I recently bought car seat cushions for my car. I had ordered the cushions online, and the entire process of buying was smooth.
It was delivered on time, but the package was damaged. Naturally, I reached out to customer support.
The only option I had was the chat option. They asked me to take a photograph of the damaged package and send it to them.
Upon sending the photograph, I received a message that stated, “Thank you for sending the photograph. We will revert to you within minutes.”
The minutes were running, but there was no response. So, I left my mobile number on the chat and started doing other activities.
There were no calls.
After a while, I opened the chat to see if there was any response. There was, and it read:
Thank you for reaching out to us. We understand your concern about the damaged package. We don’t see the damaged product in the photograph. We will share this feedback with our delivery partner. Thank you once again for reaching out.
It was a cold, templated response.
I was completely frustrated, and there was no option for me to escalate. I went to Quora and searched for the email address where I could escalate.
Once I sent the email, a real person stepped in. He acknowledged my frustration and apologized sincerely. He offered to send a replacement for the cushions with same-day delivery, along with a discount coupon that I can use for my next purchase.
This interaction stayed with me, mainly because of the initial hiccup and my helplessness, and also because it perfectly reflected the double-edged nature of automation and AI in contact centers today.
As someone who’s deeply involved in customer experience and technology for more than two decades now, I find myself constantly grappling with this one question:
Can we use Generative AI to make contact centers more efficient without making them feel robotic?
I believe we absolutely can. However, we will have to do it the right way.
Why is Generative AI relevant to contact centers?
Imagine a situation where your agents are handling multiple interactions every day, and they have Generative AI helping them with the next-best actions.
This is exactly what today’s Ai- powered cloud contact center software enables — seamless integration, unified data access, and smarter agent assistance across every customer touchpoint.
Generative AI can quickly scan through all your customer-facing apps and customer interactions across systems and interfaces and provide you with the context and the next-best action for you to address your customer.
That would be magical for both your organization and your customers.
Generative AI used responsibly in combination with human agents can streamline processes, reduce response times, and in many cases, even improve customer satisfaction.
While customers want quick resolutions, they also want to feel heard. That’s where the balancing act comes in.
AI can be used for speed and scale without compromising the emotional quality of the interaction.
Use cases where Generative AI fits like a glove
Let us talk about some relatable use cases where Generative AI is making a measurable difference in contact centers.
How about generating agent responses
Gen AI can contextually understand your customer’s query and generate a complete response that you can use. However, you will have the option to choose to accept, edit, and personalize the response.
This would drastically reduce the average handling time (AHT) without losing empathy.
One of our customers in the telecom domain reduced their AHT by 18% after implementing AI-generated email drafts for their support team.
Summarizing calls and chats
The biggest chunk of time an agent takes is to ensure appropriate call disposition. Besides, it is also prone to errors.
With Gen AI, you can automatically summarize customer interactions, capturing the key issues, sentiment, and resolution steps.
This helps with faster case handovers, better audits, and coaching.
One of our customers, a loan aggregator, now uses AI to summarize every call and feed it directly into their CRM. Would you believe that their team is saving over 3000 hours per month?
Training and onboarding new agents
I still remember the days when the entire floor in contact centers was dedicated to training agents.
How about simulating customer conversations to train new agents with Gen AI? It can easily replace static manuals and classroom sessions. Besides, your new agents would be able to come up to speed with interactive real-life scenarios.
Real-time knowledge bases
One of our customers used to run a session with all their agents on the floor once every week, during which they shared their best and worst customer interaction moments. This was used as a learning and training session for all the agents.
While they continue to have these sessions, they have also implemented AI to continuously update internal knowledge repositories by analyzing common queries, issue patterns, and resolutions.
With this, the right answers find the agents, without them having to dig deeper.
How to use Gen AI responsibly?
Your AI is as good as what you ask it to do. You can either elevate your customer experience or destroy it with AI.
The key to success lies in how we implement and govern AI. Let us look at some of the ways by which you can use Gen AI responsibly.
Always have a human in the loop
Ensure that the final say lies with your agents.
Generative AI can draft the response and suggest the next-best action, but your agent should be the one to decide whether it fits the tone, context, and emotional nuance of the customer’s situation.
Empathy modelling
Train your AI models on real-life examples where empathy was handled well.
Do we stop here?
No. Go ahead and add sentiment analysis to tweak responses based on the emotional state of the customer.
What if you figure that your customer is angry?
Your AI-generated response should lead with an acknowledgement, and not policy.
How easy would your life be if you trained your models to act empathetically?
Transparency
I used to sell to customers in the US while working from India. The very first line in my conversation used to be, “I am calling from India.” This always built trust, and I did not have to worry about my accent either.
The same level of transparency should be applied when you use AI.
How about using a simple line like “I’m an AI assistant here to help you faster?”
That would build trust, and most customers are open to AI-assisted service if it’s accurate and transparent.
Complex and emotional issues: Avoid full automation
Gen AI is great at FAQs, returns, and updates. For that matter, they are good at most transactional queries.
However, when it comes to billing queries, complaints, or crises, escalate to humans early.
Nothing beats your presence when emotions are high.
Benefits of using Gen AI in customer experience
Let us get this straight. It is not just about cost savings. While it does, it is just the beginning.
Let us look at some of the key benefits.
- You don’t have to juggle five browser tabs to get an answer. Gen AI provides you with the right information in real time, making your responses faster.
- Repetitive queries like “Where is my order?” and “What is my refund status?” can be auto-handled or AI-assisted, freeing agents to focus on nuanced and meaningful work.
- How difficult would it be for you to maintain tone and compliance? It would be fairly difficult, but that won’t be the case for Gen AI. You can keep a consistent brand voice with AI, especially in regulated industries like finance and healthcare.
- AI learns what works and what doesn’t with the right feedback loops. It gets better over time, like your best agents.
A few decades ago, driving was becoming a chore for me. Then the automobile companies introduced power steering, and life became much easier.
You still drive, but it took away the strain.
Gen AI should be more like a power steering system where your agents stay in control, but with less cognitive load and more emotional bandwidth.
When done right, Generative AI can actually make your interactions more human, not less. It helps you clear the clutter so that your agents can focus on what really matters.
Have you ever heard a customer exclaim:
Wow, that was such a perfectly automated experience.
I don’t think so, and you don’t want to lead your customers to that stage either.
How about making AI an ally in your customer experience journey, and help your customers exclaim:
That person really understood me.
That’s the kind of magic that Gen AI can help CX functions deliver.
Lynn Martelli is an editor at Readability. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and has worked as an editor for over 10 years. Lynn has edited a wide variety of books, including fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, and more. In her free time, Lynn enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with her family and friends.
