is stuck in reverse gear or neutral at best, per Forrester’s CX Index of the last 3 years—0% of companies offered “excellent service” in 2018 and 2017, down from an astronomical 1% in 2016! The answer clearly lies in deploying next-generation knowledge that is personalized, proactive, and infused with AI guidance that powers informed customer service through digital and traditional channels.

Our clients report up to a 60% deflection of phone calls to digital self-service, powered by AI knowledge.

AI Knowledge and the Digital Agent (AX)

There has been a massive generational shift in the contact center workforce with millennials and increasingly Gen Z taking over, especially in the frontline. These next-gen agents live digital, guided lives. They don’t pore over AAA maps or Thomas’ Guides for driving—they are used to getting guided by GPS. They are doing away with human financial advisors, leaving their 401K assets to “robo-advisors.” Moreover, they have low attention spans and hate training, choosing instead to learn or get guided, as they do their jobs.

The result? They struggle to answer customer questions, oftentimes improvising to come up with some answer or the other. In fact, 84% of contact center agents complained that their desktop tools do not help them in resolving customer issues, per Gartner. No wonder agent churn has hovered at 25% to 50%, depending on whom you ask, and agents have an average of ten hostile encounters with customers every day, according to Psychology Today.

Here’s the good news: AI knowledge can guide the agent (and the customer through the agent) in finding answers, resolving problems, and providing advice through best-practice conversations in a consistent way.

♦ One of our telco clients uses our AI reasoning technology to guide 10,000 contact center agents and associates in 600 retail stores. The consistent use of guidance helped it boost First-Contact Resolution (FCR) by 37% and Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 30%, while doubling agent speed-to-competency, transforming both AX and CX in the process!

♦ A global banking client was able to ascend from #3 to #1 in NPS, while reducing agent training time by half and reducing agent churn significantly, even while expanding to 11 countries!

♦ A fast-growing SaaS provider in the HR space improved consistency of answers by a whopping 62% and turbocharged speed-to-answer by 67%.