May 29, 2024
How AI Can Improve and Optimize Customer Experiences
To meet the elevated expectations of customers and employees, organizations must look to artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
Customers’ expectations have risen dramatically over the past several years, driven in part by the ubiquity of powerful consumer technology in their daily lives. To build brand loyalty, protect their revenue streams and even retain staff, companies must ensure that they have access to the solutions and services needed to consistently deliver a superior customer experience. This can be a daunting task. Business and IT leaders must decide where to host their contact center solutions and choose the vendors that will best meet their organization’s needs. They must also implement and integrate various technologies and support processes that lead to personalized interactions to quickly solve customers’ problems. Specialized contact center solutions, data analytics tools and cloud resources are all necessary to provide an excellent experience. Managed services from a trusted partner such as CDW can bring these disparate technologies together while reducing the burden on internal IT staff. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, organizations must consider AI solutions to help them reduce risk, improve performance and provide the best experience to customers.
Learn how your organization can provide its customers with a modern digital user experience.
Customers’ expectations have risen dramatically over the past several years, driven in part by the ubiquity of powerful consumer technology in their daily lives. To build brand loyalty, protect their revenue streams and even retain staff, companies must ensure that they have access to the solutions and services needed to consistently deliver a superior customer experience. This can be a daunting task. Business and IT leaders must decide where to host their contact center solutions and choose the vendors that will best meet their organization’s needs. They must also implement and integrate various technologies and support processes that lead to personalized interactions to quickly solve customers’ problems. Specialized contact center solutions, data analytics tools and cloud resources are all necessary to provide an excellent experience. Managed services from a trusted partner such as CDW can bring these disparate technologies together while reducing the burden on internal IT staff. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, organizations must consider AI solutions to help them reduce risk, improve performance and provide the best experience to customers.
Learn how your organization can provide
its customers with a modern digital user experience.
Technology has given customers more ways than ever to communicate with companies and seek resolutions to their problems. But it has also led to heightened expectations. Consumers want to reach businesses using whatever channel they choose, and at times that are convenient for them. They also expect a swift, personalized response.
At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly demanding internal “customers” of IT departments. In their personal lives, workers have access to technology that is responsive and intuitive, and they’ve come to expect the same performance from the more complex tech tools and systems they interact with on the job. To power productivity and promote staff retention, IT leaders must bring the same care and attention to the systems that support internal users as they do to those used by external customers.
The rise of remote work over the past several years has increased the expectations of both internal users and external customers when it comes to digital experiences. People have grown accustomed to instantly connecting with others around the world from the comfort of their own homes, and they want this push-button speed and convenience when they interact with companies as well.
55%
The percentage of baby boomer customers who say they would give up on a service issue if they couldn’t find an answer after contacting multiple people
Source: gartner.com, Adapting to the Customer Service Preferences of Gen Z and Millennials, Oct. 30, 2023
In the coming years, these demands are likely to grow. In part because of the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, people expect companies to leverage contextual data analytics to offer frictionless, personalized experiences. When customers can air their grievances to the world via social media — and with countless startup competitors waiting to capitalize on the mistakes of incumbent businesses — a subpar customer experience can breed disloyalty among consumers, leading to lost revenue and a damaged reputation. By strategically deploying technologies to streamline their contact center operations, companies can secure a competitive edge and be ready to meet today’s customer demands and tomorrow’s challenges.
Employees: The ‘Other’ Customers
For IT departments, supporting internal users is often just as important as providing an excellent experience for external customers. After all, workers in customer-facing roles need intuitive, responsive tech tools to be great at their jobs. These are some common pain points for internal users:
Lack of Automation: Manual processes can slow down workflows, frustrate users and increase the likelihood of errors. Automating routine tasks speeds up important business processes and allows employees to focus on more nuanced strategic initiatives that require creativity and critical thinking. The result: Workers are more productive and more engaged in their jobs.
