Today’s interview is with Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder & CEO of PolyAI, a leading supplier of Conversational AI for automated customer service. We talk about some recent research of theirs that finds that the phone still reigns in customer service, making the contact center into a ‘command center,’ why voice channels aren’t relics of the past but are, in fact, essential infrastructure, that customer service interactions are becoming increasingly contentious and what their AI capabilities are doing to help with that.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The future of CX and agentic CX – Interview with Sid Banerjee of Medallia – and is number 544 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Nikola:
- The phone still reigns in customer service.
- Automated voice is a digital experience. But the modality matters, so let’s not put it in the same bucket.
- If you call and I pick up quickly with a well-trained agent, that is a good customer experience. However, if you call and I put you on hold and while on hold, I give you all sorts of reasons why our lines are busy and that you can do everything online … that’s deflection. And, I’m kind of hoping that you’ll hang up and decide that you don’t have to talk to me after all. That’s not a good customer experience.
- Good business is driven by personal connections.
- Our research found that for Gen X, and then especially millennials, the propensity for voice does shrink.
- But with Gen Z, you see a jump up from millennials in the likelihood to pick up the phone, and one thing that is driving that is that they grew up on social media and gaming and while gaming, they’re talking to people nonstop.
- Headlines from the research:
- 86% of Gen Z and younger Millennial participants prefer the voice channel for support, breaking the stereotype that young people don’t like to talk on the phone.
- 55% of respondents are likely to immediately ask for a representative if they hear a robotic IVR (interactive voice response),
- 71% of consumers are willing to speak to an intelligent voice assistant if it could accurately fulfil their customer service needs (process a return, perform a price match, answer questions, etc).
- The main highlight from the research is that voice is in fashion, people are calling, and there’s an increasing expectation that a brand has a good voice digital channel. If you do, then people will engage.
- In the future, 90% of all customer queries into the contact center will be automated.
- The contact center in the future will be a ‘command center.’
- By building that command center, you focus on the top 10 use cases, build those out in terms of automation, and make it very easy to escalate to a human.
- Every time you escalate, you capture why you escalate. Now you have an automation roadmap grounded in data over what’s actually going on, versus some abstract idea of what it might be.
- When you turn off the voice channel, you turn off a real-time data capture and insight machine.
- When you build the command center, you also build the cognitive functions of your level two agents.
- We have different names for it. But above your tier one, you’re going to have your coaching agents. And these will be your humans handling both the escalation and the management of the AI, making sure that the right things are getting done and that the system hasn’t gone off the rails.
- Listening to these calls will help them understand the business even better because they will know the customer’s needs. Then, above that, as you pass those insights up, the command center emerges.
- If you have very busy agents and if you tell them, “Hey, at the end of every call, try to sell this,” but also try to pick up 100 calls a day, that’s at odds with each other.
- You need a self learning contact or context center with the right humans in the loop at the right moment. There’s no time for decisions by committee.
- You can have a committee for major decisions from automation and stuff. But, by and large, the people on the ground should be empowered.
- 43% of customers now admit to yelling or raising their voices during customer service interactions. And that’s up from 35% 10 years ago.
- To the best of my knowledge, we’re the only ones running automated systems with dozens of voices for different contexts/use cases.
- Nikola’s best advice: Don’t take the smallest baby step possible, which these days manifests as assistive tools that make agents a bit better. Imagine this world where it is largely automated, not fully automated, but largely automated with human escalation. Imagine that world and start working towards it because the roadmap to building that is not the same as something that lives on an agent’s screen and tells them how to do their job better. It is not the right transformation. It kind of anchors you further in the human first world rather than in this like AI-mind followed by really highly paid, knowledge workers above. So start automating the phone now. Don’t distract yourself with chat or with assistive tools for voice.
- Nikola’s Punk CX brand: Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
About Nikola
Nikola Mrkšić is the CEO and Co-Founder of PolyAI, the leading provider of voice AI agents for enterprise customer service. Nikola got his machine learning PhD from Cambridge, and he was the first hire at VocalIQ, acquired by Apple to make Siri more conversational. Nikola was named in the Forbes 30 under 30 in 2021 for his work with PolyAI.
Check out their recent research mentioned in our chat here, find out more about PolyAI via their website and feel free to connect with Nikola on LinkedIn here.
Credit: Photo by Ali Shah Lakhani on Unsplash