Talking, listening, optimising: rethinking the customer journey in the new era of AI

As we've touched on before, all this means establishing an accurate picture of the entire customer journey is easier said than done. Nonetheless, it's an essential starting point for any digital transformation initiative in contact centre environments and must be given careful consideration before any investment is made in new technologies. Far too often, disconnects in the customer journey are allowed to go undetected until a customer reports a negative experience that affects their whole perception of the organisation… Potentially irreparably.

But don't panic!

If you're willing to taking to take a hard, objective look at your overall customer journey, and take a deep dive into every aspect of your contact centre's systems and process, any gaps that are uncovered represent rich opportunities for digital transformation that will empower your agents to deliver seamless, successful resolutions on a regular basis.

Practical steps for effective journey mapping

Customer journey mapping can feel like an overwhelming task, but the important thing is taking the right first step and approaching the whole thing systematically. Here are a few ways to get started and establish where the gaps and challenges lie. The actual findings will vary immensely, depending on your contact centre's existing processes and current level of digital maturity, but following these initial steps will ensure you can make an informed decision about the way forward.

• Start small, pick a target area, then listen and observe its customer interactions. Establish all stages of the journey: how they arrived (the trigger), how they are greeted (the opening), how they are diagnosed (the triage), how they are processed, and how the interaction is closed and wrapped up.
• Take note of how often the interaction is fully resolved vs. further action required, e.g. when a transfer to another department or follow-up with the customer is required.
• Take note of the interactions with systems and processes and the availability of information needed to help the customer.

This method is of course, manually intensive, and may not necessarily be representative of the full picture, even when paired with your contact centre's system data. But this is where AI comes in – a potential gamechanger when it comes to understanding the customer journey. 

Technologies like AI and machine learning can understand and analyse conversations, in detail and at scale, in a way that it is impossible for humans to achieve with manual effort. Indeed, according to ContactBabel[1], 93% of UK contact centres already see AI as having huge potential when it comes better understanding their customers. However, take-up is currently limited, with only 24% currently using AI for this purpose. This suggests huge untapped potential for a whole new standard of customer service across a range of sectors.

[1] The UK Customer Experience Decision-Makers' Guide 2024-25

Productive conversations are the key to successful outcomes

To maximise the number of successful outcomes in your contact centre, it's essential that you get a handle on all conversations – both formal and informal – that take place between agents and customers, as well as agents and their colleagues, each day. It's likely that you already have some measures in place for monitoring voice conversations and email, but with interconnected, omnichannel communication, this will likely not be enough.

Too often, we find that while there is a certain level of monitoring in place, there are no processes in place for the kind of deep analysis that yields actionable insights. This is the key to optimising the customer journey: understand the nature of conversations, ensure all opportunities for improvement are acted upon, and measure everything.

AI has a critical role to play here, ensuring the growing volumes of data generated throughout each interaction can be automatically collated and analysed in a way that would be otherwise impossible. But looping right back to our first point, that makes it all the more important that it is implemented intelligently, in a way that fully supports your agents and your customers.

A new standard of tech-powered customer service

The transformation of contact centres is very much a journey rather than a destination, where technologies like AI support the continuous rollout of new efficiencies, new measures to enhance wellbeing, and – of course – new ways to make the customer journey as smooth and stress-free as possible. There's a lot to consider, but the potential rewards are immense, provided you start in the right way, by developing a thorough understanding of where your contact centre currently is compared to where you want it to be.

If you'd like to find out more about how this investigation process typically works, I'd strongly recommend our latest white paper, Humans, Machines, and a Tech-powered Customer Experience: A Practical Guide to AI in the Contact Centre. This not only elucidates the growing complexity of the customer journey, but also provides a thoroughly tested methodology for how next-gen AI platforms can be best utilised to help agents deliver successful outcomes. It's ready to download today.