Check out this exclusive interview to hear insights on how #GenerativeAI will impact the future of #customercontact and #customerexperience and how it can be effectively implemented into business operations.

How do you think Generative AI will impact customer contact centres and customer experience?

I personally think that there is no limit in how GenAI is able to improve not only the customer experience, but also the agent experience. Every business will have a different risk tolerance, but we see GenAI as a way to help our members resolve their transactional enquiries without having to speak to an agent, which in turn ensures that we have agent capacity to have those more complex conversations that are not as easy to resolve, that require empathy and a human touch. From an agent point of view, GenAI will allow us to surface the right information to the agent at the right time, allow us to increase efficiencies and take the admin work away from our agents to allow to them to concentrate on connecting with our members and having those amazing interactions we ask of them.

Can you talk about some GenAI use cases?

As a health insurance provider, we are taking a very measured approach to the GenAI that we will be using within our platform. As you can imagine, protecting out members and customer information is of the highest priority.

With this in mind, we are currently rolling out GenAI to help improve the productivity of our agents, through features such as Generate Summary, in which GenAI is able to give a bullet point summary of the conversation for our records and #CRM, “Modify Tone” to increase the professionalism of what our agents are saying to help match the customers tone.

As we scale we will be looking at GenAI:

• To review and provide a summary of themes and topics of conversations to ensure that our agents are trained sufficiently
• As a way to surface knowledge base information to our agents in a much quicker and conversational way.
• To review our messaging history and recommend automation paths (and then build these automation paths)
• To provide generic information about customers' cover without having to speak to an agent.

Again, I genuinely feel that our back log and roadmap will be ever increasing as we learn the intricacies of where we can go with GenAI and are able to showcase the benefit of increasing its use cases.

How do you identify the best places for introducing GenAI into operations?

When you look at the hype, the assumption for this that you can replace your human agents with GenAI overnight. We have seen it done before, and we have seen it fail, from not only an operational view, and also through brand damage.

The first thing I would recommend is to document at your current end to end process. Not just as a customer, but look internally well. What are the pain points of your agents, your reporting team, your senior stakeholders. Having an really good understanding of end to end experience is going to allow you map these processes out, and from there you will be able to find gaps in information, gaps in processes, and ways that can be improved through automation.

I also find it helps to simply ask. Ask your reporting team “Are you happy with the sentiment analysis you are currently getting?” – if not, you can push these verbatims into an AI or ML model and give you a quick summarised output. The GenAI application does not have to be earth shattering, as those 1% increments will add up much quicker than you realise.

What key lessons would you share for anyone looking to introduce AI?

What are the common failures and roadblocks? Manage your stakeholders! I cannot stress this enough. Nothing is going to take the wind out of your sails more than someone in legal that as a very low risk tolerance and not happy to sign off, or someone at the top that sees GenAI as dollar signs in relation to OPEX savings.

Again, this is very industry specific and where your risk tolerance as a business lies, but managing stakeholders and taking them on your journey is going to be the as important as getting the features integrated / enabled.

And start internally. Optimising internal processes using GenAI is a great way to get your business on board without damaging your brand. Being first to market is great place to be, but you can’t learn off the mistakes of others.

How do we ensure employees are open and skilled for a GenAI transition?

There are two ways that we have approached this internally.

Firstly, removing the fear of GenAI, and SECONDLY showing the opportunities that have presented themselves, and will continue too.

The fear of AI - One of the first things that was asked when we were training our agents on GenAI was “Is this going to take our job”. The answer is no. I firmly believe that GenAI is not able to replace what our agents can do in our industry. What GenAI is able to do is to remove the repetitive transactions enquiries that our members have, updating addresses, making payments etc. Outside of these transactional enquiries, Health Insurance can be a really scary product to use. People can contact us when they are at the most vulnerable, and it is a very confusing industry to understand. We need empathy, we need understanding and we need a human touch if I am being honest.

Opportunities – this is an exciting one. It is something I personally have been pitching for many years (before GenAI was the “it” thing) and we were building and creating….less sophisticated bots. Look at your bots as human agents. They need upskilling, training and coaching. #NPS from a bot flow is the same as one through an agent and has the same impact to brand. We need Coaches to monitor and optimise these automations. We also need people to design them and people to build them. This year we actually created a new team of Conversation Specialists, and upskilled a handful of front line agents who are able to use their experience of connecting with our customers to help automate these conversations keeping – putting the customer at the forefront of the experience.

Want to hear more from Darren? Join us at CCW on the Gold Coast next Feb 28-Mar 1!

Check-out the brochure here: https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-customercontactweek-au/agenda-mc