How 8×8 uses conversational AI to improve customer, employee dialogues

The first tool, Conversation IQ, extends contact center capabilities — such as quality management and speech analytics — to all 8×8 cloud communications users. As the name implies, the tool uses conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to extract insights from dialogues. Conversation IQ is delivered via 8×8’s eXperience communications as a service (XCaaS), which brings together unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) in a single cloud platform. Last week at the Enterprise Connect event, 8×8, a provider of enterprise cloud-based communications solutions, unveiled two easily deployable tools with a simple user interface to help organizations improve both the customer and the employee experience.

How Voice Is Changing Customer Experience Practices for the Better

The advice is for business leaders to educate themselves on the implications of AI. They need to understand not just the technology, but the impact on existing processes and in turn the impact on the culture of the enterprise. They pointed out the need to collect all relevant data about the customers’ preferences. These are the timeless questions about their expectations, and their perception of the current relationship with the brand, and how they wanted to be treated, and how they have been treated. They really set the bar for what the future could look like, and it has taken us 30 years to build the technology to achieve their vision.

Voice Is the Future of the Customer Experience

Conversational AI leverages the latest technologies, but it requires situational awareness and an overall understanding of what’s going on from a people, process and content standpoint to truly improve the customer experience. This stark contrast in customer experiences became evident for millions of us over the past year, as organizations across all industries struggled to maintain business operations while volumes increased. NICE inContact is a call center and customer experience (CX) platform vendor with more than a decade in the business. Chris Bauserman, VP of product and segment marketing for NICE inContact tells us what you should be thinking about when bringing AI into VoC programs, and how it is changing the playing field now and in the future. First companies will get access to more data and types of data they never had before. Second, they will be able to not only record what is being said by customers, but using AI will be able to analyze pitch and tone to understand a customer’s disposition.

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First, customer experience (CX) professionals need to get more familiar and comfortable with AI overall and understand its technology requirements, processes, benefits and limitations. Since according to Maxie “only 21 percent of people in a CX role communicate metrics in ways that drive action,” it is step number one that CX pros need to get better at translating metrics into action, and leveraging AI is a great way to do that. Another thing Maxie warns us to be wary of is that setting up AI can potentially put a burden on internal broken processes and systems you already have in place. “ChatGPT and traditional LLM chatbots will continue to advance and become more sophisticated in their ability to understand and respond to customer interactions. With wider public awareness, more customers will expect the GPT-level of conversation ability from chat functions, leaving first-gen scripted bots in the dust,” predicts Conversica’s Kaskade. A recent survey conducted by AI company Conversica shows that first-gen chatbots experienced by users are not living up to customer expectations.

• Not only do chatbots face challenges in understanding inputs, but they also struggle to deliver satisfactory outcomes.
• Hyro automatically scrapes a variety of data sources including websites, databases, application programming interfaces (APIs) and more, and when content is updated, the conversation is also updated.
• Looking at purchase data, they would find that people who return things are more inclined to purchase more, so helping expedite this process would lead to more sales.
• The firm said four out of five buyers abandon the chat experience if the answers don’t address their unique needs.
• IndiGo also used automation for customer campaigns that share airline information and promote discounts via push notifications.
• ChatGPT and other turbo-charged models and bots are set to play a crucial role in customer interactions in the coming years, according to Juniper Research.

Enabling Employees to Better Serve

• Liberty London worked with the San Francisco CX software company Zendesk to use AI to automatically classify and route customer support tickets to “the right team at the right time,” which helped the store manage busy customer service periods.
• The next step is for the enterprise to develop a plan to bring together the right team to blend Generative AI into existing customer experience programs.
• After more than 18 months of experience, we have ample proof of the ability of generative AI-powered bots to deflect calls to human agents, and also as a way to deflect human interactions when the customer has a simple query.

The firm said four out of five buyers abandon the chat experience if the answers don’t address their unique needs. ChatGPT and other turbo-charged models and bots are set to play a crucial role in customer interactions in the coming years, according to Juniper Research. A recent report from the analyst firm predicts that AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of 2023. Large language model–driven artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots burst into prominence in recent weeks, capturing enterprise leaders’ attention across various industries. One such chatbot, ChatGPT, made especially notable waves in the tech world, garnering over 1 million users within a week of its launch. Automating common requests using AI virtual agents to minimize repetitive work for agents is the first step.