By James Towner, Chief Growth Officer at ArvatoConnect
The progress of AI has been significant in the last 12 months. It’s fantastic to see more and more businesses having the confidence to implement the technology across their customer service frameworks.
We’ve seen increasing movement towards cost-centred design over the last ten years to positively impact bottom-lines and AI is certainly contributing significantly to that.
There are many examples across multiple sectors of it transforming productivity, from enabling faster responses at scale to improving quality assurance, workforce management and team onboarding.
But in the context of customer experience, we need to be thinking about its potential for delivering better customer outcomes, and not just the cost savings.
And that will come through using the technology to support human agents in having fully informed conversations with customers and to troubleshoot and make more nuanced decisions to free-up people to handle more complex enquiries.
Data protection and digital infrastructure
But the reality is that AI’s capability will only be as good as the data that trains it.
And while the technology will still help to deliver substantial cost savings, placing AI on top of incomplete data sets won’t result in the transformation in customer outcomes that the technology promises.
From what I see, there are two barriers that need to be unlocked.
Firstly, and fundamentally, there is the issue of data protection. Many organisations struggle to combine their data sets because they don’t have the right customer data protection agreements in place. Under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, organisations need specific lawful bases and often explicit consent to combine customer data from different sources or use it for AI training. This becomes particularly complex when historical customer data was collected under more limited privacy notices that didn’t anticipate AI applications, or when data sits across different departments operating under separate privacy frameworks.
Of course, the removal of customer data rights is simply unthinkable and inappropriate – these protections exist for good reason. But there are compliant ways forward.
Organisations can update their privacy notices and data collection processes to explicitly cover AI applications, implement more sophisticated consent management systems, and develop clear data governance frameworks that balance innovation with privacy. This might involve techniques like data minimisation in AI training, implementing robust pseudonymisation processes, or using synthetic data where appropriate.
Secondly, there are still organisations with legacy infrastructure that can’t collate customer data they have stored and siloed in different parts of their organisations together into one place to analyse and use.
For the brands in question, with highly complex system designs and multiple layers of decision making through IT and customer service, this level of transformation presents a significant challenge.
To tackle it requires an ambition to build what we call a 360-degree view of the customer, which you can learn more about here.
In short, it is about mapping your systems, consolidating information using automation and then orchestration, where AI can come in to use a complete data set to hold more meaningful engagements with customers on simple enquiries, and to deliver insights to human agents on how best to tailor experiences for customers.
Moving forward
It’s clear we have a technology with significant potential for enhancing the customer experience and importantly, delivering better outcomes for them.
This won’t be a case of using the technology instead of people. The human touch will remain a vital element in customer experience design and delivery – ‘humanising the digital and digitising the human’ is where I see AI’s potential in this space.
But there are challenges here and I’m looking forward to engaging in conversation around how we tackle them.
To learn more about how we support our customers with AI and approach the single view of the customer, get in touch with us – enquiries@arvatoconnect.co.uk
