How AI Intersects with Customer Experience
In this episode of Salesforce Simplified, the topic is AI and what its relationship to customer experience is today and needs to be in the future.
To help us in the discussion, we’re thrilled to welcome back to the podcast Nick Glimsdahl, who is a Senior Account Executive at VDS, a company that specializes in improving contact center operations through a strategic, personalized, and consultative approach. He’s also the host of his own podcast, “Press 1 For Nick” (which is focused on Customer Service, Customer Experience, and Employee Experience), and is a featured contributor for ICMI, a company that works with contact centers to accomplish desired outcomes and prepare them for the future.
Transcription:
Speaker: Thanks for stopping by. This is Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.
Mike Boyle: Well, good day everyone. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Inside this episode of the Salesforce Simplified podcast, the topic is AI and what its relationship to customer experience is today, and what it needs to be in the future. And to, help us with this discussion, we’re thrilled to welcome back to the podcast Nick Glimsdahl, who is a senior account executive at VDS, which is a company that specializes in improving contact center operations through a strategic, personalized, and consolidated approach. He’s also the host of his own podcast, which is called Press 1 for Nick. I highly recommend it. It’s focused on customer service, customer experience, and employee experience. Nick is also a featured contributor for ICMI, which is a company that works with contact centers to accomplish desired outcomes and prepare them for the future. Nick, welcome back to the podcast.
Nick Glimsdahl: Great to have you with us, thanks so much mike. It’s always a pleasure to be here.
Mike Boyle: We had you here as a guest back in August of ’22 and we talked about enhancing customer experience through digital transformation. And I highly recommend our listeners, seek out that episode. You know, Nick, as a salesforce consulting company, Ad Victoriam Solutions is helping our customers every day navigate this new AI space, the AI world. It occurred to me that a big part of that is making sure customer service customer experience continues to be in the forefront of their plans, thus reaching out to you for your expertise. So let’s get the conversation started here. In general, how is AI currently transforming the customer experience landscape across various industries?
Nick Glimsdahl: Yeah, I would say to start, I can’t believe its already been almost two years since I’ve last been here. So I would also encourage all the people that listen to this to continue listening because not only does this fella have an awesome voice, but he also has awesome content. I’ll put the plug in there because I know that as a host we don’t plug enough. But to answer your question around the first question, I think it’s interesting. I think there’s a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts around AI, the buzzwords around AI, and everybody. You go to an event and you can’t throw a stick without hitting ten people that talk about AI, which is good. I think it’s turning into a trillions of dollars business. But ultimately it should be finding ways to identify that customer experience, like where are the friction points of that customer experience? And then reverse engineering that back into the technology that you hopefully can solve for that outcome that you’re hoping to achieve, that could be things like automating tasks. It could be providing quick responses or even personalizing interactions. There’s things that, and maybe we can get into this a little bit later. But you can even do like agent summarization where, instead of inside the contact center, you follow an interaction, and at the end of a chat, that agent is sitting there trying to follow up, write the summary of that interaction, and then hit submit. It’s about, on average, probably one and a half to two minutes long for the length of time that takes. And so what you could do now is use something, an AI solution to auto-summarize that. So it’s listening in real time and it’s transcribing as soon as that interaction is done. And then you have the ability to review it real quick, probably in about 20 seconds, write the disposition, and send that off, which also should be shooting over into Salesforce. You know, the one thing I will say that I think your prospects or even clients will get is if you’re not marrying those two interactions together, the system of record and the system of engagement together, you’re not actually using those to the best of their abilities, right. You’re creating a system of, engagement. It’s a way to build these relationships back and forth. And then I think AI can work on both the Salesforce side and the system of engagement.
Mike Boyle: Well, let’s get into some nitty gritty here. Talk to me about some of the most innovative ways, the innovative uses of AI, and ways that AI is enhancing customer interactions.
Nick Glimsdahl: Yeah, I think some of them are, let’s say, like real-time language translation. I mean, if somebody is speaking in a different language, you have the ability to still speak English or type English to them and receive a response, back, even though they might speak Spanish or German or, or something else. I think that’s really cool. The sentiment analysis is a really good one to analyze feedback and understand what that customer journey is and more that interaction analytics with that sentiment analysis, where you can see throughout that interaction the positive and negative, and neutral sentiments of that interaction. So if I was somebody who’s measuring QA, or even QM for that matter, quality assurance and quality monitoring, you have the ability to search for, instead of listening to two interactions per agent per month, which, is about average, you now have the ability to dig deep, dive into what you’re hoping to achieve. I like that one. I’m trying. You know, when it comes to personalized experiences, like, if somebody has an IVR and it says, hey, are you calling about your delivery tomorrow at Monday at or Monday at 9 a.m. if yes, it is still available. Would you like to reschedule or how else can I help you? And it’s more of that conversational, IVR than it is just saying. Press one for service, press two for sales, and press three for support. And the more personalized that you’re going to get, the differentiated you will be on that experience.
