Smarter, more independent AI is starting to transform customer experience in myriad ways, making brands more proactive in meeting customer needs and helping customers resolve queries faster.
So says Luke Willemse, Sales and Marketing Manager at Decisioneering, a data engineering and AI specialist and local partner of Medallia – a leading real-time experience management platform.
AI has evolved far beyond chatbots, he notes: “Customer experience remains a field that needs a human touch, but the industry is moving towards an AI approach as the technology becomes more autonomous and capable of making service more personal.
“AI will definitely be the next big thing in the sector, thanks to the efficiencies and how much time the technology can free up. Whereas AI bots were more scripted and capable of only basic tasks, the new AI agents are a lot smarter – they can learn, add context and identify sentiment. They are becoming a lot more independent in their decision-making,” he says.
This means AI can be deployed to handle first-line queries and routine tasks, as well as helping brands analyse large volumes of data to identify trends and market sentiment.
Willemse says Decisioneering harnesses software solutions with integrated AI, and is exploring possibilities to expand its AI arsenal.
He notes that as a partner of Medallia, Decisioneering is bringing Medallia’s Athena AI to South Africa.
Medallia, which has invested over $750 million in AI over the past two years, is making strides in harnessing AI and generative AI to improve customer experience. Building on its lightning fast text analytics, Medallia also enables speech analytics of conversational and audio data to help marketers analyse survey data and customer engagement trends. Generative AI in Medallia Themes enables users to identify granular trends and analyse root causes, and intelligent summaries offer agents a concise overview of the engagements with a client, with metrics and notes on resolution and customer satisfaction. Medallia Athena is described as an advanced AI technology layer that helps turn customer, employee and product journey data across multiple channels into a 360-degree view that drives action to improve experiences.
Willemse says: “An AI model like Athena can analyse your customer interactions across e-mails, calls and chats, understand who the customer is and what they want, and pick up on the sentiment behind the engagements. This can inform brands on where human intervention is needed, for example. It can also support forecasting like predicting customer churn.”
Willemse expects to see AI agents and tools like Athena making greater inroads in the South African CX environment over the next few years. “Now is the time for organisations to think strategically about how they want to harness AI, and how they want to impact their CX. They also have to identify and integrate the right data, because an AI model is only as good as the data it loads from. If your customer data is scattered across different systems – your e-mails, social media, messaging channels – you need to integrate it and ensure that it’s quality data before rolling out your AI model,” he says. “It’s also important to consider the ideal balance between automation and human interaction, and when engagements should be handed over to humans. Once AI is deployed, you've got to continuously test and refine your AI models to ensure they are improving CX, not undermining it.”
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