Cognitive Customer Experience: The Future of Contact Centers

In the past, many brands could get away with providing a poor customer experience because customers either didn’t know any better or there was little they could do about it. The internet and social media turned the tables.

Cognitive customer experience (cognitive CX), or the experience customers have when they interact with a business, arose because customers now expect businesses to understand their personal needs and preferences—and to address them directly. To provide this experience, businesses must start with the right data, properly analyze it, and use this data to personalize the customer experience and respond to customers in a timely manner.

Businesses that fail to provide a cognitive customer experience are at a serious competitive disadvantage.

How AI can increase cognitive customer engagement: The cognitive call center

There are a few ways brands use artificial intelligence to increase cognitive customer engagement.

• Chatbots—The most obvious way AI enhances cognitive engagement is through chatbots. Chatbots answer customer questions, enable customers to navigate company websites or products, and even make recommendations or suggestions.
• Predictive analytics—Predictive analytics identifies those customers most likely to stop doing business with a brand, enabling companies to proactively interact with these wobbly customers in an effort to retain them.
• Personalized CX—AI uses customer data to create individualized customer profiles, enabling businesses to provide customized offers and recommendations.

The real benefits of Conversational AI comes to the fore only with rich data sets that contain granular customer information. Compared to other solutions, the uniqueness of this approach is its focus on intent—not channels.

Cognitive customer engagement creates a seamless, friction-free customer experience that solves channel confusion, eliminates wasted spend, and truly understands intent (i.e., accurately understands the main reason customers contact a company in the first place) and then drives to a successful resolution.

We've seen phenomenal results in this intent-driven approach, and we are thrilled about the potential to take customer journeys to the next level—to create even more delightful and memorable customer experiences. This trend has been ascendant in the telecommunications, financial services, retail, travel, and insurance sectors for several years.

In 2020, to solve for this at scale in the enterprise world, we partnered with IBM Watson to come up with a joint solution framework. We leveraged 20 years of contact center experience working with live agent assistance to train IBM Watson, which learned to handle complex intents and provided advantages in scale and prediction in the growing world of asynchronous messaging.

Of course, there will always be scenarios in which customers want to talk to an agent, or when the AI cannot handle the conversation anymore. When this happens, the system elegantly transitions to live chat assistance; this is where HI (human intelligence) kicks in.

Cognitive call centers: A winning customer experience needs the right blend of AI + HI

To learn more about [24]7.ai conversational AI technology, AI chatbot products, and use cases, please check out the following:

• Blog: Conversational AI and Chatbots: How We Got Here
• Insights article: Conversational AI: What It Is, How It Works, Why It Matters
• Infographic: [24]7.ai Conversational AI Differentiators
• Analyst report: [24]7.ai named a Leader in the Everest Group PEAK Matrix® for Conversational AI Products, 2021
• Technology web page: [24]7 AIVA—Conversational AI Chatbot Technology with NLP