Here’s something we should probably all acknowledge: internal customer experience can be as important as external customer experience, especially in environments like contact centres. But new AI-powered tools are helping to get user experience right internally to help retain talent.
Tackling turnover in customer contact centre teams can be a perpetual challenge for customer experience (CX) leaders. Australia claimed an average attrition rate of 27% in 2024, according to the Australian Customer Experience Professionals Association. While this was a 5% decrease compared to 2023, it still represents a substantial number of professionals to replace.
The truth is that contact centre environments come with their own unique set of challenges and rigours that can test even the most patient customer service professionals. Wouldn’t it be great if the same AI-powered tools now being used in contact centres to improve external customer experiences could also improve user experience internally? Well, they can, and are.
AI tech to tackle turnover
Customer contact centres have used tools powered by AI technology for a long time. It’s nothing new. Chatbots, intelligent call routing and automated quality management are all tools that have become commonplace in call centres and contact centres. While AI is bringing advances to customer experiences through such tools, the same technology can also be used internally.
AI-based tools used for automation and augmentation in contact centre scenarios have the potential to reduce inefficiencies to make repetitive or highly manual tasks less of a chore, provide real-time insights for greater customer service agent empowerment and support consistency across every interaction, helping to drive greater team morale.
For instance, AI-based copilots are making their way into a plethora of solutions, such as word processors and software development platforms. They’re also making their way into contact centre platforms, delivering capabilities like AI call summaries so that supervisors no longer have to trawl through lengthy transcripts to review things like call quality and dispute resolution.
In addition to AI copilots, internal applications of AI-based technology aimed at improving the employee experiences also include AI-powered coaching and knowledge recommendations — with AI models able to delve into and quickly analyse huge volumes of customer interaction data, providing insight and advice to agents on any number of issues.
Augmentation is the key
One of the things that strikes me about the emerging generation of AI-powered solutions designed to improve the internal operations of contact centres and the workday experiences of contact centre agents is that the most effective tools tend to augment human team members and the work they do rather than simply replacing them outright.
There’s a very good reason for this. More than half of the consumers surveyed in a recent study by Genesys, one of Nexon’s partners, said they preferred to work with human agents to resolve their needs where possible. Having a human in the loop is critical to delivering on the expectations of consumers because they provide something valuable and unique: humanity.
However, the work involved in things like automatically transferring an inbound call from a chatbot to a human agent can be accomplished more seamlessly by AI tools that go beyond simple automation and bring a level of intelligence to such processes, helping to reduce the areas of friction and pain points that may have traditionally impacted human agents’ efficiency.
AI-enabled insight
One of the most valuable contributions AI-powered tools can make to human contact centre agents’ experience is in the area of insight and analysis. As noted earlier, this is one of the key areas in which AI-based solutions are transforming the employee experience in contact centre environments.
For example, quality evaluations are an essential part of customer contact centre operations, yet traditionally they have been underpinned by semi-automated processes and manual scoring. This takes time and it’s unnecessarily laborious. Today, we have tools that enable AI-based scoring to assess engagement quality with consistency, accuracy and contextual reasoning.
Likewise, AI-based tools enable deeper personalisation with customer insights for human agents to create a more personal connection with customers. This capability enables three things that can make human agents’ experiences better: reduced time to learning about a customer, greater understanding between agent and customer and faster issue resolution.
The emerging raft of AI tools available to contact centre teams today have the power to transform team members’ user experiences internally for the better, making their work more efficient and more fulfilling, reducing the chances of employee turnover. In doing so, they also improve customers’ experiences, which is what it’s all about really.