How to Integrate AI for a More Powerful Human Customer Experience

The phrase “AI customer service” often evokes a strong, frequently adverse reaction. Online discussions, like those commonly found on Reddit, feature a cynical view of how companies plan to use AI in customer care.

A Gartner survey found that 53% of customers would consider switching to a competitor if a company heavily relied on AI for service. These aren’t just opinions; many have endured frustrating encounters with poorly implemented AI.

Yet, a compelling counter-narrative is emerging from businesses at the forefront of AI adoption.

Research from ISG reveals that customer service chatbots are the most common generative AI use case (53%), and these early adopters report significant benefits: increased business efficiency, accelerated growth, cost savings, and, crucially, improved customer service leading to better experiences and higher retention.

So, how do we reconcile this fear of AI with its proven potential to enhance interactions?

The disconnect often lies not in AI itself, but in its integration — whether it’s used to replace or empower the human element. This guide cuts through the apprehension, showing you how to strategically integrate AI into your agent workflows to amplify your team’s capabilities, optimize business processes, and deliver a more responsive, empathetic, and powerful human customer experience.

Grounding AI in Your Human-Centric CX Strategy

Before exploring the practical ways AI can transform your agent workflows, set clear and realistic expectations. The aim isn’t merely to adopt new technology, but to thoughtfully integrate AI to uplift the experience for both your valued customers and dedicated human agents.

Wayne Butterfield, Partner for AI, Automation, and Contact Center Transformation at ISG, is blunt about his beliefs around introducing self-service and AI workflows. During a virtual summit hosted by Nextiva, they highlighted several factors to build more human experiences with AI, stating, “A high ROI on your AI endeavors is not a given, especially in contact centers.”

They further advised that simply deploying AI tools doesn’t automatically guarantee a remarkable return on investment or an improved human experience. The truth is, while AI is a potent enabler, it isn’t a magic wand.

Achieving success with AI in customer service hinges on understanding its capabilities and limitations, and strategically applying it to support and enhance, not replace, the crucial human element within your team.

While a suite of out-of-the-box AI solutions offers exciting capabilities:

• Customer sentiment analysis
• AI-powered agent coaching
• Self-service AI chatbots
• Intelligent call routing
• Automated escalations

Realizing a genuine transformation that elevates the human experience requires more than just implementing features. It calls for a dedicated approach to managing business change. The contact center is an intricate and ever-evolving ecosystem. Successfully weaving AI into its fabric means looking beyond surface-level automation to build systems where technology empowers your team to be more effective, empathetic, and engaged in their interactions.

If we underestimate this level of complexity, we’re stuck with a limited return on investment. Going deeper and fully understanding how to create more human experiences in the age of AI will ensure we extend the ROI of AI while delivering better agent and customer experiences.

Using AI to Empower Agents and Amplify the Human Touch

If we can reduce the administrative load on our agents, we free up their valuable time and energy to focus on the critical human skills — like empathy, complex problem-solving, and nuanced communication — that your customers expect and your business relies on. This means strategically removing the menial and repetitive tasks that agents find time-consuming and of low intrinsic value.

With AI functions like auto-summarization of calls and chats, we can reduce call center burnout (it’s a real problem that’s costing you more than you realize).

This allows agents to dedicate their full concentration to active listening and helping customers, rather than juggling note-taking with conversation. By alleviating this burden, AI enables agents in sectors like banking, insurance, and retail to process transactions or update records seamlessly, without the pressure of constant, manual data entry across multiple systems.

This, coupled with intelligent on-screen agent coaching prompts, empowers agents to give customers their undivided attention. They can provide in-the-moment, insightful service tailored to the customer’s immediate needs, without requiring supervisor intervention, leading to faster and more effective human-to-human support.

The thoughtful integration of these AI-driven workflows means your human agents can dedicate their focus to delivering attentive, empathetic, and effective customer service. The output isn’t just a better agent experience and a more productive workforce, but also more meaningful customer interactions and predictable cost savings.

Crafting Deeper Human Connections

Better agent experiences drive better customer experiences. When your staff feel supported, are less burdened, and are more engaged, they’re better equipped to provide exceptional, human-centric service.

Having a human-in-the-loop matters. You can powerfully complement this enhanced agent experience with AI technologies that build a superior human experience for your customers.

Consider real-time translation. This technology is invaluable when assisting customers, patients, or migrants who may not be native speakers. Without it, conversations can easily become fragmented, leading to misunderstandings and frustration.

