AI has been deployed for years in customer experience settings, but it was an expensive, time-consuming exercise to train the models and required ongoing maintenance to analyze sentiment and other signals, according to Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and head of AI at Five9.
“Then generative AI came along and changed all of this,” Rosenberg said.
Many business leaders expect the technology to transform operations in the coming years, improving efficiency and productivity and reducing costs, according to a 2024 Deloitte Digital report. Customer service is one of the top use cases for generative AI, helping agents rapidly build rapport and elevate experiences and acting as a force multiplier.
“It’s possible to analyze every conversation in the contact center by feeding the content of the conversation to a generative AI model and asking it to assess sentiment, customer satisfaction, issue resolution and many other metrics,” Rosenberg said.
But it doesn’t stop there: The technology can then aggregate all this information, providing the business with a bird’s eye view of what’s happening in the contact center.
“We can now automatically detect new topics of conversation in the contact center and alert managers to these topics so they can proactively take action,” Rosenberg said.
Alaska Airlines has deployed Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform for automating calls routing based on channel volume, agent skill set, and availability. The airline was able to lower wait times, even during call spikes.
“Real-time call transcriptions let agents read what a guest is saying in real time, improving their comprehension and engagement,” Rosenberg said.
Aeroflow Health, a medical equipment and supply provider, combines multiple AI tools to streamline customer inquiries.
This approach has increased self-service options, decreased average handle times and reduced call volume, while AI-generated summaries enable Aeroflow to test, monitor, and improve its models to optimize the output of its call summaries.
From chatbots to agent assistants
Human intervention remains essential, and generative AI can enhance the traditional 360-degree customer view, prioritizing key insights to guide agent interactions.
In addition to outward-facing tools such as chatbots, internal assistants can support customer service teams and show the potential of the force multiplier effect.
“Conversational AI, especially in live chat and messaging, has matured significantly, but with generative AI, it’s shifted inward, focusing on augmenting employees who interact with customers,” said Jason Valdina, senior director of go-to-market strategy for digital engagement channels at Verint.
When it comes to customer support, these tools excel at summarizing interactions and extracting useful data points, such as language and caller history.
“Summaries help agents quickly grasp the context, reducing average handling times by approximately 50 seconds per interaction,” Valdina said.
By combining tools, businesses can realize more significant results. For example, Volaris airlines, a major Latin American carrier, deployed knowledge automation and coaching tools, freeing up agent capacity and redirecting agents’ attention.
“Agents, with newfound bandwidth, could upsell services, such as discounted seat upgrades, and they were able to offset the entire cost of their contact center,” Valdina said.
Sentiment analysis is another area of customer support that can be improved by applying generative AI tools. A coaching tool that operates as a copilot alongside an agent’s workflow can intervene with prompts that provide guidance, from improving communication etiquette to ensuring accurate responses and gauge customer and employee sentiment in real time.
“One healthcare provider saw a 16% increase in net promoter score after implementing a scoring tool that monitored and intervened in conversations with declining sentiment,” Valdina said.
Other tools can create summaries of ongoing conversations when transferring interactions between agents and at the end of an interaction to make a record of the call, saving on average 30 seconds and 60 seconds, respectively, according to Valdina.
However, consumers are concerned about not being able to speak to a human. While generative AI tools can help save time, they are not a replacement for human touch.
“The emphasis is not on replacing human agents, but on enhancing their efficiency, enabling them to handle more tasks effectively,” Valdina said.
