Contact centres have been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years. The concept of a ‘contact centre’ has been steadily yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centres are evolving from relying solely on human agents to incorporating AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalized. Central to this transformation is the digital-first customer experience, according to GlobalData, a data and analytics company.
Gregg Willsky, principal analyst, enterprise technology and services at GlobalData, comments: “A digital-first customer experience involves customers interacting with an organization through digital channels such as live chat and chatbots, messaging, social media, and websites. Implemented correctly, a digital-first customer experience increases customer satisfaction, improves customer engagement, and deepens customer insights.”
Hallmark
The hallmark of a digital-first customer experience is data that captures the entire scope of a customer’s interactions with a business and helps organizations learn from those interactions. AI is one of the most powerful tools to assist with this endeavour. AI can analyze large volumes of data to uncover and interpret patterns of customer behaviour, to predict customer needs and enable proactive responses.
Willsky continues: “AI impacts the digital-first customer experience in other ways as well. GenAI provides a customer experience marked by self-service capabilities, allowing agents to focus on addressing complex inquiries. For supervisors, GenAI provides analytics of agents’ interactions with customers, which they can use to coach agents and enhance their performance. Agentic AI is playing a large role too in the form of agents that perform tasks on a user’s behalf acting autonomously, making decisions, and adjusting their approach based upon new information or changing circumstances.”
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 organizations raise customer satisfaction by making agents better equipped to perform their jobs, but they also help them to run more efficient contact centre operations by equipping supervisors with appropriate tools. Willsky concludes: “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 rich digital-first customer experiences.”
