89% of business leaders across Europe say investments in AI for CX have paid off

The collective voice of 1035 business executives couldn’t be any clearer: AI for Customer Experience is here to stay and with good reason. AI is more than just an IT tool that delivers efficient services. AI solutions are a growth accelerator.

Odigo, a leading provider of Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, today announced the findings of its 3^rd annual AI for Customer Experience report. Davies Hickman, a reputable market research agency from the UK, conducted detailed research across market verticals and geographies. The results are key trends and conclusions on the pace of adoption of AI solutions in customer-facing environments. As a champion of the benefits of AI for Customer Experience (CX), Odigo has dedicated itself to infusing its CCaaS solutions with AI functionalities. That makes Odigo doubly keen to keep its finger on the pulse of what businesses right across the board have to say.

The entire scope of the AI for CX research addresses three main topics:

• How AI is changing European contact centres
• NLP challenges in the contact centre industry
• Six ways to improve CX using AI in your contact centre

For each of these, a targeted eBook brings together findings from business leaders. Some of the highlights include:

• Customer service departments have taken the lead in adopting AI, a 21% jump from 2021 and an insight taken from the first ebook.  as detailed in the first eBook in the series
• The vast majority of business owners (84%) state that time needed to prove NLP works is a major challenge when investing in NLP, as is overcoming the fear that NLP will replace people, 79% of those surveyed agree.  Further details to be found in the second eBook in the series
• In 2022, 77% of respondents (compared with only 71% in 2021) stated they were interested in using customer service bots to provide customer service via the company website. In  our third eBook, discover more ways to apply AI for CX.

A lot of hype about AI in all facets of business and life means that not all the information in circulation is grounded in reality. This is not the case, however, with AI in the contact centre, as ebook 1 reveals. Businesses are on the offense with almost 3 out of 4 businesses responding that they have already made AI investments. What is striking is that 89% of these investors report the deployment to be a success, sometimes in multiple areas. On top of that, 6 out 10 of the remaining businesses that haven’t invested yet intend to do so over the next 2 years.

The root cause of this is that AI-powered solutions have an impact that is not limited to their immediate application. For example, the application of conversational bots is not only limited to extracting information from a conversation but to interpreting it and providing a convenient self-service option in the process. Conversational AI does all that and also optimises the contact centre with advanced call qualification (detection of intent) before routing. What’s more, it offers contextualised responses directly to the agent. The principle of AI for CX, when intelligently applied, enriches the experience of both the customer and the agent. And it is that mutual benefit, or symmetry of attention, which makes it a fundamental lever of growth for your company.

If you want to explore and better understand the world of AI for CX through the eyes of a 1000+ business executives, bookmark the Odigo page for the publication of the second and third eBooks.