Let’s face it, customer experience is declining in the name of automation.
Chatbots and voice assistants were intended to replace long wait times with efficient service. Instead, they reinforce the barriers between brands and their customer service teams with clunky interfaces, misrouted queries, and impersonal experiences.
For many organizations, automation is seen as a way to reduce their reliance on outsourcing as a stopgap strategy for managing labor shortages and tight budgets. However, the goal of automation becomes deflection, not delight, and customer experience suffers.
The perception problem
Many enterprises still view the contact center as a cost center. If customer service were viewed as a strategic function, more companies would invest in hiring, retaining, and supporting service teams. Instead, many organizations continue to underfund them while over-relying on automation to close the gap.
Most organizations say they value customer conversations, but their investment doesn’t reflect that. Support teams are still positioned as a problem-processing function, not a source of insight or strategic value for the rest of the organization. That has to change.
What modern customer service can be, with the right AI
More sophisticated agentic AI systems are available for organizations to communicate with customers. Solutions like AI agents are reshaping customer engagement by offering efficient, secure, and personalized support through natural and humanlike conversations.
But using these systems to deflect calls from your contact center is like building a state-of-the-art kitchen and only using the microwave. You’re not getting the value from what you’ve invested in.
95% of CX and contact center leaders agree that friction points in other parts of the customer journey cause problems for customer service teams. But support teams aren’t set up, culturally or operationally, to feed what they hear back into the business. This results in missed opportunities to fix root causes, improve products, or create more efficient operational processes.
Are you ready to move from cost center to command center?
Find out how to introduce strategic automation, develop a real-time event monitoring and response system, and build a culture of feedback.
Read it hereThe 4 Ps: Pillars of strategic customer service
Strategic customer service is more than a problem processor. It’s a source of data, insight, and value that can shape how businesses operate.
It starts with the 4 Ps:
Prescriptive: Strategic customer service adheres to a set of rules that deliver consistent experiences and outputs. It should also instruct the rest of the business on areas for optimization and improvement.
Predictive: Strategic customer service anticipates problems and readily delivers solutions. Examples include scaling to meet seasonal demand or self-learning AI models that continuously improve based on real customer conversations.
Productive: Strategic customer service means handling the total demand on support while also driving and conserving revenue. It produces for both the customer and the business in as equal measure as possible.
Preferable: Strategic customer service considers customers’ preferences, and is accessible across channels and languages. It should be intuitive and engaging so that customers actively want to communicate.
The best conversations aren't scripted.
Find out what it really takes for AI agents to accurately understand, take action, and communicate with users through engaging conversation.
Read the guideTransforming the contact center into a strategic customer command center with agentic AI
When customer service aligns with the 4 Ps, it evolves from a cost center to a command center.
In a customer command center, issues are not just solved; they are traced back to the source. This helps businesses fix root causes, adapt processes, and push updates to customers in context and in real time.
The contact center becomes a hub for insights and action. It creates a feedback loop between customer experience and business strategy.
A strategic approach to implementing agentic AI will enable enterprises to transform their contact centers into customer command centers building continuous feedback loops between brands and their customers. An enterprise that adapts to their customers in near real-time is an enterprise that can compete on a much higher level and win.
Scale your AI-powered CX with confidence. Our team offers the expertise, tools, and support to guide you every step of the way. Get in touch to explore your next phase of transformation. Schedule a meeting today.