Tomorrow’s Customer Service: AI and the Rise of Empowered Agents

The Gist

• Real-time decision making. Barry Cooper describes how NICE's AI enhances real-time decision-making, empowering agents with actionable insights.
• Automating routine tasks. Keith Farley talks about balancing automation with empathy, enabling agents to focus on complex, emotionally nuanced interactions.
• Transforming agent experiences. Tom Laird highlights how AI tools are revolutionizing agent tasks, providing improved accuracy and reducing after-call work.
• Future of AI in contact centers. Barry Cooper and Keith Farley envision an agent-bot co-pilot model that shifts the dynamic, enhancing agent roles and customer outcomes. 

Editor's note: This transcript was edited for clarity and brevity. This podcast is a derivative of Barry, Tom, and Keith's interviews with Dom Nicastro on the CMSWire TV show Beyond the Call. 

Dom Nicastro: Welcome back to CX Decoded, brought to you by CMSWire. I’m Dom Nicastro, your host, and editor-in-chief here at CMSWire. In this episode, we're weaving together insights from two separate CMSWire TV "Beyond the Call: interviews:

• Bots to Biz Growth: AI's New Role in Customer Experience
• Human First: How Aflac Combines AI With Authentic Connection

We've spoken with Barry Cooper, president of NICE’s CX Division, and Tom Laird, CEO of Expivia, as well as Keith Farley, SVP of Individual Voluntary Benefits at Aflac.

Today, we get into the role of AI in customer service, demonstrating how it’s being integrated into contact centers for customer and agent experiences alike. But not only AI — we get into the latest innovations in contact centers, customer support, and service even if it doesn’t include our bot friends. Let's dive into our discussion with four key takeaways.

Takeaway 1: Enhancing Real-Time Decision Making

Dom Nicastro: Our first takeaway examines how AI is enhancing real-time decision-making capabilities, empowering agents with instant insights to better support customer interactions.

Barry Cooper: First of all, AI is not new for NICE. We come from a background of having billions of label interactions. And back in 2019, 2020, we launched Enlighten, which with the first few models based on those kind of labeled interactions. They were mostly around agent behaviors and CSAT, that kind of stuff.

So we've been in, we've been doing this now for this is our fourth year going full out, full swing on AI. Last year, we were able to integrate and include Gen AI into our AI solutions to give a nice semantic front end AI making very nice copilot, autopilot interfaces.

But first thing, this is not new for us. So you probably heard at Interactions. You know, we have over 1,500 customers that use our AI now, billions of AI interventions on our platform happening already. So the whole theme of Interactions was CX AI realized because we get a little bit miffed by all of the hype that's out there that's not real. So if you were at Interactions, you heard from many of our customers that have deployed AI for self service, for knowledge, all that kind of stuff, and achieve great results from that already.

So, you know, for us, we're in kind of stage three of our AI adoption. It's very, very exciting for the company.

I created a couple of years ago a separate AI division within NICE which is now a huge burgeoning division. We have almost every enterprise deal we close now includes AI of some kind, and at a really high level, our AI solutions focus in really three domains, three personas.

First of all is kind of automated intelligence. So that's AI for the consumer, kind of replacing agents on some of the activities, some of the use cases with bots that actually work, that sound like people, that act like people, that do things very, very efficiently. This is category number one.

Category number two is what we call augmented intelligence. So this is AI for the agents, or for the supervisor or for the administrators that superpower those people allow them to do things they couldn't do before.

And finally, we have, like, AI for the CX leader. And if you've seen it, Enlightened actions, that's exactly what that is, a solution that allows CX leaders to query everything using AI, using a generative AI interface, to find out what's going on, get, you know, make skill changes, all that kind of stuff on the fly.

Related Article: AI's Role in Shaping the Future of Customer Experience

Dom Nicastro: Tom Laird's perspective emphasizes a crucial shift in how AI is being leveraged within contact centers—not just for customer-facing interactions, but more importantly, to transform the agent experience.

Tom Laird: ...And again, we've had these tools, and so many tools have been just customer facing, where AI is really the first kind of platform or group of technologies that we can really go down the funnel to to improve agent experience.

