Check out fresh industry insights on how AI is changing customer and employee experiences – with key takeaways for your own business transformation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an ever greater role in both employee and customer experience. The technology can foster the collaboration needed to innovate and enhance customer interactions at every touchpoint. What’s more, it can streamline internal workflows to enhance employee engagement and experience.
To shed light on AI’s transformative impact on CX and EX operations, RingCentral is featuring a new report, entitled How AI is Changing Employee & Customer Experiences. It includes the latest research from industry experts at Metrigy on how top-performing companies are deploying AI to benefit their customers and employees.
Read on for three key takeaways.
1. AI Must be Actionable to Positively Impact CX and EX
There’s no question that AI is a hot topic among business decision makers. IT, CX, and business unit leaders that participated in Metrigy’s study spend about $3.3M a year on AI technology. This figure is set to increase in 2024, and companies plan on increasing AI spend for both customer experience and employee experience initiatives.
How are businesses investing in AI?
What is the ROI for AI?
The good news is that nearly half of the companies participating in the study are already seeing a return on their AI investments, and another 23.6% expect to realize ROI in 2024. The key to achieving results is to be intentional about driving tangible value from your AI implementations.
For example, AI is resolving an average of 41% of customer interactions without live agent support for all study participants. That figure jumps to 51.5% for the study’s “success group,” or those companies that realized higher-than-average improvements in business success metrics through the use of AI.
The research also found that reducing after-call work is another way AI tangibly augments contact center staffing. Among the study participants, agents are saving 5.8 minutes per call, for an average time savings of 35%. The improvements vary by industry, with hospitality realizing the biggest gain, of 54.1%, in time saved.
How does AI augment staffing?
More than 40% of companies say AI:
Users of RingCentral’s RingSense AI note similar benefits. RingSense is an AI-powered platform that integrates deeply into the RingCentral suite, leveraging conversational intelligence to analyze business communications and collaboration.
RingSense AI includes features like interaction analysis, sentiment analysis, and automated conversational summaries, which support business functions such as sales, customer service, and overall communication strategies. It’s designed to transform conversation data into actionable insights, helping businesses unlock better experiences for their employees and customers.
“When our team was manually reviewing 20 of our 1,500 daily calls, that was just over 1%, and it took a massive amount of our time. I’ve reclaimed about 20 hours of my time every week.
That’s 20 hours I can now devote to more important things to help Tarrytown Expocare and the customers and patients we serve,”said Matt Pernesky, Director of Customer Experience at Tarrytown Expocare Pharmacy, a RingCentral customer using RingSense AI. “The business intelligence we’re now able to glean thanks to RingSense AI is amazing,”
Melody Brue, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “AI can play a crucial role in improving the employee experience. By making data more actionable, AI will streamline workflows and unlock new levels of efficiency. As an early preview tester, I saw that RingSense AI is an intuitive assistant designed to help users optimize employee and customer outcomes by providing data-driven insights across multiple channels.”
2. You Must Exercise Caution When Implementing AI for CX and EX
Even as AI spending accelerates, companies are being mindful about implementation to ensure the best possible results in customer and employee experience.
According to Metrigy’s research, companies are being particularly careful about generative AI, and their concerns include data privacy, wrong answers/hallucination and bias, among others. These concerns reflect macro-level conversations about generative AI risks, and consumers share many of these worries.
What are your company’s concerns about using Generative AI?
The research also finds that companies are considering best practices such as human oversight of generated content.
For example, 81% say either all or some generated content must have human oversight before they’ll use it, even when generative AI is pulling from their own managed and accurate knowledge base. Study participants also expect solid service-level agreements with providers and clear data use policies.
At RingCentral, for example, we prioritize customer trust and are dedicated to ensuring privacy, security, and transparency by implementing privacy by design. Our AI applications include human oversight for precise outcomes and are continually refined based on user input. We rigorously test AI capabilities for bias, equity, and accessibility across diverse groups, and every AI feature is subjected to legal scrutiny and stakeholder evaluation to guarantee inclusivity for all customers.
What should companies look for when implementing Generative AI?
Beyond privacy and accuracy, businesses are defining new expectations for what AI success looks like, particularly in the field of customer experience.
Nearly half of the participants in Metrigy’s study expect AI to help gain them an understanding of why customers interact, so they can then respond appropriately.
RingCentral agrees that this is an important function of AI. Our RingSense AI features for voice interactions enhance call recordings with summaries, keywords, and insights on talk time and sentiment, facilitating easy understanding of communication dynamics.
Additionally, our Conversation Analytics features for RingCX provide insights on how often specific words and phrases appear in customer conversations, and what issues frustrate customers the most. This actionable feedback boosts agent performance, and helps contact centers optimize resource costs by ensuring the right mix of agents and skills.
3. Tailoring CX and EX AI Solutions to Unique Business Challenges and Personas is Vital
Another key finding of Metrigy’s research is that tailoring AI solutions for specific use cases can help companies effectively address everyday challenges, enhance operational efficiency, and gain deeper insights into their customers’ behaviors and preferences.
For example, agent assist use cases, such as providing context about customers or topics and helping agents upsell and cross-sell, drove impressive improvements across the board, but especially for the success group, as shown in the chart below.
When asked which generative AI use cases were most valuable, respondents named the following as their top 3: optimizing management and administration of applications and devices; interaction summaries; and generating different kinds of content for agents and customers.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Explore the best uses of AI-generated content for enhancing customer experience for your customers and your unique business operations.
Evaluate whether it’s most beneficial for automating customer self-service interactions, assisting marketers in crafting emails, supporting agents during customer engagements, or perhaps a combination of these applications. That’s the best way to harness AI for both employee experience and customer experience.
Top Use Cases for Generative AI
RingCentral, too, takes a “purpose-built” approach to RingSense AI, which is designed for specific use cases and verticals, with tangible outcomes across sales, marketing, and support.
For example, RingSense for Sales accelerates deal closures for revenue teams by transforming insights into effective strategies that foster operational excellence. With RingSense AI integrated into RingCentral Events, marketing teams can streamline event management from start to finish.
The Age of AI in Customer Experience & Employee Engagement is Already Here
As AI continues to transform the customer experience landscape, businesses are seizing its potential to drive substantial enhancements across both customer and employee interactions. However, merely adopting AI isn’t sufficient.
That’s why RingCentral’s approach to AI focuses on leveraging conversational intelligence throughout our core platform. We’re building a new world where AI meets trusted communications, one in which AI-driven communications for everyone will empower every person in an organization to contribute to the success of the business.
Our strategy is aimed at transforming everyday conversations into valuable insights that can improve both employee performance and customer interactions. RingSense also integrates with other business tools to provide a holistic view of communication strategies, supporting better decision-making, more efficient processes across business functions, and better ROI.
We look forward to continuing to empower businesses to innovate intelligently in this era of AI transformation.
Originally published Jun 20, 2024