Insufficient Insights: Without robust data analytics tools, managers and employees lack the information they need to make the best business decisions in the moment. By enhancing existing systems with advanced analytics capabilities, IT departments can support real-time insights into customer behaviors and preferences, empowering staff to deliver personalized solutions that exceed customer expectations.
Antiquated Systems: Legacy applications and infrastructure can hinder employee performance — and even cause workers to consider leaving a company if the experience is bad enough. By investing in modern technology, companies can cut down on unproductive time and improve employee morale.
Learn how your organization
can provide its customers with a
modern digital user experience.
Technology has given customers more ways than ever to communicate with companies and seek resolutions to their problems. But it has also led to heightened expectations. Consumers want to reach businesses using whatever channel they choose, and at times that are convenient for them. They also expect a swift, personalized response.
At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly demanding internal “customers” of IT departments. In their personal lives, workers have access to technology that is responsive and intuitive, and they’ve come to expect the same performance from the more complex tech tools and systems they interact with on the job. To power productivity and promote staff retention, IT leaders must bring the same care and attention to the systems that support internal users as they do to those used by external customers.
The rise of remote work over the past several years has increased the expectations of both internal users and external customers when it comes to digital experiences. People have grown accustomed to instantly connecting with others around the world from the comfort of their own homes, and they want this push-button speed and convenience when they interact with companies as well.
In the coming years, these demands are likely to grow. In part because of the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, people expect companies to leverage contextual data analytics to offer frictionless, personalized experiences. When customers can air their grievances to the world via social media — and with countless startup competitors waiting to capitalize on the mistakes of incumbent businesses — a subpar customer experience can breed disloyalty among consumers, leading to lost revenue and a damaged reputation. By strategically deploying technologies to streamline their contact center operations, companies can secure a competitive edge and be ready to meet today’s customer demands and tomorrow’s challenges.
55%
The percentage of baby boomer customers who say they would give up on a service issue if they couldn’t find an answer after contacting multiple people
Source: gartner.com, Adapting to the Customer Service Preferences of Gen Z and Millennials, Oct. 30, 2023
Employees: The ‘Other’ Customers
For IT departments, supporting internal users is often just as important as providing an excellent experience for external customers. After all, workers in customer-facing roles need intuitive, responsive tech tools to be great at their jobs. These are some common pain points for internal users:
Lack of Automation: Manual processes can slow down workflows, frustrate users and increase the likelihood of errors. Automating routine tasks speeds up important business processes and allows employees to focus on more nuanced strategic initiatives that require creativity and critical thinking. The result: Workers are more productive and more engaged in their jobs.
Insufficient Insights: Without robust data analytics tools, managers and employees lack the information they need to make the best business decisions in the moment. By enhancing existing systems with advanced analytics capabilities, IT departments can support real-time insights into customer behaviors and preferences, empowering staff to deliver personalized solutions that exceed customer expectations.
Antiquated Systems: Legacy applications and infrastructure can hinder employee performance — and even cause workers to consider leaving a company if the experience is bad enough. By investing in modern technology, companies can cut down on unproductive time and improve employee morale.
Learn how your organization
can provide its customers with a
modern digital user experience.