While hiring a full spectrum of multilingual agents is unscalable, AI-driven translation allows for natural, fluid conversations, with technology acting as an invisible bridge to build understanding and human connection across language divides.

Similarly, businesses worldwide use conversational interactive voice response (IVR) systems to transform the initial customer contact. Instead of navigating complex menus or enduring long hold times only to repeat their issue, customers can state their needs naturally.

The conversational IVR then efficiently connects them to the best-suited human agent in record time. In the background, APIs sync your CRM and contact center platforms, presenting the agent with pertinent customer history and context the moment the interaction begins.

From that point, the agent is already a step ahead. They can see recent transactions, review ticket history, identify repeat issues, or offer personalized guidance based on past purchases — all without the customer needing to re-explain. This removes a burden from your agent and lifts your customer’s frustration, leading to a more efficient, satisfying, and personal interaction.

Real-World Use Cases of Contact Center AI

It’s one thing to discuss the theories behind AI agent workflows; it’s another to see the tangible impact on real organizations and the people they serve. As the adage goes, seeing is believing. The following examples illustrate how strategically integrated AI isn’t just streamlining processes — it’s actively building more powerful human experiences for both customers and agents.

1. Humanitarian charity better connects with real-time translation

When dealing with non-native speakers, often in vulnerable situations, clear and empathetic communication is paramount. For instance, consider the impact on a mid-sized humanitarian organization. By implementing real-time translation, such charities have been able to achieve critical human-centric goals:

• Service their beneficiaries faster and offer a more personalized, understanding experience.
• Reduce the operational strain of continuously recruiting specialist personnel for niche languages, allowing resources to be focused on direct aid.

For organizations where delivering an excellent, accessible experience and managing operational costs are paramount, these improvements are vital. When individuals seeking help speak limited English or less common dialects, real-time translation offers a powerful solution.

The implementation can be straightforward — a simple desktop installation giving agents instant access to comprehensive language support. Observed results in such scenarios include significant decreases in average handle time, and, more importantly, beneficiaries report feeling more genuinely understood and personally assisted.

2. Behavioral health organization uses an AI-powered contact center

Consider the impact on the behavioral health sector, where sensitive and focused interactions are paramount. Reducing call wrap-up and documentation time by several minutes per interaction can directly translate to reduced employee burnout and greater capacity for care coaches and agents to engage with members with the necessary empathy.

Leading AI-enabled behavioral healthcare companies are indeed reporting such benefits. For example, Ontrak Health, a Nextiva customer, uses AI-powered contact center features, including real-time call summarization, to reduce the time their care coaches spend on manual tasks like note-taking.

This allows their team to reach more members and dedicate more focused attention during conversations. As highlighted in Ontrak’s approach, after each interaction, AI-powered speech-to-text tools can generate theme-based summaries, and Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) can analyze notes to measure care practices and track member progress.

The positive ripple effect on the human experience is significant. By freeing employees from these heavy administrative tasks, their attentiveness and presence during member conversations naturally improve.

While specific metrics like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) can vary, the ability for staff to concentrate more on empathetic interaction rather than extensive note-taking directly enhances the members’ experience and sense of being heard.

Furthermore, as Ontrak’s use of AI demonstrates, organizations benefit from more consistent, accurate call summaries, which not only improve internal efficiency and quality monitoring but also ensure a clearer understanding of each member’s journey over time, contributing to a more supportive and continuous care experience.

3. Regional bank uses conversational agents

Altering the initial point of customer contact, especially by introducing automation, can seem daunting. However, experiences consistent with those of regional banks adopting AI-powered chatbots demonstrate that customers warmly welcome changes that lead to faster resolutions and access to the right support, improving their human experience.

For example, in scenarios where chatbots have been implemented, like the one from HSBC, banks have seen significant improvements. It’s realistic for queries to be answered quickly and to get transferred to a live agent quickly.

This means a big portion of their customers receive quicker attention. They can also achieve notable reductions in queries needing a live agent, allowing basic inquiries like branch hours or bill payments to be handled instantly by AI.

As a result, human agents are freed up to address more complex needs where their expertise and empathy are most valued, and customers experience faster attention and resolution.

The Future is Collaborative: AI and Humans Partnering for Superior CX

The AI-powered tools and strategies discussed so far are not futuristic concepts; they’re readily available today, tried, tested, and simpler to implement than you might imagine, paving the way for immediate enhancements to your human-led customer service.

