How human/AI collaboration will shape customer-facing teams of the future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising customer-facing operations by empowering human-led teams to drive greater customer satisfaction, deliver improved customer experiences, and building greater customer loyalty.

The era of human-AI collaboration promises a new era of efficiency, enabling customer-facing teams to deliver high-quality customer experiences at scale.

Research by Hubspot found that 79% of customer-facing specialists value AI in their strategy, with 78% saying AI enhances their efficiency, and 71% saying it leaves more time for meaningful work.

The key to unlocking business value from AI adoption in customer-facing operations is to use the technology as a complementary tool. Customer-facing teams that effectively leverage AI enjoy enhanced efficiency while also unlocking new capabilities to meet customer needs.

Common use cases for AI in customer-facing teams include enhancing customer success (62%), improving customer satisfaction (36%), and reducing wait times (33%).?

Unlocking the benefits of AI for customer-facing teams

Companies that leverage AI in their customer-facing operations unlock a broad range of benefits, including:

1 Reduced customer churn

AI supports customer retention and reduces churn by helping customer-facing teams respond more quickly and more effectively to customer queries.?

In addition, AI tools may draw on user data to proactively identify customers that are at risk of closing their accounts or moving to a competitor, allowing customer-facing teams to reach out and resolve any issues that may cause them to leave.?

2 Lower operational costs

Nearly 3 in 10 (28%) companies use AI to lower their operational costs.?

How? By automating processes and augmenting the capabilities of their teams, driving greater efficiency throughout their customer-facing operations.

By automating responses and enabling self-service solutions, companies reduce reliance on human resources for repetitive tasks, freeing skilled customer-facing teams to deal with more complex and high-value tasks.

3 Quicker service

AI enables companies to deliver faster solutions, which is critical in high-volume environments such as customer support. For example, chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant responses to common customer queries.

In addition, AI can be used to track custom SLAs and prompt customer-facing teams when a query has been left unattended for too long. This ensures every customer receives a timely response to their issue.

4 Enhanced customer experiences

If customer experience is king, then consistency is the crown on its head. In one survey, two-thirds of respondents said they would become long-term customers of a brand if they deliver a consistent experience throughout the customer journey.?

Companies are now deploying AI to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale. One study found that 42% of companies currently use AI to create consistent customer experiences, and this figure is set to grow as more companies adopt AI.

Understanding common AI use cases

AI tools are still in their early stages of maturity and companies are still exploring AI's potential in a range of applications. While it's still early days, there are effective uses cases for deploying AI to boost customer-facing operations, including:

1 Personalisation

AI trained on customer data helps customer-facing teams to deliver personalised experiences at scale. By analysing customer behaviour, past interactions and other data, AI can predict customer needs or preferences, allowing companies to tailor experiences to each customer's tastes.

2 Onboarding

Deploying AI to guide new customers through an onboarding process can significantly reduce friction and ensure consistency in customer experiences. For example, an AI chatbot can provide relevant information or tutorials based on when customers may be struggling, allowing companies to speed up the onboarding process and enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of the new product or service sooner.?

3 Consistency

We mentioned this earlier in the article, but it's worth repeating: consistency really is vital to customer experience. Companies leveraging AI-powered insights can more easily maintain context and continuity, reducing the frustration of explaining issues multiple times to different agents.?

AI systems can also monitor customer interactions in real time, ensuring that customer-facing teams are aware of previous conversations around a particular issue. This also helps to better coordinate responses to customer requests, ensuring consistency throughout the customer journey.?

Conclusion

The era of AI has arrived. For customer-facing teams, this means quicker responses, more consistent customer experiences, and greater efficiency. By effectively leveraging AI tools to enhance and support customer-facing operations, companies can drive greater customer loyalty, retention and growth.

The key is to develop strategies that encourage and enable human-AI collaboration. By adopting AI as an enabling technology, companies can more easily adapt to evolving customer needs.

We will be exploring the potential and practical uses of AI in customer-facing operations over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions around how you can use AI in your customer-facing teams, please reach out.