How AI Will Revolutionize CX’s Revenue-Generating Potential
Guest Authored by Nicole Dunn, VP of Partner Success
Bold statement alert: In the very near future, the best customer service organizations will take an “every interaction is a sales opportunity” mentality.
I understand that this idea departs from how most CS organizations operate today. Many service and support leaders may object to the notion that customer service interactions should involve sales motions. However, we predict that the results generative AI produces will convince even the skeptics to rethink their positions on whether customer service is a sales-oriented practice.
In our recent webinar, “Serve, Solve, Sell: Mastering the Future of Customer Experience,” we discussed three reasons why this change will occur:
First, generative AI can relieve your customer service team of simpler transactional customer contacts. When your customer service professionals aren’t working on password resets, you can redeploy your most knowledgeable team members to work on value-added initiatives. For example, since implementing their GenAIBot, Solo Stove has seen their automation take rate increase by 35%. While the automation rate is impressive, what’s more exciting is the impact. Solo Stove has reallocated agents’ time towards highly sensitive and complex interactions. According to Solo Brands’ Chief Digital officer, their agents can focus on delivering “wow!” customer moments and further drive customer lifetime value. Brands taking this approach will convert customer service into a highly effective mechanism to improve customer loyalty and drive incremental revenue.
Second, generative AI can autonomously compose responses and interact with consumers significantly better than older versions of AI. This capability enables upsell and cross-sell conversations in an automated and highly consistent manner. A well-designed AI chatbot makes small talk to build rapport while comprehending and responding to relevant inquiries thoroughly. It can remember and answer all questions for a complete resolution. It can also leverage data within CRM and customer data platforms to offer perfectly tailored product recommendations at the exact right times in the conversation. Finally, generative AI allows us to train on the best collective experience of entire customer service and sales organizations to learn the most effective objection handling further improving sales conversion rates and to do it fast.
Finally, generative AI can assist with capturing and analyzing valuable customer data you get through customer service interactions. This additional customer data can enrich insights for important initiatives ranging from product development to marketing campaigns. Accenture recently found that “Companies are seeing 10X+ higher revenue growth the more involved their service organization is in the development of new products.” While many data analysis projects are manual or assisted by automation today, in the near future, they will be handled almost entirely by automation, identifying and delivering important insights to the teams that need them most and directly attributing customer service efforts to the bottom line.
We are at the very beginning of an exciting new chapter in customer service. Too often, we’ve heard customer service leaders lament the fact that they are seen as a cost center as opposed to a value driver. With the advent of generative AI, they will no longer need to find ways to deflect customers and focus on efficiency and cost savings. Instead, by finding ways to deliver the best experience within every single interaction, they will become the primary mechanism companies rely on to improve customer trust and advocacy. In turn, these customer service leaders will forever redefine how customers interact with brands for the better.
Watch the full webinar, “Serve, Solve, Sell: Mastering the Future of Customer Experience,” at https://now.simplr.ai/serve-solve-sell-cx-webinar.