Customer Experience: By the Numbers
Recent surveys pertaining to the customer experience show common user preferences and challenges.:
71%
The percentage of Generation Z consumers who say they prefer live phone interactions for customer care
Source: mckinsey.com, Where is customer care in 2024?, March 12, 2024
51%
The share of customer service and support leaders prioritizing self-service adoption who cite it as a major challenge for 2024
Source: gartner.com, Gartner Identifies Three Top Priorities for Customer Service and Support Leaders in 2024, Feb. 5, 2024
6%
The percentage of brands that reported a significant increase in the quality of the customer experience they provided in 2023
Source: forrester.com, Forrester’s US 2023 Customer Experience Index: Brands’ CX Quality Falls For A Second Consecutive Year, June 13, 2023
Customer Experience: By the Numbers
Recent surveys pertaining to the customer experience show common user preferences and challenges.:
71%
The percentage of Generation Z consumers who say they prefer live phone interactions for customer care
Source: mckinsey.com, Where is customer care in 2024?, March 12, 2024
51%
The share of customer service and support leaders prioritizing self-service adoption who cite it as a major challenge for 2024
Source: gartner.com, Gartner Identifies Three Top Priorities for Customer Service and Support Leaders in 2024, Feb. 5, 2024
6%
The percentage of brands that reported a significant increase in the quality of the customer experience they provided in 2023
Source: forrester.com, Forrester’s US 2023 Customer Experience Index: Brands’ CX Quality Falls For A Second Consecutive Year, June 13, 2023
- CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CHALLENGES
- ELEVATE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
- MEETING USER EXPECTATIONS
Most business and IT leaders are keenly aware that their customers are demanding more from the digital experience, and they are committed to delivering a seamless interaction that will reduce friction throughout the customer journey. However, this is easier said than done. To truly transform the customer experience, organizations must navigate several hurdles:
Choice of Contact Center Environment: Companies face countless choices for contact center providers. Business and IT leaders must make difficult decisions about which customer channels they want to offer, what technology should support these channels, and which vendors and service providers will help them achieve the ROI and customer satisfaction they are seeking. Complicating matters is that this is a fast-moving space, with vendors racing to integrate AI into their tools (with varying success).
Implementation: Once an organization chooses a contact center environment and the vendors to help make it a reality, technicians must roll up their sleeves to implement and integrate the components. During this process, implementation teams should prioritize high-value and business-critical use cases, taking steps to ensure that the technology promotes workflows that align with customer expectations. Data integration, system compatibility and employee adoption of new tools can all pose challenges during the implementation stage, and many organizations struggle with the transition between platforms.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Repercussions of Oversights: Contact centers are complex systems, and a single oversight in their design or implementation can have far-reaching consequences. Data migration, resource allocation, cybersecurity planning and technology integration are all likely areas for oversights. Depending on the severity of the mistake, one seemingly small overlooked detail could lead to what people in the industry jokingly refer to as a “resume-generating event” (meaning an incident that causes someone to have to look for a new job). By testing systems and gathering extensive user feedback, IT leaders can prevent these problems from popping up.
Long Wait Times and Inefficient Workflows: Almost everyone has had a customer service experience that made them want to throw the phone at the wall. Due to ineffective workflows, complex phone trees and other factors that are almost always invisible to customers, they end up repeating the same information to multiple people, being put on multiple holds and then repeating the information yet again. Poor experiences like these not only diminish customer satisfaction but can also jeopardize retention. Cleaning up these interactions can have a big impact on customer loyalty and brand reputation.
Impersonal Interactions: When implemented poorly, new contact center technologies can lead to impersonal interactions that leave customers feeling undervalued. For example, artificial intelligence can be an incredibly powerful tool to help contact center agents understand customer sentiment. But if organizations overreach with their AI initiatives, they risk alienating customers through cold and detached interactions that lack a human touch. As business and IT leaders seek to modernize their contact centers, they must set aside the hype surrounding emerging technologies and instead stay relentlessly focused on how new solutions will actually affect the customer experience.
Tech solutions are critical to enhancing the customer experience. CDW and its vendor partners provide a wide array of advanced tools that can help organizations reach their goals and build customer loyalty. From long-standing necessities such as voice technology to emerging solutions such as artificial intelligence, the IT landscape offers enormous potential for companies looking to elevate customer interactions.
Contact Center Solutions: The modern contact center has grown far beyond a room full of representatives fielding calls to a toll-free number all day. It now leverages multiple forms of communication, including voice, text messaging, chat, video, email and others. For this reason, many organizations have expanded their use of collaboration tools such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom into the contact center. When integrated seamlessly with existing infrastructure, these solutions can enable smarter call routing, live customer support and shorter wait times. Modern platforms also provide comprehensive monitoring and logging, giving managers the information and tools they need to optimize training.
