SPECIAL REPORT
Step 3: Demonstrate that the ROI > 100 % When Finance objects to escalation to a human costing $ 25, place that within the context of a customer worth $ 500 or even thousands of dollars.
Help Finance to do the math. Is it worth saving $ 25 while losing $ 250( 50 % X $ 500)? At minimum, the ROI of easy escalation is 200 %, and in this case, $ 83 /$ 25 = 330 %, assuming a 33 % gross margin.
FIX YOUR AI THE SAME WAY YOU( HOPEFULLY) FIXED YOUR IVR
I’ ve discussed the causes of rage that we’ ve found with IVR and are now seeing with AI and have provided solutions that can be applied to both. But now let’ s deep dive into them, especially those that apply to AI.
• Assure the customer the issue will be reported to Quality or Continuous Improvement [ as I recommended earlier ], and actually create a reporting channel.
• Ask( via popup survey or speech question) every customer receiving a problem remedy if they feel they were treated fairly and given a clear explanation. Make it part of the basic AI transaction, not a separate survey. These two dimensions are the best predictors of long-term loyalty and correlate with being“ Easy to do business with.”
1. PROVIDE EASY ACCESS
• Highlight help and be transparent it is an AI application.
• Minimize front-end messages based on what you know about the customer. Push back on Legal and Marketing that want to front-load frustrating messages.
• Assist the customer in communicating their intent. Think how you used example words in IVR menus.
• Test and continuously improve your AI tool using all the reasons for escalation which signify failures. Never stop measuring and assign a reason to every escalation beyond original intent.
2. ASSURE EFFECTIVE RESPONSE
• For any problem, always have a natural sounding apology – for questions, always thank the customer for asking – convey enthusiasm via language. At Zappos, a CSR would say,“ I love this type of problem.”
• Create flexible solution spaces for every difficult issue based on internal corporate data: do not trust external sources.( This one action will reduce your probability of disaster by at least 50 %.)
• Your empowerment of AI should mirror the empowerment you give your CSRs. Test every solution space with the CSRs first and program the same solutions and explanations into the AI.
3. PROACTIVELY OFFER ESCALATION
Remember, every escalation is a customer saved with a positive ROI.
• Provide an obvious channel for escalation to a human. Triggers to provide an offer of escalation can be use of negative language, more than three tries or an explicit request for“ Human” or“ Representative.”
• Provide an assured response time if it is not immediate; virtual queues with response within 20 minutes are satisfactory as long as the promise is kept.
• AI should transfer the data, or the customer should be given a case number to avoid retelling the story.
• The CSR should always stress the customer’ s incident will be reported to Quality and identify the reason for escalation: separate from the initial problem. The reason for escalation is usually more important than the original issue in terms of process improvement.
SUMMARY
AI tools are basically glorified IVRs with all the same problems. The payoffs of a good tool are huge for the 90 % of issues that can be handled with self-service. The damage of a flawed tool is likewise as large. The key to success is to encourage escalation out of AI and capture the reason for escalation for every transaction.
John Goodman is Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting( CCMC). He has assisted 45 of the Fortune 100 companies. Harper Collins published the second edition of his book, CX 3.0 featuring updates on AI and other technologies as well as research in April 2024.
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