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In recent weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss technical innovation with CIOs at several Fortune 500 organizations. I’m always fascinated to hear the story these leaders report how their corporation’s technology and operating framework came to be. Inevitably, every CIO notes how much time and energy their teams have invested in their technology stack, working through many levels of complexity. And they share their frustration at how difficult it is to gain anything more than incremental improvements year over year.

“They’ve been telling me the same thing for five years”

A common challenge faced by most senior leaders is the absence of new insights into what’s driving their CX outcomes. While there are terabytes of data flowing through these businesses, the use of legacy reporting and analytics methodologies renders scant new actionable insights. One CIO told me he no longer asks his teams to provide insights into customer contacts because, “I already know what they are going to tell me because they have been telling me the same thing for the last 5 years.” Antiquated methodologies can be used to report historical performance, but fall very short of providing the customer insights needed to deliver material value.

There’s gold in your data

Intelligent data processing translated into actionable insights can enable even the largest organizations to respond rapidly to ever-changing market dynamics. Most Fortune 500 companies are sitting on a mountain of data and extracting little more than information for historical scorecard reporting. This data is a valuable asset that could drive significant business efficiencies through the application of well-developed artificial intelligence.

Data from all your interactions with customers is a rich source of insights that can significantly improve performance across your organization.

Chris Arnold

ASAPP helps companies mine this gold

Leveraging native, self-learning artificial intelligence enables the largest companies in the world to gain new actionable insights into what’s driving their business outcomes. The ASAPP AI platform provides insight into contact drivers, customer intent and sentiment, trends, effectiveness of promotional offers. and opportunities for enhanced automation and self-service. Machine learning models deployed in both voice and digital environments offer real-time as well as historical insights that lead to double-digit OPEX savings, incremental revenues, and enhanced customer and agent experiences.

Turning insight into action

I work with F500 customers daily in modernizing how they use real-time and historical data to reimagine their CX operations. By deploying the ASAPP AI Native® platform, they are immediately able to identify common topics raised by customers, understand root cause, and see what actions were taken by agents to resolve customer issues.

Sales and Marketing teams can use these insights to drive upsell/cross sell initiatives, promotions to improve loyalty and retention, and enhanced personalization. The Data Science team can leverage agent insights to inform automation flows that will reduce the level of effort for customers to get answers to questions. And, the digital team can use them to update self-service content.

Increasing productivity

These insights also help contact center operations directly. Leveraging data-driven AI, one customer has more than doubled their productivity, with 2.2X increases in resolutions per hour while also realizing a 7 percentage point increase in CSAT. Rather than simply using data for historical reporting, this F500 company is using data to create a leapfrog moment at a very challenging time globally.

Believing there are no new data-driven insights within the CX environment is a costly mistake. Continuing to leverage legacy methodologies will lead to outputs that offer little to address new business challenges. Actionable insights are there, often hiding just below the surface. Identifying and taking action on these insights across the entire organization will result in employees working on critical areas of opportunity rather than old assumptions.

Agent engagement is critical for a contact center as it directly impacts the customer experience. Many companies only interact with their customers a couple times a year, for just a few minutes each time, via an agent. The experience of those brief interactions is critical for customer satisfaction and retention, and happier agents tend to have more positive interactions with customers. Despite this important correlation, agent satisfaction in most industries is low. Some estimate that under 40% of contact center agents are extremely satisfied with their job.

Keeping agents engaged and satisfied is more challenging than ever due to recent events. Agents’ jobs are increasingly difficult and stressful with dramatically higher volumes, long wait times, and unhappy customers. Meanwhile, systems haven’t caught up. Most agents still have to toggle between many different, antiquated systems to solve a customer issue. And if agents are working remotely to limit health risks, they miss out on things that contribute to engagement—like coaching and a sense of community with their peers.

So what’s a company to do?

While modern, AI-based technology can’t alone solve these problems, it can provide some much needed relief for agents—and help your customers, too.

A well-designed AI solution can:

Help agents do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, with less stress.

Artificial intelligence capabilities can help agents more effectively handle volume spikes, unhappy customers, and whatever else might come their way in these unprecedented times. AI-driven predictions put the right content at their fingertips and suggest the right actions. This helps the agent, shaves time from each interaction, and improves the customer experience.

Provide an easy to use, self-learning system that agents love.

Many legacy systems that agents use were designed decades ago and can be hard to navigate. Modern, AI-based solutions developed by user experience specialists and data scientists provide a whole new experience for agents, helping them to do their jobs more easily and encouraging greater adoption. And the more agents use these new solutions, the better they get as AI technology continues to learn what works and what does not.

Automate mundane and routine tasks.

We’ve seen that upwards of 60% of customer interaction time is spent on mundane or routine tasks. An AI solution can automate away some of the tedious tasks that are part of an agent’s workflow, such as collecting customer information, timing out inactive threads, and summarizing interactions. This frees up an agent to focus on what they were hired to do: satisfy complex customer needs.

Improve agent satisfaction with virtual coaching.

If agents are working from home, modern AI solutions can help combat their sense of isolation with in-the-moment virtual coaching from supervisors. AI technology can also help supervisors better pinpoint which agents need help, so they can coach more effectively and improve the quality of interactions.

Job satisfaction is in many ways drawn from our own human needs—creative problem solving that engages our brains, a sense of purpose, and socialization within a broader community. With agents facing unprecedented challenges, potential isolation from their teams, and seemingly-endless routine work—it’s easy to see why customer experience suffers. This no longer needs to be true. The ASAPP AI platform can bring out the very best in each agent—which is great for your customers and your organization—and ultimately more satisfying for your agents.