With every contact center looking to deploy AI, and every vendor looking to sell their solutions, organizations need bigger picture thinking. Most vendors offer core AI capabilities for improving customer experience (CX), but contact center decision-makers need more than just features. They need a clear understanding of the vision behind these capabilities and guidance on where and how to achieve tangible results. While measuring ROI for AI can be challenging, contact centers benefit from well-established use cases with defined success metrics.
RingCentral’s approach leverages AI to deliver effortless CX, ensuring interactions are intuitive, personalized, and seamless across all channels. While that may seem like a lofty outcome for contact centers struggling to support customers using legacy systems, it’s precisely what we’ve brought to market with RingCX. Our solution goes beyond just being AI-first; it truly differentiates by being built around both CX and EX (employee experience).
Differentiating with AI for Both CX and EX
Modern CX today encompasses both live agent interactions and chat and voice bot engagements for virtual customer service. In some cases, customers will just need one of these modes, but increasingly they need both. This means contact centers must now excel in supporting all these scenarios. By doing so, they can build customer trust, not only through improved care but also by leveraging today’s AI tools to deliver superior outcomes.
Thinking of the bigger picture theme, decisions about deploying AI are being made across multiple departments within an organization – not just in the contact center – and this is central to RingCX’s value proposition. While our market-leading UCaaS offering, RingEX, provides AI capabilities for all employees, including knowledge workers for collaboration, such as marketing and sales teams and support agents for customer care, our CCaaS offering, RingCX, addresses the dual needs of CX and EX in AI deployment.
A recent Metrigy Research study validates our comprehensive approach for the broader market. The data reveals that current and planned AI applications are remarkably similar for both customer and employee interactions. While the specific AI implementations may differ between these groups, optimal CX outcomes depend on providing AI capabilities for both. This underscores the importance of a holistic strategy that addresses both customer and employee needs through AI integration.
RingCentral’s AI Focus for CX
At a high level, automation is a leading driver for AI adoption, but decision makers should know what that means at ground level, where customers are engaging with the contact center in real time. For RingCX, we break this down into four distinct areas:
1. Frontline efficiency
First and foremost, AI has to make the agent’s job easier, both for managing the workload and providing great CX. Real-time call transcripts ensure accuracy for capturing the conversation, eliminating the need for customers to repeat information and enabling supervisors to monitor script adherence and compliance. Automatic call summaries free up agents to focus more on customer interactions, while AI-generated action items streamline follow-up processes. These features not only help agents prioritize their responses, but also provide supervisors with a comprehensive roadmap for team management. By automating these tasks, AI empowers agents to deliver more personalized and efficient customer service.
2. Customer sentiment
This is where AI brings entirely new capabilities that go beyond the content of conversations to recognizing the sentiment of customers in the moment. Not all agents can pick up the nuances that provide extra layers of insight into customers’ feelings and behaviors. AI’s ability to capture and analyze inputs at scale enables it to apply predictive analytics, generating data-driven responses that surpass individual agent capabilities. This technology can provide real-time guidance to agents during customer interactions and empower supervisors to offer immediate coaching. It also serves as a valuable tool for training new agents, creating a comprehensive support system that enhances overall contact center performance.
3. Self-service
While AI plays a crucial role in supporting agents, it also significantly enhances self-service automation, a key focus for improving CX. RingCX offers advanced chatbots, or Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs), which use conversational AI to far surpass the capabilities of legacy IVR systems. This approach helps contact centers manage increasing call volumes and efficiently directs simpler queries away from live agents. As a result, human agents can focus on more complex issues that truly require their expertise, optimizing resource allocation and improving overall service quality.
4. Call routing
Most contact centers remain tied to IVR systems, which by their legacy nature, lack intelligence for call routing. Because most inbound inquiries are still telephony-based, there is a pressing need here to re-think how calls are routed. The scalability of AI means that your contact center can now manage all incoming calls with more intelligent routing, both for automated and live agent handling. AI significantly outperforms legacy IVR systems in real-time call routing, intelligently determining whether a call is best handled through self-service or by a live agent. It also excels at connecting callers with the most appropriate agent, leading to improved first call resolution (FCR) rates and reducing the need for transfers. This advanced routing capability enhances overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Bigger Picture Results
RingCX’s comprehensive approach delivers far-reaching results that extend beyond initial expectations. By significantly enhancing self-service capabilities, RingCX drives operational efficiencies and provides an effective solution for managing increasing call volumes without expanding your workforce. Moreover, it empowers agents with real-time AI-driven insights, enabling them to deliver more personalized and effective service. Ultimately, RingCX’s holistic AI integration strategy yields tangible benefits across multiple facets of your contact center operations.
Setting expectations for AI can be challenging for contact center leaders, but our view is that you should expect more. We are already seeing AI’s impact for our customers, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t expect the same. Below are some of the big picture metrics we’re seeing.
- 29% improvement in customer sentiment
- 80% reduction in time to close cases
- 19-point increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Each of these success metrics has its own merit, but you should also consider the range here, as these collectively speak to the bigger-picture we have for RingCX. Improving customer sentiment can catalyze a cascade of positive outcomes, not just for agents and customers, but your brand.
Add to that, when agents can resolve customer requests in less time, you can handle more calls in the same amount of time as before. Finally, big bumps in NPS will be great news for senior management, as this metric reflects the strength of your brand, demonstrating that your vision for AI goes beyond streamlining the contact center. These are just a few of the success metrics we’re seeing with our customers. If this vision of AI-driven CX resonates with your goals, request a demo today!
Originally published Jul 25, 2024