Mike Boyle: This is always something that’s a really big concern for companies when they implement anything new and that’s disrupting operations. How can companies effectively integrate AI into their existing customer service frameworks without disrupting the day-to-day?
Nick Glimsdahl: Yeah, what I would say is there are some, I’m not going to pick on everybody, but there are some people who will say my objective is AI, and so I’m going to go gungho and I’m going to solve, I’m going to drive efficiency so much that I’m not actually focusing on the customer experience and putting in a bot and the bot isn’t trained effectively. But what I would say when it comes to that, the right way to do it is to understand what the needs are. First, start, small. Do a pilot manage projects through phases. Ensure that the AI that you’re bringing into the system or systems, that it’s going to work effectively across these different channels or across these different pieces of software. And then of course, and I think one of the bigger challenges, not just inside of AI, but you think of a CRM or even the contact center, is the training. sometimes you get this amazing tool and you don’t necessarily know how to use it effectively. And so putting the right resources in place, people and training and videos so that people can use the tools effectively to drive the outcomes they’re hoping to achieve.
Mike Boyle: Stay on this a little bit, morgue a little more. What key challenges do businesses face when implementing AI-driven customer service solutions and how do they overcome them?
Nick Glimsdahl: Yeah, I would say some of the challenges are leadership, maybe saying just the fear of the unknown. What happens if, and then you fill in the blank from there, what happens if the bot takes over and they try to sell an SUV for a dollar? What happens if that customer’s expectations are not met and my customers are now ticked off and they can’t get to a human, the fear of an unknown takes over. People. I think people’s, challenges when it comes to data privacy and concerns, somebody’s going to send a nasty gram, from one manufacturer to the other that the cost is too high or I’m going to provide free cost, but the p’s is too expensive. So organizations only know what they know. And so sometimes they have to make an educated decision based off of the information that they have. And I think that’s another challenge, is they’re sitting, they’re walking through the dark with a flashlight, and they’re trying to find the right information and skimming through the marketing and trying to identify what’s actually the right fit for them without just being sold to people. The old saying is people love to buy, but they hate being sold to. And I think the same is true with technology and specifically AI.
Mike Boyle: You briefly touched on this a moment ago, personalizing customer experiences. How can AI help with doing that? And what are some of the best practices for achieving that?
Nick Glimsdahl: Yeah, I think when it comes to, let’s say that it’s a specific group that you’re hoping to target. let’s say that it’s trying, to think of like, you can segment an audience, you can personalize content that goes out, you can have, predictive engagement is something that’s kind of new and fun, that, you can see where people are perusing on your guys’, on the website for, let’s say, an e-commerce or software sales for that matter. And even if somebody is not logged in or downloaded a white paper, you can still follow the interaction or the engagement of that prospect and then send personalized information. Say you’re setting a threshold. Somebody spent time for three minutes on this page, a minute and a half on this page, and they’re in checkout, but they’re kind of waiting. They haven’t really done anything yet. you have the ability to kind of alert that point of that salesperson who is aligned to that specific territory. Send them a 10% discount jump on. And now you’re interacting with that individual and just saying, hey, I see that you are in checkout. Is there anything I can help you with? And that could be the bot process or it could be a human interaction. I think those are really fun. You can prioritize VIP. So if somebody is, you know, it’s, let’s say it’s a, I don’t know, a university. And they’re trying to, it’s part of their foundation. They’re trying to find ways to raise more money. But the big person calls who is their number one contributor. That’s one thing that they don’t want to do. Maybe they’ll just call the cell phone or the president’s office, who knows? But, you have the ability to go right to the top of the queue or go right to that person who they are aligned with. And if that person is not available, they’re sick or they’re out to lunch or they’re off for the day. You go to that next best person, the more personalized that, you can get to. And as a consumer, you think, I just spoke with Mike yesterday and I got Mike again because he’s available. How awesome is this? I feel like they, they care for me. I feel known and valued. So I think those are some of them.