Feature
The Gist
- Automation boost. Customer service automation is enhancing CX, reducing costs and improving engagement.
- AI integration. Artificial intelligence in customer service is rapidly evolving, with a push toward autonomous processing.
- Market evolution. Intelligent automation adoption is growing, with enterprises investing heavily for strategic advantage.
In today’s digital business landscape, automation plays an increasingly important role in enhancing customer experience (CX). Leading organizations are counting on customer experience automation investments to reduce their operating costs, improve customer service, increase customer engagement and gain competitive advantage.
Indeed, nearly half of organizations today see automation as a key digital differentiator, and the rate of adoption is expected to increase substantially in the next two or three years. According to the 2022 Gartner Data & Analytics for Digital Transformation Survey, 41% of enterprises across all industries are using intelligent automation today, and investment rates are expected to jump dramatically in some industries.
For example, the 2022 Gartner Financial Services Technology Survey, finds that nearly 90% of surveyed banking and investment leaders, and 83% of insurance leaders, said they expect to increase spending on hyper-automation tools through 2024. From a business outcome perspective, 54% of banking leaders and 61% of insurance leaders surveyed said they want to increase the level of automation in their organizations to gain strategic advantage.
Customer Experience Automation to Simplify Processes and Free-up Resources
One organization that sees robust investments in automation as a key to competitive edge is Hunter Douglas Inc., a global manufacturer of window blinds and coverings.
“Every day, our CX teams manage thousands of customer interactions from multiple channels, and we wanted to automate the collection and reporting of those insights,” explained Ross Garretson, vice president, customer experience at the firm. “We aimed to improve our quality assurance and training teams, and provide helpful information to product development, engineering, and other internal functions. The data collected improves our responsiveness, awareness of emerging issues, and the ability to make more informed data-driven decisions.”
Hunter Douglas is known for innovation, especially with its product development and proprietary solutions, Garretson said. That innovation requires a willingness to try new things and a focus on continuous improvement.
For investments in technology specifically, aligning technology strategy and objectives with the business case is essential. Often, the firm’s investments will align with the ability to provide an improved customer experience, generate growth, reduce rework or costs, and improve our efficiencies by providing our people with the tools (or information) to be more effective, Ross explained.
Investments in automation and related solutions can eliminate some of the more routine and repetitive tasks, Garretson continued. The outcome will result in the organization’s ability to reallocate the CX team to focus on the more complicated activities and even shift toward a customer-success type model.
Related Article: 6 AI Automation Trends in Omnichannel CX
A Combination of Customer Experience Automation Tools Provides the Biggest Payoff
There is an array of accessible tools under the umbrella of automation, and it’s through a combination of these tools that value can be created, according to Laurie Shotton, VP analyst, insurance, at research firm Gartner Inc..
“The market is maturing and being provided by a plethora of vendors that are bringing it within reach — eventually getting towards autonomous processing,” Shotton said.
It’s important for organizations to realize that some improvements in intelligent automation are in the face of the customer, while others that improve the experience are behind the scenes.
Shotton offers several examples that highlight this:
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“Chatbots are being used to support customers in servicing their policies by providing support for inquiries and enabling simple policy alterations via a chat interface, rather than traditional form or website filling.”
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“They can extend servicing capabilities hindered by legacy systems by using chatbots, APIs and RPA in conjunction with each other. Using technologies to support interactions in the front end to turn data into structured data, which is then acted upon by RPA bots in the back end.”
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“Using natural language processing (NLP) in combination with call center systems to automatically understand a customer's need and divert the call to the appropriate person who can answer the query. This avoids the need to transfer the customer between departments.”
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“Some organizations are using Intelligent document processing solutions to extract information from complex documents in areas such as insurance claims, and underwriting using LLMs and generative AI to improve and speed up decision making. The impact on the customer is much faster turnaround on these key decision points.”
These examples have focused on process improvements, but Shotton says that through the use of AI, organizations can also extend into revenue generation that will push suggested adjustments to products that better meet customer personal needs. This term is known as auto-adapting products.
Related Article: Turbocharging AI in Customer Experience for Growth
Aligning Automation Investments With Expected Business Outcomes
As organizations invest in automation technologies tied to their customer experience strategies, it is important to align metrics to the business outcomes they are looking to achieve, and not focus on big measures such as “Cost,” “Risk” and “Revenue,” Shotton said.
“These indicators quantify the underlying benefit, but also create buy-in from employees who need to be recipients of the change and will fuel new ideas for further improvements,” Shotton explained.
Also, while customer experience automation can underpin a huge proportion of the administrative and decision-based work, there can definitely be too much of a good thing when it comes to automating business tasks and processes.
Organizations often try to automate tasks too early in their maturity where the process has a high number of variations and is complex or nuanced, Shotton explained.
Over-automating in the face of the customer can create negative impacts, including frustration when a human interaction is needed, Shotton said. This can be especially true in banking, insurance and healthcare, where organizations and customers have a highly emotional event that requires human empathy and engagement.
With AI seeing unparalleled hype, especially from generative AI, enterprise leaders should now push intelligent automation initiatives and hasten toward autonomous processing, Shotton said. Generative AI will be a component in the customer experience automation, enhancing the impact and value of some projects.
But it is important that organizations monitor the impact of automated processes on customer feedback along the journey.
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“As we explore new opportunities through the advancements in AI and other technologies, we plan to pay close attention to the user experience,” Garretson stressed. “I believe the ‘hands-off’ items are the solutions that do not add value to the customer — or are deployed simply for the sake of it. Technology should be an enabler of our strategy and provide a more personalized and proactive customer experience.”
