AI fueled personalized intelligent routing to drive customer experience transformation

In today’s world, consumers expect everything to be personalized catering to their met and unmet needs. Onus is on the enterprises to figure a way to deliver a personalized experience such as target offering and services to stay as the market leaders.

Contact centers have always played a subtle role in establishing the brand asides the usual Marcom driven strategy, and still many enterprises believe that contact centers are behind the scene business function, that are reactive and is a cost centers with little value add to business top-line.

This narrative is changing fast, as the consumers are increasingly conscious to experience for themselves first hand the true brand value and create a long-lasting brand perception based on the experience they have with business. Mostly it is through contact center which is the preferred way of interaction with the business.

There are enough evidences backed by most industry leading surveys, to the notion that improved customer experience delivery will have a direct impact on top-line revenue of the enterprise and a recent one from Forrester Research found that the revenue impact of a 1-point improvement in CX Index scores can help a company increase revenue by $175 million annually.

With clear correlation between Experience, Brand and Revenue, the key questions become how do one deliver on such a personalized experience that will set an everlasting brand memory. While there are many strategies available that help deliver better experience in contact center, one of the upcoming / overlooked strategy and solution is to enable real time matching of customer and agents by behavior characteristics and personality to drive business outcomes.

Discover card commercials series https://www.ispot.tv/ad/75x5/discover-card-it-card-fico-twins are good examples on how contact centers can be a huge leverage to create the brand. In the series of ad, the key theme seems to be "We treat you like you'd treat you" while positioning variety of products and features by routing the customer calls to similar personality of customers to highlight the message.

To deliver such as an experience, personalized Intelligent routing will be required that uses AI predictive routing models based on the consumer data using both 1st party (such as Customer segment and CRM data) and 3rd party data (such as social media, website and survey data) alongside agent performance data.

Traditional skill based routing focus on routing customer contacts to agents based on the options chosen in Interactive Voice Response unit (IVR) or the number (toll/toll free) dialed such as customer services, products queues. Over the years there has been various enhancements to this logic by including agent attributes such as multi-skills and agent vintage.

However, those routing strategies fails to drive business outcomes namely sales through appointment settings, enrollment and operational efficiency through improved first contact resolution, reduced transfer etc. This is primarily due to the reason, that the aforesaid traditional contact routing is based on finding best available agent basis the limited information from the contact meta data’s like queues type, customer segment and agent skills.

Leveraging true power of data that provides more detailed attributes of customers and agents is key for successful AI solution that personalizes the interaction by matching customer to right agent.

In many cases these data’s are available from 1st party data / in house sources such as contact center data from telephony platform, IVR, call recording, interaction transcripts, CRM and Agent performance data from and through 3rd party services such as LiveRamp (https://liveramp.com/), AnalyticsIQ (https://analytics-iq.com/) to name a few providers.

Enterprises that are customer experience obsessed have mastered harnessing the data that they own and enriching critical data element as required using 3rd party data providers to provide truly exceptional customer experience and to be market leader. Embedding AI in contact center provides huge opportunity to explore advanced use case such as this to leap frog in customer experience transformation journey.