You know, if you look at even things like auto summarization, right, while that can be, you know, kind of a handle time and then kind of just making some things a little bit easier on the KPIs, it's also making things a lot easier on the agent, right? No more memoing, no more mistakes when you're memoing, being able to maybe take a breath instead of working for that 15 seconds or 20 seconds or 30 seconds of after call work.

Even looking at, you know, looking at OttoQA, right, looking at those type of platforms, where, before, we would score two calls per agent per week, and if they failed one, that agent was maybe not going to get their bonus.

But now we have the ability to score multiple calls, up to 100% of calls, and that really paints a better picture, I think, for the agent, for that agent experience.

Takeaway 2: Automating Routine Tasks

Dom Nicastro: Our second takeaway dives into how AI is automating routine, mundane tasks, thereby freeing agents to handle more complex and emotionally nuanced interactions.

Keith Farley: It is a balance. I mean, we have to remember that when people reach out to us, it's often one of the worst days of their life. They've been diagnosed with a disease, maybe they've lost a loved one, maybe they've been in an accident. They could be in physical pain. So it's not like reaching out to someone to order a pizza or to book a flight, you know, or to buy a shirt. I mean, it is. It is a much deeper emotional experience.

And one of the things that we try to remember when we balance technology and empathy and all the buzz is AI as well it should be, because it's exciting. But the first word in AI is artificial, and sometimes what you want is authentic, not artificial. And so we try to remember, let's be authentic. Let's remember where people are coming from when they reach out to us, where their mindset is. They might be calling us from a hospital or a doctor's office or at home again, if they've been dealt some bad news. So we want to make sure that we've got a human-first approach.

Now we do use AI and automation to handle more of the simple things. So you need to change your address, that's a job for AI. You know, you want to update some billing information or add a dependent, remove a dependent, that can be handled with self-service tools, digital tools, or AI, but when you need to talk through a diagnosis and understand your coverages, that's when we think it's probably right for most people to speak to a human. Some people still want to do it all digital, but we want to make sure that it's omnichannel, however you want to have it, we can do it, whether it's with a human or if you want to work with one of the automations.

Dom Nicastro: And what if the agents are the ones who are empowered to get the most out of the bots? What if the agent is the assistant to the AI bot?

Barry Cooper: And the really interesting thing is, today we talk about Enlighten being the co-pilot to the agent. You know, pretty soon the agent's going to be the co-pilot for Enlighten, and that is, you know, the bots are going to be handling a lot of the interactions, but every now and again, a bot’s going to run into trouble, and the bot’s going to put its hand up, and it's going to be the agent that gets in there and helps the bot out.

So it's this role reversal that we see is going to happen over the next few years or so. So we're creating solutions that are actually going to enable that. So I truly believe that come three, four, or five years from now, the role of an agent is going to be turned on its head, and they'll be overseeing all these AI bots doing different things. And it's going to be very, very interesting.

Related Article: The Wrong Way to Do CX Automation

Takeaway 3: Improving Agent and Customer Experience

Dom Nicastro: For our third takeaway, we look at how contact centers are inspiring agents and customer experience by providing in-depth insights and predictive analytics, enhancing the overall service quality."

Tom Laird: I'm a huge analytics person. It's been one of the biggest drivers of our business, not just from a cultural aspect, but even from a monetary aspect, with other customers, being able to really dissect and give marketing data, right, where nobody thought that that could happen.

So, like, Enlighten actions, for me is like, how, right? It's like, you know, I don't want to look at dashboards anymore, right? I want to ask specific questions and get those answers. And I think that's the stuff that's really cool, that's really exciting, that, you know, you don't have to be that giant, smart, PhD analyst, right to do analytics, to get really deep insights into what's happening.

So the customer experience is, I don't want to say it's going to take care of itself, but, you know, we're working on that. The agent experience is being worked on, and I think also this analytic piece right, of really digging deep into data, because now it's not just, it's not just CCaaS or telephony data, but it's your sales data, it's your marketing data. It's having all these different data sources together, and how do we really utilize that as a business-changing opportunity, instead of, again, that's where the contact center really starts to take off as a driver of business, instead of just that, the thing that answers the painful calls from customers.

Dom Nicastro: And when it comes to some of those key analytics, what’s top of mind for Keith?

Keith Farley: I would say the number one that we look for is ease. And in today's world, if it's not easy, you're not going to do it. You have choices. You have selections you're going to go with. You know, the one that was easy to do.

