CX in the Era of Intelligent Self-Service

Intelligent assistants no longer need to be inflexible and mentally underdeveloped. Unfortunately, many so-called AI solutions were developed and rolled out with defense in mind rather than the consumer in mind. Deflection became the primary indicator, while customer satisfaction and, more critically, customer agency took a back seat.

Companies may become more proactive by using Conversational Intelligence and self-service, moving from defensive to offensive. Answers to these issues may now be found via the strategic use of Conversational Intelligence and self-service choices. A new age has begun.

Search is the Start of a Conversation

When designing marketing, sales, and support strategies for "digital natives," it's important to remember that these consumers do not see their experiences as a linear "journey" from discovery to purchase. Instead, people are having an asynchronous dialogue, which takes place across time, devices, and channels of their choice to find and engage with the organizations with whom they wish to do business.

Conversational Intelligence is the sum of a conversation's content and metadata that can be shared throughout an organization to enhance the quality of every customer interaction and reduce the time it takes to accomplish a goal. Individual identities (verified or assumed) serve as the foundation for the information, as mentioned earlier, which also factors in location, search activity, purchase history, loyalty status, and more.

The process always begins with a search engine; for most people, that's Google. Even though "the Sultan of Search" makes much of its money by serving up digital advertisements, many aspects of its service contribute to a positive and productive user experience. The first step is to allow for input in natural language. For many years, people used single words or short phrases in "Google searches," expecting instantaneous answers from the algorithm. Young people who grew up with computers are used to searching for information by speaking or typing. For this reason, a tool like NICE's CXone Expert may "intercept" search activity as an early indicator of intent due to its abundance of rich, unstructured data.

Intent Recognition Facilitates Instant Feedback for Enhanced Self-Service

Real-time conversation capture and intent extraction provide the groundwork for a service level equivalent to user agency. This is particularly true when companies have used Conversational AI to build industry-, topic-, or company-specific language models that match those intentions with extremely specific aims and reply with granular or exact answers from a company's knowledge base.

For example, a market leader in healthcare wanted to increase digital customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT) while also adapting to shifting benefit structures. Before the yearly Open Enrollment period, the organization used NICE's Enlighten XO solution to cut down on phone calls and speed them up to improve self-service. "Enlighten XO could really help us get our existing automated tools working much better," the automation team leader said. 

With Enlighten XO, the team had access to a smart extract of the words and phrases they required to construct smart self-service quickly from historical voice and text interactions, sorted by the greatest automation ROI and based on the most common customer intentions. The automation group previously organized workshops to map client intentions; this process took weeks as they gathered educated guesses and built out self-service that still forced most customers to resort to living voice conversations. 

The group well received the Enlighten XO answer. The digital channel saw increased member satisfaction, fewer calls about HSA and FSA benefits, a shorter time to issue a new intent, and a monthly savings of hundreds of hours.

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