Let's make no bones about it: in customer contact land, innovation and technology are mainly used to reduce the costs of customer contact, not to optimize the customer experience. Otherwise, most companies would have achieved excellent CX by now. And national retraining programs for redundant agents would have been created.

 

It is famous for innovation and automation in customer contact quadrant model devised, which is based on value for the customer and value for the organization. Low value for both customer and organization? Eliminate reason for contact. Having to call for a password reset of your my environment is a good example of this. But for the other three quadrants the solution is less clear and rigorous. Value for the organization, but not for the customer? 'Simplify the process': just stand by it. Value for the customer, but not for the organization? Make it self-service – but what is the value for the customer? And finally: valuable for both? Let a thousand flowers bloom, give the agent plenty of room to start the conversation.

Giant leaps forward

You have to find out exactly how the value for the three quadrants is arrived at. Until recently, that was somewhat of the weak spot of the otherwise attractive model - because it offered the manager some support.

Fortunately, there is now GenAI. That rushes through life as an adolescent: it happens every quarter great leaps forward and goes along with it regularly on his face. GenAI is no longer limited to ChatGPT, there is now a whole class full of ambitious teenagers. Who from this class will be the first to win that fourth quadrant of the value model for customer contact?

Complex conversations

To this day, suppliers and managers maintain that agents have more time for complex conversations thanks to the use of GenAI. We must not forget that prior to the 'agent has more time for complex conversations' phase, customers have already visited the app, the website, the self-service, the personal page, the chatbot and the live chat. What about time well saved, time well spent? Does this also fit into the customer effort score?

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Or to Dave Michels to quote from his column for NoJitter: “No one believes that the number of calls is currently higher than normal. No one believes that their call is really important to the supplier. No one needs to be reminded that there may be a faster service available on the website. The abuse and misuse of deflection practices, limited digital capabilities and neutered self-service have taught consumers and B2B buyers to be resistant and skeptical of modern customer service.”

Complex conversations for expensive employees who will soon no longer be there

There is another reason to abandon the idea of ​​'more time for complex conversations'. These complex conversations require highly trained agents. The rapidly rising wage costs of these highly trained agents have to be recouped somewhere. Large brands try to postpone that question and opt for Suriname or other locations where there is Dutch-speaking customer contact talent. The use of GenAI is interesting for organizations that have relatively large volumes of complex conversations. Every day it becomes more likely that AI will be able to handle some of those complex customer issues – just look at Google's multimodal Gemini or the next phase of real-time speech translation.

If we want to continue to use agents for cases where customers and/or AI get stuck, there is yet another reason to be careful with your employees. There is a good chance that a future government will want to limit labor migration. That means even more vacancies in IT, for example. This not only slows down our innovative capacity and limits our development and implementation power. It also makes it even more difficult to find people for the 'complex conversations' category in our industry.

All balls on quadrant 1

In short, as customer contact professionals, let us primarily focus on quadrant 1: eliminating contact reasons. To achieve this, we (AI cannot do that) have to enter the organization and tempt or force employees to do different things or do things differently from now on. That already costs mountains of time and energy. Then, in time, AI can focus on those three other quadrants: better self-service, more automated contacts and more good conversations about complex issues. (Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

Customer Experience, Featured, Opinions