• by Scott Kolman , Columnist, July 12, 2018

I don’t envy today’s digital brands. When it comes to optimizing customer journeys, they’re facing a three-headed beast: data gives brands that can wrangle it a competitive advantage in delivering personalized experiences, customers are interacting with brands through multiple channels online and offline, and they are ready to abandon their journeys at the first sign of a poor experience.

How can brands handle these complexities to deliver the best journey to as many customers as possible? The answer lies in a combination of humans, artificial intelligence and some grade-school math. 

Our journey today begins in the contact center, where an alchemy of empathetic human agents and data-driven AI can deliver exponential value to extending and enhancing a customer’s ongoing journey. 

Artificial intelligence holds tantalizing promise for just about every industry. Customer service is no exception. Some have predicted that machines will eventually take over the contact center, but as a pivotal component of the customer journey, delivering personalized experiences to customers through the contact center will continue to require both humans and machines. 

Computers operate on conventional either/or binary logic input/output; if this, then that. Even the brightest AI thinks 1+1=2, and it takes considerable programming and learning to convince it otherwise. But in the world of customer experience, it isn’t always that clear. Often a contact center agent is dealing with a unique, unpredictable and hyper-personalized situation that requires them to bend the rules or interpret what the customer needs, thereby redefining this logic to 1+1=3. This is where the respective strengths of human agents and software can complement each other in this phase of the customer journey, ensuring that 1+1 usually equals 3.

This is not to say that, on their own, humans and AI cannot provide unique value-adds along the customer journey inside the contact center. Humans understand context, loyalty and empathy, and can quickly pivot to come up with new solutions to even the most bizarre customer concerns. Not to mention the comfort level most customers have with human contact center agents. Where AI excels is at processing information -- like customer intent, past transactions, reason for calling, etc. -- and providing helpful solutions more quickly than humans..

Both human agents and AI, however, have proven to be insufficient at truly optimizing the customer journey on their own. In any customer journey there are moments of truth when involving empathetic, proactive, quick-thinking human agents is necessary. This often occurs at a pivotal decision point or at a delicate moment when a customer’s loyalty or a sale could be gained or lost. It is these moments in which an agent’s careful intervention might save a customer relationship.

The opposite situation is just as true. We’ve all been put on hold by a customer service representative while s/he spends 30 minutes searching for an answer. This is where AI can augment the human agent. AI capabilities like intelligent routing and prescriptive guidance can enable human agents to much more efficiently resolve customer queries, reducing call times and keeping customers happy. 

Until recently, contact centers were cost centers, not revenue drivers. Those days are coming to an end. Smart companies now realize the importance of the contact center in the customer journey and its potential to reinforce the brand promise, drive loyalty, happy customers and -- ultimately -- revenue. To tame today’s customer journey beast, a human- or AI-only approach simply won’t work. 1+1=2 isn’t enough.