How can AI help increase revenue and efficiency during customer service interactions?

By Irwin Lazar, Metrigy

Guest author Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst of Metrigy, provides some insightful data about AI's positive impact on revenue and efficiency and how businesses can leverage AI for success in customer experience.?

AI has certainly received a large amount of hype over the last few years. Now, that hype is moving into quantifiable benefits for customer engagement. Let's take a closer look at the numbers and how businesses can harness AI to create a positive impact in the customer experience.

AI becoming mainstream

Of the 544 organizations participating in Metrigy’s Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 global research study, more than 20% are now resolving customer interactions via AI. Participants expect this number to rapidly increase, estimating that by 2028 more than 36% of interactions will be resolved via AI.?

By enabling AI to resolve customer inquiries, companies can free up human agents to focus on complex engagements or reduce the number of agents required, especially during times of peak demand.

As adoption increases, so does satisfaction with AI’s ability to improve customer experience. Nearly 82% of our research participants say that they are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with AI’s ability to improve CX. Just 3.3% have a negative view of AI.

AI enables automation

In leveraging AI, companies can automate responses to customer inquiries. For example, AI can use natural language to detect the reason for a call and route the call appropriately. Another example is the transcript analysis of negative sentiment from an upset customer. Automation can also include defining follow-up action items on a per-engagement basis.

Today, about 35% of companies use AI for automation, with another 43.1% planning to use it in the future. Among our research participants who report the highest improvements in contact center efficiency and customer satisfaction, 56% are already using AI for automation, demonstrating a strong correlation between automating responses via AI and measurable gains in revenue and efficiency.

Generative AI offers even more benefits

The majority of our research participants believe that generative AI will fully resolve between 26% and 75% of customer interactions. Generative AI offers the potential to tap into company knowledge, making it available to customers via chatbots and allowing customers to potentially solve problems more quickly and more efficiently without waiting to speak to or chat with a live agent.?

Here again, companies can improve revenue and efficiency by only escalating complex calls or sales opportunities to live agents or by using generative AI to create content for customers. Additional use cases include call summarization, real-time agent coaching, and text-to-speech or real-time language translation.

Improving Revenue

Increasing revenue is a driver for half of those using AI. AI can help increase revenue in a variety of ways, including providing quicker responses to sales opportunities that come in through the contact center, recognizing sales opportunities during calls and chats, increasing agent productivity to handle more calls, and automating functions such as post-call follow-up. AI can also provide analytics that companies can use to gauge sales performance and identify areas for improvement.?

Conclusions

While there is certainly a lot of AI hype, there is now increasing evidence of AI's ability to improve contact center revenue and efficiency. CX leaders should evaluate the AI capabilities of their providers, both now and planned, as well as those available from partners such as Zoom.?

Consider establishing an AI Center of Excellence that continuously evaluates emerging technologies, defines policies, provides expertise and best practices, and delivers training and guidance for AI adoption.

Find out more about how AI can help greatly improve your customer care in part 1 of this insightful conversation with Robin Gareiss , Principal Analyst and CEO at Metrigy, and Amy Roberge , Global Head of CX Solutions Engineering at Zoom.

ABOUT METRIGY: Metrigy is an innovative research and advisory firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of?workplace collaboration, digital workplace, digital transformation, customer experience and employee experience—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations.