Businesses today have a heightened focus on new and better ways to deliver services to customers. As they explore how to succeed in this new world, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing as the enabler of the best customer experiences. And the current global situation likely will accelerate the proliferation of digital.

Think of AI and digital as two sides of the same coin. Through digital, you collect petabytes of data on your customers. But the only way you can absorb, analyze, parse and effectively use these digital insights is to put AI on top of it. As businesses think about how to digitize and transform the contact center, making data AI-ready will be critical to success. Here are four trends driving that.

  1. AI Is Here to Stay

AI is a $97-billion industry that’s touching all areas of business — and all vertical industries. Everyone agrees with the value of AI and the investment needed; the challenge is where to spend it. Corporate functions must create compelling business cases to convince leadership to spend the share of wallet in their areas. As a contact center admin or CXO, differentiation and personalization are keys to success.

  1. Personalized Experiences Drive the Push Beyond Traditional Data Platforms

As you try to more closely connect with your customers, the challenge is to do it in a way that differentiates your brand. Many companies tout their customer data platform (CDP), which collects data about a particular customer. But simply collecting that data doesn’t mean you’re segmenting data or enriching it for personalization. That requires a platform that enables you to create complete customer profiles. In other words, you need to go beyond a single interaction to capture — in real time — what the customer is doing through the entire lifecycle of their relationship with your business.

These capabilities enable you to determine intent and act on that insight at the precise moment of truth. Customers now expect this high level of personalization and a traditional CDP isn’t going to deliver that experience.

  1. Omnichannel Experience Is a Must to Unify Context

Today, customers regularly interact with brands in multiple ways — SMS, over the web, email or voice. Again, digital and AI are two sides of the same coin: How do you ensure that the person calling in on the phone is the same one who sent you an SMS? Being able to unify those interactions and maintain the historical context is critical to creating a positive customer experience. With the right platform, you can see benefits from AI and digital without having to do an entire data transformation.

  1. Optimization and Analytics are Keys to Achieve Business Outcomes

Anything you deliver from an AI standpoint must be tied to analytics and platform. This ensures that the contact center admin or customer experience officer can validate the benefits to the business because of how they deployed AI. 

Where to Begin: Start With AI-Ready Data

According to a recent Forrester data and analytics survey, 53% of businesses are going to implement AI or have done so in some form. That means almost half haven’t. There are still a lot of challenges in how to approach AI and how to get better ROI at scale.

Tackling a full data transformation can feel overwhelming. Yet, it isn’t necessary when you have an AI-powered customer experience platform. Making data AI-ready is the first step toward differentiation — and it’s at the core of Genesys AI. It gives you the foundation to:

  • Engage proactively: Show customers that you know them and understand their needs before you meet them, and even before they know they have a problem. Let’s say you subscribe to a certain data plan with your cell phone provider. Recently, your usage has risen by 25%, which isn’t typical for you. Using AI-ready data, your provider can set up a trigger to contact you proactively and offer a different plan that’s more in line with your unique needs.
  • Understand the journey customers take: Customer journeys can differ greatly among individuals, even when the outcome is the same. If your customer starts engagement on your website, then interacts with a chatbot before going to an agent, they don’t want to be asked – yet again – “How can I help you?” Give your agent all the milestones of that journey, including the disposition, on their personal desktop so they can continue the conversation from wherever it left off (e.g., chatbot, self-service app and so on). Understanding what individuals have experienced in past interactions gives your agents context during engagement.
  • Give customers answers they want, including the ones they didn’t know they needed: When trying to find a solution, customers often have tunnel vision: “This is what I need to resolve.” But the cause of the problem might not be evident. Customers count on their favorite brands to anticipate their needs. If someone calls about car insurance, give that person relevant bundling options. Sharing insights for the benefit of customers creates goodwill and a more empathetic workforce.

The Future of AI Starts Today

End-to-end, personalized and cloud-delivered experiences enable businesses to deliver empathy at scale and build deeper, long-term relationships with customers. Start with AI-ready data and give your agents more opportunity to connect with customers in meaningful ways.

Take our self-guided tour and learn how Genesys AI can help you deliver the best cloud-based customer experiences