Your CX Team’s AI Rollout Won’t Be Fast or Smooth, but It Will Be Worth It

Okay, we know “fast” and “smooth” are relative terms. But whatever your ideal version of those is for an AI rollout, chuck it out the window. Implementing AI too quickly could actually have the opposite effect of what you want for your company’s CX goals. According to a recent Execs in the Know study, 39% of consumers say AI has worsened their customer experience. This statistic is a wake-up call that it’s worth reflecting on your goals and giving your team the time they need to get it right.

“The North Star is always ‘how do we provide the best customer and employee experience?’”

Those words are from Mandi Geary, Director of Customer Service at BSN Sports, a sporting goods and athletic apparel company that’s been providing gear for student athletes since 1972. Today, they’re still in the game, upleveling their contact center and improving strategies that elevate the customer experience.

So when it came to leveraging AI within her team’s CX workflow, Mandi’s goal was clear — AI had to work for both her customers and her agents. Even though her customer experience team is still new to the world of AI, they are already seeing results and potential.

In a recent webinar, Mandi shared how her team prepared for their AI rollout, the plans they’re developing to measure success, what’s in store for the next iteration of AI as a customer experience tool, and much more.

WEBINAR

How BSN Sports Leveraged AI for CX Success

Watch now

First Things First — You’ve Got To Research

In the CX landscape, there are so many AI conversations happening. Part of that is because CX presents a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to issues that AI can address. According to Mandi, the best thing you can do is research.

“Right now, everyone’s trying to figure out how they fit into an AI space from a technological standpoint,” Mandi said. “So, do the research first to understand the broad picture, and then start to connect.”

Your Prep Work Will Only Get You So Far, and That’s Okay

When asked how ready they were to roll out their new AI program, Mandi admitted that her team was only about 50% ready.

“We felt like we were more ready than we were,” she said.

That in and of itself served as a valuable lesson. Much of what the BSN contact center learned through implementing AI into their workflow was not about how organized the data was, but how to feed that data into the AI.

“It may have been digestible to us, but digestible [enough] to go through the AI and then transmit to a customer or an agent for a resolution brought in a whole new way of looking at the data.”

The artificial intelligence your contact center uses will need to be trained on your company’s language, goals, and routines just like any new employee would. Though AI in the CX workflow is quick at learning, it performs best when presented with metrics in ways it knows how to process.

“We’ve had to revisit how we had our data organized,” said Mandi. “We’ve had to revisit how it was even typed out or stored so that it was leveraged better from the AI perspective.”

The first step for BSN was a full aggregation of data and building a knowledge base. Before Gladly Answers gave Mandi’s team both customer-facing and agent-facing data, they had resources all over the place. Tribal knowledge, PDFs, SOPs, Word documents, and more. Organizing their data put BSN in a position to layer AI into their new CX platform more easily. Now, their data is centralized and digestible for AI.

KPIs are BFDs

First Contact Resolution. Average Handle Time. Time to First Response. They’re all metrics that you’re likely familiar with. But in this new world of AI, those are requirements. You’ll have to reallocate some of those KPIs based on a new tool and standard of performance. You’ll also need to ask yourself, ‘How does each of these KPIs fit into this new AI world?’

At the time of the webinar, Mandi’s team had only been using AI embedded into their contact center for about six weeks. That said, they were already seeing measurable changes.

“Layering in AI to our chat platform immediately resulted in 16% of our chats being fully resolved by the AI technology,” Mandi said. “So for us coming right out of the gate, and still having opportunities to learn, it’s a huge win for us.”

“Layering in AI to our chat platform immediately resulted in 16% of our chats being fully resolved by the AI technology. So for us coming right out of the gate, and still having opportunities to learn, it’s a huge win for us.”

Mandi Geary

Director of Customer Service, BSN Sports

Make an ROI Measurement Plan

As BSN’s contact center goes on this AI journey, they’ll have to look at other ways to quantify success and ROI. Even with that being the case, they’re collecting anecdotal evidence of AI’s improvements on their contact center.

“Feedback from our team and even conversations with the customers around how their experience went with that AI transaction has been really positive,” Mandi said. “I think folks are really excited about what this means and having solutions at their hands.”

Ask yourself, what are the resources that are important to you and that will most impact your team?

“Our important impact initially was customer experience, and it might be agent experience for somebody else,” Mandi said.

A common immediate ROI goal may be to save cost. Another might be to reduce contact volume. The measurement will be different from team to team, company to company, because every contact center brings its own different perspectives and sees those perspectives develop over time.

Calling All Agents: New Role Alert!

As a leader of a team, Mandi has to keep her finger on the pulse of the BSN customer. Just as importantly, she has to stay on top of her agents’ workloads and efficiencies.

“If we put time and effort into doing this, and the agents came back and said, ‘This is terrible. It’s not helping our lives. It’s not impacting our customer experience,’ We would pivot. It’s a priority for us to listen to that feedback — even if it is anecdotal.”

“It’s a priority for us to listen to [agent] feedback—even if it is anecdotal.”

Mandi Geary

Director of Customer Service, BSN Sports

When agent sentiment is good, the contact center overall can move in a positive direction. It’s not about replacing agents with AI or AI doing the work for you, but about AI enhancing what your team is capable of.

“AI gives back more of that personalized time. It allows them time to focus on the more complex situations that a customer has, versus some of those simple product knowledge questions.”

Implementing an AI rollout is going to be new for most teams out there. It might be wise to consider creating an AI expert role. This role would be responsible for teaching and onboarding agents into your AI program now and looking out for AI advancements in the future.

Questions to ask yourself before hiring an AI expert:

• Who owns the AI space at your company?
• Who is teaching AI to your agents?
• What does that new role look like?
• Will that role exist in CX, IT, or in an innovative space?
• What does the future of that AI expert look like?

Your Next AI Iteration Also Starts Now

Mandi is envisioning a world where a perfect hybrid exists between AI, agents, and customers. However, her foresight extends well beyond that. She’s already thinking about how to leverage AI-obtained knowledge to identify the root causes of problems that customers experience, remove their pain points, and truly fix their problems.

“I think the second iteration [of AI] is that we get this much deeper understanding of our customers and what they really want, and what drives them to customer service.”

Rich data collected from different AI touch points will empower teams to service customers on a more complex and nuanced level.

Walk Before You Run on This AI Journey

Rolling out a brand new platform takes time to get right. There will be hiccups along the way. But if you keep your goals clear, you too could start to see impressive results like Mandi’s CX team at BSN Sports. If you’re interested in growing through Gladly’s revenue-driving CX technology, reach out to schedule a demo.

Learn More About the Leading Customer Service AI Conference of the Year

GLADLY CONNECT LIVE