A growing number of service providers in Australia and elsewhere are incorporating AI into their customer experience (CX) strategies, explains global technology research and advisory firm, Information Services Group (ISG), in its latest report.
The 2023 ISG Provider Lens Customer Experience Services report for Australia also found that the rise of remote work and other factors have significantly changed the way enterprises interact with their customers. Meanwhile, CX has become a much more closely watched measure of company performance. Contact centres are now strategic assets, and organisations are adopting new technologies, including AI and analytics, to address contact centre challenges.
Similarly to much of the rest of the world, many Australian organisations are embracing home-based and hybrid work modes for roles involved in delivering CX, making the work-from-home concept an accepted norm, the report explains.
This change has made workforce management, including the task of ensuring infrastructure is secure, more challenging.
ISG also explains that, following the pandemic, enterprises in Australia are moving to cloud-based contact centre solutions to ensure business continuity during crises. At the same time, increasing reliance on low-cost, digital self-service channels, such as smartphone apps, asynchronous messaging and chatbots, is leading more organisations to shift from captive contact centres to third-party providers that bundle these technologies with their services.
Jarrod Magill, director at ISG Australia
“Contact centres in Australia are evolving into intelligent CX centres,” said Jarrod Magill, director at ISG Australia. “Despite many disruptions to the way Australian companies operate, digital technology is now generating insights and predictions that help contact centres better respond to customers.
“During the pandemic, some clients repatriated voice services in an effort to improve CX. This has broadly been unsuccessful, with little evidence to show onshore teams outperform offshore teams.
“The significant cost increase has not been offset by gains, causing many clients to begin moving work offshore to third parties.”
Analytics tools based on AI and ML are the way forward
Magill also explained: “During the pandemic, some clients repatriated voice services in an effort to improve CX. This has broadly been unsuccessful, with little evidence to show onshore teams outperform offshore teams. The significant cost increase has not been offset by gains, causing many clients to begin moving work offshore to third parties.”
According to ISG in its report, analytics tools based on AI and ML expand the possibilities for using data from multiple sources to understand customer needs and provide better CX. This includes both structured data, such as transactions, and unstructured data, including from social media and web browsing.
In addition, contact centre managers can use information from customer interactions to improve poor agent performance before it affects the company’s reputation. A growing number of service providers in Australia and elsewhere are incorporating AI into their CX strategies.
Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader at ISG Provider Lens Research, concluded: “Enterprises see a rising flood of unstructured data that could help inform customer interactions but is hard to process and interpret. Australian contact centre consultants can help them develop and optimize AI systems.”
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