Build AI agents for customer support

Looking ahead, the next phase in contact center AI involves intelligent virtual agents. These alleviate the burden on human agents and enhance operational efficiency. Here, the goal is to enable AI to handle certain well-defined interactions end-to-end, liberating human agents to dedicate their expertise to more complex, emotionally nuanced, and high-value customer engagements where their skills are irreplaceable.

These advanced virtual agents offer clear benefits that contribute to a better overall service experience:

• 24/7 accessibility and adaptability: Meeting customer needs anytime.
• Reduction in call escalations: Resolving issues effectively at the first AI contact point.
• Reduction in average handle time: Increasing efficiency for routine queries.
• Accelerated complex workflows: Streamlining processes for faster outcomes.
• Agentless decision-making for routine tasks: Empowering customers with immediate solutions.
• Enhanced self-help and online tutorials: Providing accessible information.
• Intelligent customer routing: Ensuring queries reach the right bot or human.
• AI and NLP-powered capabilities: Dealing with increasingly complex queries effectively.

What’s more, these virtual agents operate across all channels — be it voice, chat, SMS, or social media — responding in real time to customers who need urgent assistance. And, with no queue for these AI agents, wait time for many common issues can become a thing of the past.

Human role in advancing AI thoughtfully

AI technology is available now. So, why is there still an emphasis on a phased approach and continuous learning? Because achieving a human-centric AI integration is a journey.

If businesses rush to implement AI solely for rapid ROI without careful consideration of the human element, they risk creating impersonal experiences that lead to customer frustration. The most successful AI strategies are built on a foundation of augmenting human capabilities, not hastily replacing them.

The future of AI workflows

Industry analysts project significant advancements in agentic and autonomous AI capabilities by around 2025-2027, with ongoing development towards more sophisticated systems.

For instance, some research, including insights from firms like ISG and Deloitte, indicates a strong trend toward companies piloting and experimenting with large language models (LLMs), AI algorithms, and more autonomous “agentic AI” in this timeframe, aiming for AI that can handle more complex processes independently.

The goal, when discussing fully autonomous agents and AI that might feel remarkably human-like, isn’t primarily to mimic humanity for its own sake, but to achieve a level of efficiency and capability in AI that allows human agents to operate at an even higher strategic and empathetic level.

Reaching that future involves overcoming many dependencies, embracing iterative development, and mastering complex orchestration methods before such advanced agentic AI systems can be optimally and safely deployed.

While the ultimate vision, sparked by open-source innovations like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, might be sophisticated multi-agent systems tackling complex problem-solving, dynamic pricing, or intricate task execution, today’s operational reality leans on robust templates and precise step-by-step process automation.

This might not always sound as glamorous as fully autonomous AI, but it’s extremely effective in reliably handling routine tasks, which builds a crucial foundation for more consistent service and frees up invaluable human talent.

Where to Use AI Agents in Your Workflows

Here’s how you can strategically use artificial intelligence to support your human team and enhance customer experience:

• FAQs: Instantly answer common sales and service questions, letting agents handle unique queries.
• Appointments: Allow customers and prospects to book or reschedule 24/7, reducing agent workload.
• Collect payments: Enable customers to make secure payments anytime, streamlining a common task.
• Check balances: Offer immediate self-service for account balance inquiries.
• Password reset: Securely verify customers and automate password reset processes.
• Troubleshooting: Guide customers with knowledge articles while they wait for an agent, or resolve simple issues directly.
• Order status and lookup: Provide instant updates, reducing “where is my order?” calls.
• Order services and products: Facilitate sales of popular items through automated channels.

How Nextiva Helps Plug AI in Contact Centers

While deploying such comprehensive AI might seem like a stretch goal for some, Nextiva is already supporting many customers to achieve human oversight coupled with AI. They’re using AI for 24/7 availability and rapid response times, freeing up their human agents to focus on more complex tasks and build deeper customer relationships. AI agents work to expertly handle routine inquiries, seamlessly integrating into the broader customer experience ecosystem.

Tata Play now handles five million routine customer requests monthly using AI alone, and in doing so, has reduced support costs by an impressive 40%

“Nextiva worked with us to develop real-time listening, integrated the multiple channels into a singular customer support interface, and improved our first response time by integrating WhatsApp as a communication channel in our customer service.” ~Dwarka Srinath, CIO of Tata Play.

This demonstrates the power of the AI agent workflow when it’s strategically applied to enhance both efficiency and the responsiveness of human-led support.