Marbue Brown, author, consultant, and CX executive, shares strategies for balancing AI with the human touch in customer experience development, the topic of his panel at the ICX Summit in Charlotte, NC on September 9-11.
Few technologies have changed business more than AI has over the past year — and the pace of change is only accelerating.
But how can operators balance emerging AI technology with the time-honored human touch that forms the bedrock of customer experience for successful brands?
This is the topic of a panel session at this year’s Interactive Customer Experience Summit, hosted by Networld Media Group in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 9-11, and co-held with the Bank Customer Experience Summit.Panelists will include Marbue Brown, Founder, The Customer Obsession Advantage; Chris King, CEO at Monster Entertainment; and Daniel Parker, technical services manager, Kodak Moments.
We reached out to Marbue Brown for strategies on balancing AI and the human touch via email interview. Brown is the author of “The Customer Obsession Advantage,” a Forbes Top Ten Business Book in 2022. Brown also founded The Customer Obsession Advantage, a consultancy that helps companies supercharge customer experience design through his Customer Obsession methodology, along with developing a track record as a successful CX executive, achieving positive results with firms like JP Morgan Chase, Amazon.com, Microsoft Corporation, and Cisco Systems.
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Q and A with Marbue Brown
Q: Before we dive into CX and AI, can you tell us a little about your journey into becoming an expert on this topic?
A: My entire career since graduate school has been linked to CX in one way or another, but I’d say I became firmly established as a thought leader in the field when I began publishing some foundational articles about CX measurement with colleagues based on our research in the field. That work positioned me to lead CX teams and initiatives at some of the most iconic companies on the planet, including JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems.
Meanwhile, CX is perhaps one of facets of business that is best positioned to benefit from advancements in AI. As such in my CX executive roles I have worked very closely with technologies and use cases that are at the epicenter of the AI revolution.
Q: AI moves fast! What are some of the most important AI developments to you this year?
A: Three come to mind:
1) Proliferation of production deployments of AI-powered applications that boost CX.
2) Nvidia’s meteoric rise to become #1 in market capitalization signals that we’re still on the very front end of the AI revolution.
3) High profile AI faux pas show that there are still serious kinks to be worked out before we can maximize the potential of AI to support business outcomes. That includes the Google’s rollback of the Gemini tool that produced historically inaccurate images, OpenAI’s rollback of a voice option that sounded like Scarlett Johansson, and Microsoft’s rollback of its Recall feature.
Q: You’re an advocate of “customer obsession” in business. How do you define “customer obsession?”
A:Customer Obsession is an extreme focus on the customer that drives companies to adopt policies, take actions and make investments in the customer’s favor even when they can’t immediately connect the dots to their own financial benefit because they know it always pans out in the end when you take the position that if it’s good for customers it’s good for business. No company that has made this bet has ever gone wrong. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Their business results are off the charts in comparison to their peers.
Q: In this context, what is the challenge in balancing human touch and AI in the business context?
A: First, there needs to be a recognition that customer connections handled by live agents or associates are not inherently personal and that customer connections facilitated by AI technology aren’t inherently impersonal. We’ve all had conversations with live agents where the agent was dismissive of our concerns and didn’t demonstrate any empathy or meaningful engagement. In that case, the “human touch” was not a plus. Meanwhile, if properly architected, a fully automated customer interaction powered by AI could leave the customer with the feeling “this company gets me” and that it was thought through with them in mind. That feels personal. It feels human.
Second, there needs to be a recognition that with the current state of the art, there are some scenarios that AI-powered solutions can handle effectively standalone, some scenarios where they are better suited to assist humans in a supporting role and some where the interaction is best left to humans outright. The key to balancing the human touch with AI is differentiating between these scenarios then applying AI appropriately to each type (or not). The great thing about this approach is that when it’s implemented properly live agents are freed up to give more attention to the cases that need their attention most.
For example, routine inquiries like checking bank account balances or the delivery status for an order can easily be handled by AI standalone. Meanwhile, disputing a charge on a credit card bill that your bank initially removed then reinstated after feedback from the merchant is probably best handled by a live agent.
Q: What are some of the biggest opportunities with AI that businesses should be leveraging?
A:Consider the following:
- Extract CX insights from unstructured customer conversations.
Businesses have a myriad of unstructured conversations with customers daily and they are an excellent source of CX insights, but until recent advancements in AI those conversations were difficult to mine. Now they can be readily tapped to unearth CX enhancement opportunities that were previously inaccessible. - Transform chatbots into an attractive option for resolving inquiries.
Many of us have had the occasion to be frustrated by a chatbot that didn’t address our inquiry and that didn’t help us get to someone who could. Conversational AI has enabled development of chatbots that easily handle routine inquiries, that hold their own in addressing complex inquiries, and that recognize when to escalate to live agent. One company boasts that their AI-powered chatbot does the work of 700 agents and that over a 12-month period it handled two-thirds of their customer conversations. - Boost effectiveness of customer service associates with AI-powered copilots.
At least three use cases are emerging as significant opportunities for GenAI to boost the effectiveness of CSAs:
- Simulating live customer conversations during onboarding and in-service training.
- Minimizing or eliminating the time it takes to research answers to customers’ inquiries by querying knowledge bases and populating answers for CSAs in near real time.
- Suggesting the optimum wording for CSAs to use to respond to customers’ inquiries.
Q: What are the most common mistakes you see with AI in customer service and customer experience design?
A: There are three common mistakes:
- Building AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants without fully working through scenarios that customers might encounter to ensure they don’t reach dead ends or wind up in infinite loops without achieving their intended objective. That is, building the technology solution without insisting on working backward from the customer.
- Rolling out customer facing AI applications before they have been thoroughly tested for scenarios that could result in answers that include AI-generated hallucinations.
- Deploying AI-powered solutions for use cases that the state of the art isn’t ready to support.
Q: If all goes well, how do you envision future of AI in customer experience?
A: I envision a future where AI significantly enhances CX vs. detracting from it as some suppose it might. It’s a future where AI-powered solutions are deployed side-by-side with live agents to complement them instead of competing with them and to boost their effectiveness instead of supplanting them. I imagine a future where fully automated AI-powered interactions feel as personal and as effective as dealing with a live agent but don’t feel creepy. I see a future where AI-powered solutions are deployed for use cases where it feels natural and where they are withheld from scenarios that aren’t a good fit.
Q: As the event approaches, do you have any closing thoughts for our readers?
A: Many companies have already taken the plunge and proven that AI-powered solutions can be a tremendous benefit to CX. If your business is still “sitting on the fence,” there’s no doubt that you can take a major step forward for CX too if you make sure to start from stubborn, critical path use cases already on your radar vs. starting with the technology. Once you do the path forward will become a lot clearer.
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