Top Tips For Using CX Automation to Deliver Better Business Outcomes

The arrival of AI and automation has thoroughly swept today’s CX landscape, influencing outcomes like agent productivity, customer satisfaction, and so much more. But the real success comes from knowing exactly how to use these tools in harmony with your CX strategy—in the real world. 

To better understand how AI can slot into your CX strategy, we spoke to the experts! Edwin Margulies, Nextiva’s Chief Evangelist, and Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder and Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, let us in on a few secrets about the benefits of implementing a CX platform, the vision of UCXM, real-world use cases for AI, and much more. 

Stick around for key insights that can help you excel in the world of AI and automation. Ready to dive in? 

Key Outcomes of Implementing a CX Platform

The first step toward reaping the rewards of AI tools is implementing an omnichannel CX platform that can streamline everything your business needs in one place. A good CX platform puts your customer at the center of every conversation, tracking all of their messages across channels and delivering data-backed insights directly to an agent’s dashboard. 

In addition to happier employees and happier customers, your CX platform should reduce the number of vendors you need to run your business and reveal top opportunities for where you can leverage automation and AI to enhance productivity. 

“AI is the most recent addition to what we now call the customer experience platform. And with all of the information in one place, we get all of the insights into where and when to automate a well,” says Sheila.

Nextiva’s Unified CXM platform, for example, unifies your entire customer journey in one platform and helps you deliver personalized experiences at scale using the latest and greatest in AI and automation. Choosing the right CX platform for your company will ultimately have a huge impact on your ability to effectively implement AI—and a huge impact on your bottom line as well. 

What Is the Vision of Unified Customer Experience Management (UCXM)?

UCXM evolved out of a desire to seamlessly connect companies with their customers, teammates, and real-time insights—all in one place. With a single source of truth, agents can see a customer’s complete history right in front of them and deliver personalized experiences on the fly. They can reach out to supervisors or collaborate with other teammates if they’re in a bind. They can even use AI to transcribe a call, summarize a call for their wrap-up, or reveal customer sentiment to ensure a smoother conversation. 

Nextiva may have started with voice, but the company has continued to innovate and add capabilities to ensure that the entire customer journey is covered, without having to switch to multiple apps or vendors. 

“The vision has kind of been the same from the very beginning,” explains Edwin. “We should add this capability. We should add this capability. Why? Because customers, enterprises, businesses, of all sizes, have more than one problem to solve. So the aspiration, the vision was, let us solve as many problems as we can. Let us put ourselves in the center in terms of the turnstile of interactions.”

As it turns out, there are so many opportunities for AI and automation when using a UCXM platform like Nextiva.

Real-World AI Use Cases

Automated Summarization

One of the easiest ways to start seeing impressive outcomes with AI and automation is by using AI summarization for calls. This built-in tool in Nextiva actually transcribes customer calls in real time, showing the conversation up on the screen for the agent and supervisor to reference as needed, avoiding repetitive questions or confusion. After the call ends, Generative AI summarizes the main points, saving time on the back-end when an agent would typically need to write their wrap-up. In healthcare specifically, this application can be a huge timesaver for clinicians.

Edwin explains how to take this one step further: “The other thing that’s really fun is that depending on what type of transcription you’re using and what kind of generative AI summarization you’re using, you can also do sentiment. For example, it’ll say initially the patient was agitated about the new medication and the care coach talked her off the ledge. And then by the end of the call, she was happy. So, it’ll actually express the arc of sentiment, and some nuances that maybe if you’re taking manual notes because you’re in a rush, you might miss. It’s a winner use case for AI.”

Agent Assist Supported by Knowledge Management

Leveraging multiple AI modalities, like an autonomous bot and an agent assist bot, helped Nextiva’s satellite TV service customer reduce call handling time for queries by 50%! In this use case, the satellite TV provider leverages autonomous bots for conversational commerce or purchasing a package. But if the customer has questions, they’ll be intelligently routed using skills-based routing to a suitable agent. As the customer speaks, relevant articles from the platform’s knowledge base are being surfaced in front of them, so they can easily answer the customer’s questions in real time. 

“In this particular journey that the customer has taken, he has encountered two AI modalities. There could be more, but the mixing and matching of these modalities is where it becomes an art form in true journey orchestration. And that’s where we’re having the most fun is the balance of those modalities,” says Edwin.

Automated Omnichannel Outreach and Payment Portal

Why not meet your customers where they are for follow-ups like payment reminders? After you send a snail mail reminder to a customer about a payment that’s due, follow up with an automated text message providing a link to the payment portal. If your customer texts back with questions, a platform like Nextiva can intelligently route their inbound messages to an agent to further help the customer.

If the customer wants to shift to a phone call at any time to negotiate a payment plan or discuss additional questions, they can seamlessly jump on a call and the agent will have their full history in front of them to quickly resolve the issue. Ta-da! It really is like magic.

AI & Automation Tips to Consider

When asked about their best advice for successfully leveraging AI, Sheila and Edwin both offered some helpful parting words. 

“I always say the first place to start is the sources of data that your agents are using today, that your customers are using today, and making sure that they are up to date, that they are consistent, that you understand what parts of what you have in terms of documentation is suitable for agents, suitable for only engineers, suitable for customers. Just that knowledge management job is an important step one,” advises Sheila.

According to Edwin, “it’s actually very straightforward. When you’re thinking about, ‘Hey, how can I deploy automation or AI?’ Look at the intersection of volume and complexity first. A credit line increase is very complex. The volume of that going into a financial institution is very high. So anything that’s very high in volume and very high in complexity is a target for automation.”

Want to unlock more real-world use cases and AI tips from the experts?

Watch the full on-demand webinar to hear key insights from Edwin and Sheila, including Nextiva’s full evolution to UCXM and four additional AI use cases to help you master the art of AI.