At times, the priorities of employers, employees and customers can seem at odds with one another. But when it comes to the delivery of a modernized user experience, most stakeholders have similar expectations.
As Salesforce points out in a recent blog post, “Customers’ expectations for empathetic, personalized, and digital-first engagement don’t stop when they go to work. Much like consumers, business buyers see a gap between the standards that have been set and the reality they experience.”
From chatbots to new uses for generative AI, organizations are leveraging automation to meet the demands of their users, both internal and external. The benefits are multifaceted, and they’re paying off for stakeholders with savings of time and money.
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Automation Is Reinventing Customer Support
CDW Digital Experience Manager Anthony Viola says that automation is the biggest driver of change regarding the digital experience. He points out how drastically customer service has changed over the past 15 to 20 years as a result of automation.
The customer contact center is a department rife with opportunities for automation. As expert Carol Payne, notes in a recent CDW blog post, “AI solutions have become an important component of an efficient user experience.
DIVE DEEPER: Learn how automation can help small businesses improve the customer experience.
Getting a caller to the right person quickly and efficiently minimizes frustration and increases satisfaction. The more that organizations use AI to help customers navigate contact center systems, the better those experiences will be. First-call resolution becomes the norm and not the goal.”
Thanks to new automated tools, customer service agents working in contact centers are provided with information on a customer as soon as they pick up a call.
“They already know what the consumer has gone through, and they can pull up a recent order by the customer automatically. The caller has already been verified, so there is no need for them to repeat themselves or their information, and the agent can immediately begin helping the customer,” Viola explains.
Automation Can Pay Off Big in Increased Productivity
Automation can allow an organization to provide a more efficient experience for both internal and external users, and it can benefit employers as well. A June 2023 report from McKinsey notes the impressive potential of generative AI to increase productivity.
“Our latest research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across the 63 use cases we analyzed,” notes the report. And those increases will likely be widespread: “About 75 percent of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across four areas: Customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D.”
Productivity isn’t the only benefit employers are likely to see from increased adoption of automation, says Matthew Wettstein, solution manager for cloud and digital experience at CDW.
The accessibility of automation can enable employees to leverage it in their own roles to increase efficiency and productivity. According to Wettstein, an employee might say, “‘Now I have the tools that I can automate that myself and share it with everyone else.’”
Increased productivity can then lead to the adoption of automated tools for additional purposes, Wettstein says: “Those tools are there, and they’re only getting better. As we’re seeing with programs like Copilot and OpenAI coming in, those things are going to be able to get even more automated” and empower employees to improve their own digital experiences.