Data Analytics: Sophisticated analytics tools, whether purchased separately or included as part of a contact center platform, give organizations granular insight into their customer service environments. Gone are the days when managers needed to spot-check call recordings. Instead, contact center leaders can readily access data on call length, common phrases, customer satisfaction scores, resolution rate and even customer sentiment. And in retail stores and other in-person settings, data from smart cameras can help IT and business leaders detect customer movements to identify patterns that may lead to additional insights.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Cloud Resources: CDW, in partnership with leading cloud providers, offers scalable and flexible cloud solutions that meet the unique demands of each company’s contact center environment. By migrating their contact centers to the cloud, organizations can rapidly scale resources up and down to meet changing demands — an important consideration for businesses in highly seasonal sectors such as retail, where call volumes can vary greatly depending on the time of year. A move to the cloud can also improve reliability and uptime while reducing the management and maintenance burden for internal IT staff.
Omnichannel Platforms: Customers expect to be able to interact with companies across a variety of channels. However, business and IT leaders too often claim to support omnichannel platforms when their environments are merely multichannel — meaning that channels such as voice, text, email and video are not fully integrated with one another. A poor omnichannel experience can be worse than not offering multiple channels at all: Customers will quickly become frustrated if they’re forced to repeat information every time they switch from one channel to another. These customers will often revert to voice, which is a comparatively complex and expensive channel to support.
Managed Services: By engaging a trusted third-party partner such as CDW, companies can offload many of the time-consuming tasks that are needed to provide an excellent customer experience. CDW’s managed services offerings cover the full range of IT solutions, including services around data, development, infrastructure, workspace, security and support. By strategically delegating tasks to a trusted partner, organizations can free up their staff and managers to focus on their primary objectives, without the distractions that come with supporting all aspects of their increasingly complex IT environments. With CDW providing back-end management, internal business and IT leaders can ensure that customer-facing services are efficient and reliable.
Organizations in nearly every industry are racing to find practical, value-added applications for AI. The customer contact center is rich with potential. When implemented strategically, AI solutions can generate predictive analytics that help businesses understand customer behavior, leverage natural language to interact with customers directly, and even use generative AI to provide accurate and timely responses to customer inquiries.
Improved Customer Experience: With AI, customer contact center teams can manage higher support volumes, even while improving customer satisfaction. For example, insights from AI tools can give contact center agents information about customer intent and sentiment, setting them up for more successful interactions. By strategically deploying a mix of productivity and communication bots across channels including email, social media and live chat, companies can more effectively manage growing support volumes, especially at times when they need to scale quickly (for example, during the holiday shopping season or when launching a new product).
Reduced Risk: Effectively managing the customer contact center requires a tricky balance. On one hand, companies need to support a high number of customer interactions with predictable, repeatable practices that align with corporate policy. On the other, customers are turned off by contact center interactions that feel scripted and impersonal. AI tools can help reduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies in the contact center. This is more important than ever, as customers now frequently share their experiences (both good and bad) on social media.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Hyper-Personalization: Even outside the contact center, AI tools can deliver insights that allow companies to provide personalized messaging and interactions that simply were not possible just a few years ago. Sophisticated AI tools trawl information gleaned from thousands of customer interactions — including browsing and purchase history, social media interactions, demographic trends, previous customer service interactions and customer survey data — to target customers with timely, hyper-personalized offers. According to one survey, more than half of customers (52 percent) now expect offers from brands to always be personalized.
Staff Retention: Employee burnout is a huge problem in the contact center. When customer service agents are beset by unpredictable peaks in traffic and unhappy customers, they are more likely to leave — which only exacerbates customer service backlogs. Because AI tools can scale up to meet demand and provide agents with the contextual information to excel in their roles, these solutions are having a significant impact on employee satisfaction. By handing off routine customer queries to AI agents, companies can also strategically redeploy human representatives to more complex channels such as social media, potentially providing avenues for career advancement.
