Agents and Customer Engagement

Digital customer engagement has long been a white space. Let us look at how this may become-once again-a revenue driver for brands. Quite a bit is being written about how AI-enabled agents can do everything and the future is “agentified”. The truth is more nuanced. Certainly, the user interfaces that been around for a long time are less than satisfactory. At the same time, these interfaces have created layers of separation between people, resulting in a lack of contact between brand and customer. Such separation may contribute to bargain hunting and less loyalty over time. For brands that are designed to thrive on repeat purchase and consumer lifecycles going beyond the individual into families, this is both concerning as well as an opportunity. 

Automation of customer care has been going on for a while. But it seems to be happening at the cost of service design on one hand  and genuine customer care on the other. Resource absence is palpable. For example, it is often difficult to get hold of an executive with whom one can have a deep conversation. Post-COVID, some institutions have switched off after hours live support. Menu navigation has been more complicated, resulting in average call times being unusually long. There is the offer of bots, of course. But their capabilities are extremely constrained, to put it mildly. 

Yet there are bright spots. Our telecom provider, perceived otherwise as a traditionalist giant, is very agile, high-touch and empathy-driven when it comes to customer care. Their menu, in sharp contrast to others, is very short. Our national airline has an excellent, round-the-clock service with executives who take a lot of personal responsibility and often go beyond their normal call of duty. A local community bank which exists in the shadow of it’s more publicly known parent, has very responsive to any complaints, issues and feedback. These are companies which are technologically ahead of many others but have maintained their core of service. There are lessons to be drawn from them.

The biggest advantage that intelligent agents can bring to a brand is to remove the unnecessary barriers that multi-layered menus create. There will be no menus anymore. Instead, through text and voice support, an agent will guide the customer. That is called a conversation. We converse all the time and we should be able to do so when we talk product and offers. The key value unlocked is scale. Secondly, customers and prospects are highly mobile today and they should be able to reach you wherever they are at minimum cost. Imagine calling your credit card issuer with a problem when you are in London. It cost me a fortune in 2004. It still cost me a fortune in 2024. Unless you are dealing with, say, Amex, the problem has not gone away in two decades. It is easy to forget that we call people everyday across the world at very little or no cost. Banks call us to do KYC. So why do we still need to use IDD to speak to our card issuer when we really need help? That is where calling an agent will call the same, regardless of where you are-Borivali or Buenos Aires. Lastly, how do we make an offer to a customer? When I go to the local supermarket, the cashier asks me whether I want x or y or z, which are displayed around her. But I am trying desperately to check out after spending twenty minutes in queue. So I smile, say no and politely move on. Cross-sell and up-sell is mentioned by rote when sales executives want to sell tech products. But it is much more difficult to execute than one might think. The key issue here is context. In the old days, this used to be known as use characteristics and usage situation. We have encoded, automated and weaponised this. This, in many ways, is the real essence of an AI-enabled agent. It will create and hand you your catalogue of services. It will recalibrate that same catalogue. And it will do so in real-time.  Imagine calling up services contextualized to you, while you are driving. Some of those services may be mission critical such as a battery specific to your car. Or urgent on-road assistance. Or some could be good to have, like  finding and booking a specific kind of hotel fifty miles away because you want to.

For high-involvement purchases such as wealth management products, cars, homes and luxury items, agents serve three purposes. One, they are the digital frontline when initial queries are made. Some of these queries may not translate into serious attempts to buy. But the details that emerge from these are absolutely worth their weight in gold. This is the seam that the brand will mine over time. It is also the chance to create a big experience differential for prospects, which they will remember. The second purpose is assisting those who have physically turned up at a showroom, met an executive and proceeded with a purchase. Much of this will be invisible to the customer. This includes contextual processing for the customer, completing documentation, handling KYC for loan issuance and orchestration between different parts of the company making the sale. Third, agents are available at the press of a button or a voice command at any time. You may want to know about new products. Accessories might be necessary. Value-added services may be called for, which is an upsell. In case of some new-age companies, the ability to sell new concepts to a difficult-to-pin-down segment can become invaluable.