How AI Empowers Empathetic CX In Today's Hypercompetitive Landscape

It is easy to obsess over marketplace evolution and transformation. It is easy to trumpet cliches like “the only constant is change.”

The reality, however, is that much about the customer contact landscape has remained constant in recent years. And that continuity has persisted in this year, even as companies grapple with broader market trends like economic uncertainty and new workforce expectations.

At the end of the day, today’s contact centers are still striving to empower their agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences. They continue to focus on connecting touchpoints into a seamless, consistent, omnichannel experience. They remain in pursuit of data that will enable them to improve today’s interactions and anticipate tomorrow’s needs.

The standards may be higher, the specific inquiries may be evolving, and the communication channels may be changing. The idea of using the contact center to deliver customer centricity, however, continues to serve as the guiding light.

There has, however, been one very notable change in 2023: the reimagining of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on customer contact.

Make no mistake: even AI is a decidedly familiar topic to customer contact leaders. It has been a fixture of strategic discussions and a hallmark of technology investments for the past decade. The change, however, concerns three central tenets of AI strategy:

• The use of generative and conversational AI to provide more robust, analytical, and engaging communication and intelligence.
• The shift from focusing purely on efficiency plays to one that identifies opportunities to generate value – and, ideally, more humanity.
• The emphasis on rethinking customer journeys and reallocating agent effort based on a world in which AI handles an increasing number of tasks.

Amazement over generative AI like ChatGPT has underscored the relevance and importance of these three tenets. Now that contact center leaders know AI can work and can transform, the focus shifts to capitalizing on its impact. No longer debating whether or not to adopt the technology, savvy leaders are now debating how to maximize the impact of their AI investments.

This conversation is top-of-mind for Jabra, a leading solution provider renowned for its high-caliber audio and conferencing equipment, innovative AI solutions, and customer-centric business vision.

Recently, Jabra has been making particularly compelling waves with its Engage AI offering.

Compatible with existing contact center platforms, the solution uses the power of AI to uncover and analyze vital insights about customer sentiment. From there, contact center leaders can better empower agents, better design experiences, and better build customer loyalty and lifetime value.

Engage AI perfectly addresses the aforementioned three tenets. It uncovers robust analytics, which in turn reveals opportunities for contact centers to create more valuable customer and agent experiences. The emphasis on sentiment, moreover, helps businesses identify – and remedy – root causes that are creating customer friction or agent frustration.

Collectively, these opportunities reflect the power of technology to inspire humanity within the customer experience. Example results are as follows:

Shorter, more engaging calls | With a 50% more accurate read on customer sentiment, agents can adjust their tone in real-time. This leads to 27% shorter resolution times, while also boosting the harmony of agent-customer conversations.

Increased customer satisfaction | When interactions are more empathetic, tones are more supportive, and resolutions are more efficient, customers are more excited about the engagement. Unsurprisingly, the calls in which agents deliver their “best tone” result in a 12% increase in CSAT.

Improved agent experiences | When agents can better understand the customers they are supporting, they can focus more intently and perform more efficiently. They can also adapt their tone and conversation process to make calls more pleasant and harmonious. These factors dramatically improve the agent experience, with 70% of agents saying they feel more motivated while using Engage AI.

Improved supervisor performance | Not simply useful for motivating agents, Engage AI makes agents better. Thanks to the robust analytics, supervisors have a clearer sense into how their agents are performing – and how that performance impacts customer sentiment. From there, they can provide more relevant and personalized coaching and supporting, forming more productive work relationships while ultimately driving better agent development. This connectivity is more important than ever in today’s landscape, which finds a high percentage of agents working remotely – and thus outside the physical earshot of their supervisors.

For more on how Jabra’s Engage AI empowers businesses to analyze, empathize, and optimize, check out key resources here.