Sustainability: More and more, customers expect the brands they do business with to show a commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainable operations. In some studies, nearly 80 percent of consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. AI tools can help organizations enhance their sustainability initiatives, uncovering insights that lead to optimized resource use and more efficient operations. For instance, AI can dramatically reduce energy consumption in data centers through advanced algorithms that predict peak load times and adjust energy use accordingly. This not only cuts costs, but it also helps companies achieve the sustainability goals that their customers value.
- CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CHALLENGES
- ELEVATE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
- MEETING USER EXPECTATIONS
Most business and IT leaders are keenly aware that their customers are demanding more from the digital experience, and they are committed to delivering a seamless interaction that will reduce friction throughout the customer journey. However, this is easier said than done. To truly transform the customer experience, organizations must navigate several hurdles:
Choice of Contact Center Environment: Companies face countless choices for contact center providers. Business and IT leaders must make difficult decisions about which customer channels they want to offer, what technology should support these channels, and which vendors and service providers will help them achieve the ROI and customer satisfaction they are seeking. Complicating matters is that this is a fast-moving space, with vendors racing to integrate AI into their tools (with varying success).
Implementation: Once an organization chooses a contact center environment and the vendors to help make it a reality, technicians must roll up their sleeves to implement and integrate the components. During this process, implementation teams should prioritize high-value and business-critical use cases, taking steps to ensure that the technology promotes workflows that align with customer expectations. Data integration, system compatibility and employee adoption of new tools can all pose challenges during the implementation stage, and many organizations struggle with the transition between platforms.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Repercussions of Oversights: Contact centers are complex systems, and a single oversight in their design or implementation can have far-reaching consequences. Data migration, resource allocation, cybersecurity planning and technology integration are all likely areas for oversights. Depending on the severity of the mistake, one seemingly small overlooked detail could lead to what people in the industry jokingly refer to as a “resume-generating event” (meaning an incident that causes someone to have to look for a new job). By testing systems and gathering extensive user feedback, IT leaders can prevent these problems from popping up.
Long Wait Times and Inefficient Workflows: Almost everyone has had a customer service experience that made them want to throw the phone at the wall. Due to ineffective workflows, complex phone trees and other factors that are almost always invisible to customers, they end up repeating the same information to multiple people, being put on multiple holds and then repeating the information yet again. Poor experiences like these not only diminish customer satisfaction but can also jeopardize retention. Cleaning up these interactions can have a big impact on customer loyalty and brand reputation.
Impersonal Interactions: When implemented poorly, new contact center technologies can lead to impersonal interactions that leave customers feeling undervalued. For example, artificial intelligence can be an incredibly powerful tool to help contact center agents understand customer sentiment. But if organizations overreach with their AI initiatives, they risk alienating customers through cold and detached interactions that lack a human touch. As business and IT leaders seek to modernize their contact centers, they must set aside the hype surrounding emerging technologies and instead stay relentlessly focused on how new solutions will actually affect the customer experience.
Tech solutions are critical to enhancing the customer experience. CDW and its vendor partners provide a wide array of advanced tools that can help organizations reach their goals and build customer loyalty. From long-standing necessities such as voice technology to emerging solutions such as artificial intelligence, the IT landscape offers enormous potential for companies looking to elevate customer interactions.
Contact Center Solutions: The modern contact center has grown far beyond a room full of representatives fielding calls to a toll-free number all day. It now leverages multiple forms of communication, including voice, text messaging, chat, video, email and others. For this reason, many organizations have expanded their use of collaboration tools such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom into the contact center. When integrated seamlessly with existing infrastructure, these solutions can enable smarter call routing, live customer support and shorter wait times. Modern platforms also provide comprehensive monitoring and logging, giving managers the information and tools they need to optimize training.