So we have E-scores that are measured via post call surveys. That's the number one metric for our contact centers to say, was this easy on a scale of one to 10? How easy was this? We do look at things like, you know, average, handle time, speed to answer. You know, you have to if you're running a contact center, you need those metrics to keep the engine going. Yeah.

But the one that really matters at the end, it doesn't matter how quickly you answer my call are, from a metric standpoint, internally, how short the call was, right? Or for the policyholder doesn't want to spend a lot of time….was I able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish? And was it easy? So that's the main thing for us."

Takeaway 4: The Future of AI in Customer Service

Dom Nicastro: Our final takeaway looks forward to the future of AI in customer service, imagining the innovative applications yet to come that will further transform the contact center landscape. Let’s start with Keith.

Keith Farley: Yeah, I would say for us, it's all about claims automation. It's leveraging AI. AI can read all of the paperwork, including the doctor's handwriting, which is amazing, because humans can't read doctor's handwriting.

But you know the ability to automate claims right now, where over 55% our claims are automated, where the computer can literally read your policy and read the hospital notes of what happened and match up exactly what the payment should be. And that means that we're going to have faster payments, higher quality payments, you know, in many cases, that are straight through the process.

So for us, you know, when you go back to ease and customer experience, you know, when folks have something happen, they just want to be paid, and they want to be paid quickly. And so I would say automation, and some of the things that we're doing there with AI is probably our next new frontier.

Dom Nicastro: Barry says the future is simply limitless when it comes to CX.

Barry Cooper: If anyone is listening to this, you're probably in the CX space, and CX has never been as important as it is today. You know, we like to say that CX, you know, is no longer just part of the business. CX is the business now.

So many industries, you know, become commoditized and the products, there's only so much you can do with pricing, and many of the products become the same. So the only way that organizations can differentiate themselves and win new customers is CX.

And you see how hot the space is right now, the amount of dollars being invested, our growth, you know, we're double digit growth now from years and years and years, you know, we've come from being a half a billion dollar company just a few years ago to approaching $3 billion now.

So just the amount of investment, the amount of excitement. What I love is that, you know, I get to look at some of the lab stuff we're doing that's maybe two or three years away. That stuff is incredible, guys; it's going to be game changing when it comes, you know. Anyone loves to be at the forefront of revolutions. This is a revolution in CX. The amount being invested is huge, and the space is going to transform, because CX is so important.

Dom Nicastro: And finishing up…..Tom Laird’s thoughts about the future? A more empowered – and richer – contact center agent.

Tom Laird: We're in a weird spot as an industry, because I think when I look out at where even my company will be in, say, three to five years, we've turned from a contact center outsourcer that supplies agents to answer calls, to now really a CX technology partner that specializes in contact center outsourcing, right?

Meaning, I think that the contact center associate that now is maybe that entry level person is about to become one of the most high valued employees in your organization, because they're not going to handle that stuff as to Barry's point AI is going to take 30, 40% of all the tasks away, and it's going to leave us with these really difficult tasks that maybe 10 years from now, it starts to take care of.

But right now, I think that we're trying to figure out what that line is, and as in, technology is just going so fast, right? Sometimes it can be hard to figure out really, where that is. At the same point, we do have to do that. We in our initial education even how to talk, right? Like there's different everybody texts now. Like, if we have younger employees that are 20-30 years old, right, they've grown up with a cell phone their whole life, they're texting more than they're talking. So you do have to do a lot of that from a contact center agent standpoint, I think AI is trying to help with that a little bit as well.

But again, I think we're in a bridge point right now that we have this conversation in a couple years, I think you're going to see that contact center agent position elevated, much higher pay, doing much more difficult tasks because of what's happening on the on the AI standpoint.

AI and the Future of Customer Service and Customer Support

Dom Nicastro: And that wraps up today's episode on where AI and innovation meet customer service. As we've heard from our experts, the infusion of AI into customer service not only streamlines operations but profoundly enriches the roles of those at the heart of customer interactions. Thank you to Barry, Tom, and Keith for sharing their insights.

Stay tuned to CX Decoded for more discussions that help you navigate the evolving landscape of customer experience. Until next time, keep innovating and stay customer-focused!