In customer service, satisfaction drives business. To provide a great customer experience (CX), brands make it easy for the customer to interact with the brand. Personalized CX is essential to today’s customer journey. Customers who feel engaged and attended to by brands are more likely to support them, thus boosting loyalty at a time when endless options abound.
It isn’t just customer behavior that brands must adapt to, but the boom in new technology led by artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT. These AI platforms have been emerging across various sectors, with more than 70% of companies experimenting with them.
A challenge has presented itself for customer service firms: How must brands leverage AI and make a human workforce more efficient and deliver better customer experiences (CX)? Building more engaging and personalized CX integrates innovative technology’s power with human sensibilities.
For TDCX, AI will not replace but rather optimize their operations. Through research and various engagements, TDCX understood how AI is a tool for efficiency. The company has successfully established their own artificial intelligence consulting arm called TDCX AI. The division uses AI to analyze big data, generate insights, and unlock opportunities for improvements in CX.
“By combining human intelligence and AI, our employees will be able to retrieve critical data, perform comprehensive analyses, and make informed decisions swiftly and accurately. This will in turn lead to faster response times and better one-time resolution for customers,” said Ben Sun, SVP, TDCX AI
“An example of how generative AI can be used to create hyper-personalized experiences is the better matching of customer service representatives to customers. Use cases include routing calls to representatives that have either served the customer well before and thus, already have an idea of the customer’s preferences or routing high churn-risk customers to representatives who are highly skilled at retention,” added Sun.
Such levels of hyper-personalization will, in turn, drive customer loyalty and revenue growth.
By combining human intelligence and AI, TDCX’s employees will be able to retrieve critical data, perform comprehensive analyses, and make informed decisions swiftly and accurately thus leading to faster response times and better one-time resolution for customers.
The key is for employees to be open-minded to learning new things and for companies to continue upskilling talent. Through this, employees can enjoy greater job satisfaction as they focus on more complex and important tasks that require critical thinking, analysis, and decision-making. These skills, along with empathy, relatability, and personality, are irreplicable with AI.
In the brand’s recently-published report, ASEAN SMEs: Small Business, Big Opportunity for Tech Providers, it had shown that while AI and automated customer service, including chatbots, garner much attention in the market, companies and consumers still prefer to interact with a human. Excellent customer service is a combination of having efficient channels for customers to use and providing the option to reach a human agent when technology’s limitations kick in.
Maintaining that balance between smart technology and human touch is especially important for business process outsourcing (BPO) firms in the customer service space. It is a multibillion-dollar, fast-growing industry in Southeast Asian markets like the Philippines, where more than 1.2 million Filipinos work in over 800 companies.
According to a 2020 study by Kearney, more than 80% of Southeast Asia is in the early adoption stage of AI. Among AI adoption’s top challenges are talent gaps, a need for more data governance and critical infrastructure, immature AI ecosystems, and organizational resistance.
To help address some of these concerns and explore generative AI possibilities among their clients, TDCX AI has also developed an AI Maturity Program. The program takes a structured approach to assessing a client’s capabilities across multiple areas, such as leadership and vision, proficiency in AI, CX organization structure, technical infrastructure, and data security and privacy.
“By presenting clients with an analysis of where they stand against industry best practices and helping them to understand the areas of opportunity for AI, we help them gauge their readiness before starting on their journey and play a key role in orchestrating the entire process for them,” Sun shared.
Generative AI is still relatively new with its limitations, such as cost and regulation concerns, and companies like TDCX have yet to exhaust all possibilities. But as CX solutions companies, it is crucial and exciting to see how TDCX and the BPO industry can adapt to rapidly changing landscapes and leverage innovation to scale faster and build the best customer experiences for people.