AI-Powered Mindfulness: The Human Element of Innovation

Almost every business across the globe now uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) in some form. The trick is to ensure they are cashing in on the promise of the technology with real, tangible benefits. At Avaya, our enterprise customers using AI in the contact center report a 65% reduction in after-call work and 50% increase in efficiency with solutions like conversational AI and AI analytics – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

At the same time, we hear about the dark side of AI with concerns around job displacement, data security and privacy, and minimizing the human touch. But as with any technological investment, AI is what companies make of it. AI investments can also serve as a unifier between humans and technology – helping us to learn better, communicate clearer, and connect faster. At Avaya, we see AI as a powerful tool for driving genuine, mindful customer and employee experiences. This joint focus on CX and EX is integral to sustaining innovation and driving business growth.

Here are three reasons why customer-centric companies must understand and prioritize AI-powered mindfulness, especially in the contact center:

Enterprises are Struggling to Stay Relevant in the Eyes of Their Customers

A recent report from Accenture confirms what we know to be true: customers and employees are changing faster than executives can change their businesses, which is leading to a crisis of relevance. There is a growing divide between what customers and employees need and value and what businesses can offer, specifically in the contact center which serves as the vital touchpoint where customer and employee experiences come together.

We agree with Accenture’s Chief Strategy Officer, Baiju Shah, in his belief that companies can bridge this gap and herald significant growth not by simply promoting consumption, but by meaningfully contributing to peoples’ lives. Businesses can meaningfully use AI to meet peoples’ expectations of what they should be providing.

Customers and employees are multifaceted, complex, and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances. AI engines are uniquely designed to continuously ingest data as it flows through the contact center with number crunching capabilities that are impossible for human analysts to perform at the same level, delivering actionable insights on ever-evolving customer and employee needs.

An Agent’s Experience as an Employee Shapes How They Show up for Your Business, and Your Customers

The current agent turnover rate suggests that many of them aren’t happy and that current efforts to keep them satisfied aren’t meeting expectations, let alone exceeding them. This opens a much deeper conversation about what makes the human experience joyful and how that can be woven into the fabric of the contact center workplace. A Harvard study conducted over the course of 80 years found that community and close relationships keep people happiest throughout their lives. The issue is so grave that loneliness is considered by the study’s researchers to be one of the top issues affecting humanity.

This should open the eyes of every person whose job is to retain agents and improve agent experience. Agents, especially those working remotely, are prone to feeling stressed and isolated at work. Could AI – the great “agent replacer” – actually improve agent wellness and sense of community? Absolutely. AI is already proving to be an excellent solution for helping agents increase their well-being, with AI taking on menial tasks so that agents can gain more time to not only handle higher-value interactions, but also devote more time to addressing their personal needs.

A common example we use at Avaya is AI-powered emotion tracking. Avaya’s Innovation Without Disruption approach enables enterprises to pursue this kind of innovation on top of their existing contact center infrastructure to make AI tools like mindfulness training, encouragement bots, and exercise scheduling accessible right from each agent’s desktop.

Customers Don’t Feel Truly Connected to Companies

The business-to-consumer (B2C) relationship is like dating. You don’t want your date to be more focused on how fast and low-cost your dinner is; you want them to prioritize you and what’s in your best interests, even in the smallest details.

Someone who truly cares for you will show it by consistently considering your feelings and acting in ways that support and uplift you. In the world of contact center customer experience, this translates to customer effort. According to Gartner, who experience high-effort service interactions – essentially those who experience lesser-quality service -- will move on to another company. Gartner outlines indicators of high-effort experiences as “channel switching, repetition of information, generic service, transfers and repeat interactions”. AI-powered mindfulness is essential in today’s world of business speed dating.

Here are three ways AI can improve customer effort for customer service operations, to help ensure interactions are delivered with high-quality:

• Attribute-based routing: Connect customer service across every touchpoint, matching consumers with the best resource organization-wide to deliver an effortless experience.
• AI-powered transcription: Real-time transcription takes the guesswork out of trying to understand customers or asking them to repeat themselves, keeping conversations flowing and enabling agents to stay in the moment to connect and help as needed.
• AI virtual agent: This conversational “agent” powered by GenAI uses natural language tools to replicate a live-agent experience – talking, listening, and understanding callers to provide intuitive self-service always with the option to seamlessly escalate to a helpful human. Avaya’s AI Virtual Agent solution is available 24/7, works over every channel, and supports 100+ languages.

Let us help as you consider your AI tooling approach. Start your AI transformation journey with Avaya.