In the last few years contact centres have profoundly transformed, steadily yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’.
Contact centres are converting from only having live agents to including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised. Central to this transformation is the digital-first customer experience, which involves customers interacting with an organisation through digital channels such as live chat and chatbots, messaging, social media, and websites.
The hallmark of a digital-first customer experience is data that captures the entire scope of a customer’s interactions with a business. A broad view of a customer is taken that considers contact beyond the contact centre to encompass all possible customer engagement scenarios (such as using the mobile app or conversing with marketing or sales) and to learn from customer interactions.
The impact of AI on customer experience
AI is one of the most powerful tools to assist with this endeavour: AI can analyse large volumes of data to uncover and interpret patterns of customer behavior, to predict customer needs and enable proactive responses, and to provide human agents with customer information accompanied by recommendations for resolving their issue.
AI impacts the digital-first customer experience in other ways as well. GenAI provides a customer experience marked by self-service capabilities and proactive recognition of customer needs. GenAI lets agents focus on addressing complex inquiries. For supervisors, GenAI provides analytics of agents’ interactions with customers. Agentic AI is playing a large role as well in the form of agents that perform tasks on a user’s behalf acting autonomously, making decisions, and adjusting its approach based upon new information or changing circumstances.
Organisations have kept busy building digital-first customer experiences because they symbolise what customers have been demanding since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic: one that provides access to a selection of digital channels apart from traditional channels such as voice; one where they are recognised regardless of what channel they use to engage; one where they enjoy a consistent, context-driven experience; and one where their thirst for self-service is quenched. What’s more, customers demand this experience regardless of organisation size or industry.
Mapping the customer journey
There are some critical steps an organisation should take when implementing a digital-first customer experience. One is to map the customer journey using tools such as Salesforce’s marketing cloud to fully understand how each customer is engaging with the company.
A second step is to analyse customer data as discussed earlier. A third is to ensure that customers can use a mobile device to interact with the organisation. Mobile devices are a highly prevalent channel customers use to reach contact centres by using tools such as email and text as well as to purchase goods and services.
A variety of competitors are helping make digital-first customer experiences a reality. Vendors such as Cisco, RingCentral, and Zoom have made contact centre offers a hub of their overall team collaboration portfolios. Those offers are infused with both GenAI and, increasingly, agentic AI. They not only help organisations raise customer satisfaction by making agents more effective at their jobs; they also help organisations to run more efficient contact centre operations by equipping supervisors with appropriate tools.
Vendors across the contact centre space have demonstrated no signs of slowing the rapid pace with which they have introduced capabilities. This portends an environment of increasingly richer digital-first customer experiences.