Data Analytics: Sophisticated analytics tools, whether purchased separately or included as part of a contact center platform, give organizations granular insight into their customer service environments. Gone are the days when managers needed to spot-check call recordings. Instead, contact center leaders can readily access data on call length, common phrases, customer satisfaction scores, resolution rate and even customer sentiment. And in retail stores and other in-person settings, data from smart cameras can help IT and business leaders detect customer movements to identify patterns that may lead to additional insights.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Cloud Resources: CDW, in partnership with leading cloud providers, offers scalable and flexible cloud solutions that meet the unique demands of each company’s contact center environment. By migrating their contact centers to the cloud, organizations can rapidly scale resources up and down to meet changing demands — an important consideration for businesses in highly seasonal sectors such as retail, where call volumes can vary greatly depending on the time of year. A move to the cloud can also improve reliability and uptime while reducing the management and maintenance burden for internal IT staff.
Omnichannel Platforms: Customers expect to be able to interact with companies across a variety of channels. However, business and IT leaders too often claim to support omnichannel platforms when their environments are merely multichannel — meaning that channels such as voice, text, email and video are not fully integrated with one another. A poor omnichannel experience can be worse than not offering multiple channels at all: Customers will quickly become frustrated if they’re forced to repeat information every time they switch from one channel to another. These customers will often revert to voice, which is a comparatively complex and expensive channel to support.
Managed Services: By engaging a trusted third-party partner such as CDW, companies can offload many of the time-consuming tasks that are needed to provide an excellent customer experience. CDW’s managed services offerings cover the full range of IT solutions, including services around data, development, infrastructure, workspace, security and support. By strategically delegating tasks to a trusted partner, organizations can free up their staff and managers to focus on their primary objectives, without the distractions that come with supporting all aspects of their increasingly complex IT environments. With CDW providing back-end management, internal business and IT leaders can ensure that customer-facing services are efficient and reliable.
Organizations in nearly every industry are racing to find practical, value-added applications for AI. The customer contact center is rich with potential. When implemented strategically, AI solutions can generate predictive analytics that help businesses understand customer behavior, leverage natural language to interact with customers directly, and even use generative AI to provide accurate and timely responses to customer inquiries.
Improved Customer Experience: With AI, customer contact center teams can manage higher support volumes, even while improving customer satisfaction. For example, insights from AI tools can give contact center agents information about customer intent and sentiment, setting them up for more successful interactions. By strategically deploying a mix of productivity and communication bots across channels including email, social media and live chat, companies can more effectively manage growing support volumes, especially at times when they need to scale quickly (for example, during the holiday shopping season or when launching a new product).
Reduced Risk: Effectively managing the customer contact center requires a tricky balance. On one hand, companies need to support a high number of customer interactions with predictable, repeatable practices that align with corporate policy. On the other, customers are turned off by contact center interactions that feel scripted and impersonal. AI tools can help reduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies in the contact center. This is more important than ever, as customers now frequently share their experiences (both good and bad) on social media.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Hyper-Personalization: Even outside the contact center, AI tools can deliver insights that allow companies to provide personalized messaging and interactions that simply were not possible just a few years ago. Sophisticated AI tools trawl information gleaned from thousands of customer interactions — including browsing and purchase history, social media interactions, demographic trends, previous customer service interactions and customer survey data — to target customers with timely, hyper-personalized offers. According to one survey, more than half of customers (52 percent) now expect offers from brands to always be personalized.
Staff Retention: Employee burnout is a huge problem in the contact center. When customer service agents are beset by unpredictable peaks in traffic and unhappy customers, they are more likely to leave — which only exacerbates customer service backlogs. Because AI tools can scale up to meet demand and provide agents with the contextual information to excel in their roles, these solutions are having a significant impact on employee satisfaction. By handing off routine customer queries to AI agents, companies can also strategically redeploy human representatives to more complex channels such as social media, potentially providing avenues for career advancement.
Sustainability: More and more, customers expect the brands they do business with to show a commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainable operations. In some studies, nearly 80 percent of consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. AI tools can help organizations enhance their sustainability initiatives, uncovering insights that lead to optimized resource use and more efficient operations. For instance, AI can dramatically reduce energy consumption in data centers through advanced algorithms that predict peak load times and adjust energy use accordingly. This not only cuts costs, but it also helps companies achieve the sustainability goals that their customers value.
Learn how your organization
can provide its customers with a
modern digital user experience.
