The Human Side of AI: Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Smart Technology

An interview with one of our speakers at the 15th Annual Optimising Contact Centres Summit, 25 - 26 September 2024, Rainers Hotel Vienna.

How can contact centres maintain human connection while incorporating smart technologies?

1.????? How do you ensure that the balance between human touch and digital tools scales effectively as your customer base grows?

There are different ways to ensure the right balance, and each one needs to be taken care of: understanding the customers and segmentation according to digital orientation, using data analytics to understand the interactions and deciding which interactions to keep traditional or digital.

Ensuring human presence when a customer needs human support with personalised interactions is key to making sure customers feel they are taken care of and continuously adjusting strategies. There is no magic touch that we all know up to which point we can serve in a digital way, but what we know is that we need to use the right tools to scale and attract digital interactions by being relevant and providing convenience to customers.

2.????? What future AI trends do you see influencing the evolution of customer experience in contact centres, and how do you plan to incorporate them?

Part of adjusting strategies starts with planning what is next. For us, the Smart Voice bot will be the next step in moving forward for those who prefer traditional interactions. The content of the Voice bot needs to be selected in a way that provides customer with fast answers and solves their issues quickly and easily. On the other hand, we need to balance where we create value to keep serving through human interaction.

The next step is to build up from LLM to LBM, so the customers will not feel that they are using AI tools. The behavioural aspect adds a personal touch to the tools, reducing the customer’s need for human interaction.

3.????? How do you measure the success of AI and human integration in your contact centre in terms of customer satisfaction and efficiency?

Again, to repeat, it is extremely important to analyse the data and adjust strategies.

For us this was one of the main points why we decided to change the tool because we wanted to improve the experience with AI integrated chatbot. We constantly track the satisfaction of customers and we work on making the tool to be more efficient, helpful, relevant, and convenient for our customers. This is constant work and the most important aspect of whatever tool, or channel you choose to serve to customers.

Short speaker BIO:

Burcu Begic finished Law School and continued my studies in the USA for an MBA; right after school, she started her career again in the USA in the Customer Service department of an international company.

She has more than 20 years of experience in the Customer Service and Customer Experience Fields in international environments, in different countries, and with different cultures. What she learned in her experience is that human-to-human businesses have kept the same values over the years: empathy and trust. In recent years there has been a big disruption with digitalisation, but she believes in keeping the core values the same and, on top of them, building what is fast, convenient and user-friendly for the customers. Ultimately, if customers reach the solution, it doesn’t matter which tool or channel was used.