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5 takeaways from Spark to drive contact center transformation
December 12, 2024 • 8 minutes
At the most recent 2024 Spark, LivePerson’s product launch event, we announced that we’re pairing messaging communication channels with voice, and introduced a suite of GenAI agent assist tools for a more modern contact center transformation.
Here at LivePerson, we love this event because it brings together peers and industry leaders focused on driving change within their organizations. The world is rapidly changing and we all must adjust alongside. Yet amidst all the change, one thing remains constant: people still love to have conversations. The ways and digital technologies we use to converse might vary, but this very human need is persistent, as contact centers and customer service reps know very well.
LivePerson CEO, John Sabino, kicked off the day by sharing, “I spend a lot of time talking with our customers and the word that’s top of mind today for enterprise leaders that we work with is transformation. Whether they’re focused on a digital transformation, an AI transformation, or a full-scale enterprise transformation, the world’s largest brands are in the midst of a fundamental shift in how they do business, and it’s all focused on transforming that customer experience.”
The path to enterprise digital transformation, he believes, starts in the contact center. The goal isn’t to transform for technology’s sake, he said, but to drive measurable value within the enterprise and deliver what customers really want.
This Spark event on contact center digital transformation was action-packed. In case you missed it, here are some key takeaways.
1. “Good enough” isn’t actually good enough
A good conversation is one that resolves well for the consumer, where their needs are met and they feel heard. The consumer, of course, isn’t thinking about the internal operations of a call center or which channel an agent is trained on. They just want to get in and out, quickly.
Thus far, the digital capabilities from many CAS and CRM or ticketing vendors have proven to be not quite good enough to meet this need. And in truth, contact center transformation isn’t easy. Digital channels have attempted to replace voice entirely, and while they are great, the reality is that voice calls aren’t going away. There will always be instances where someone wants to talk to another human — and it may also be the most efficient way to handle an issue.
“One of the key reasons AI is so powerful is that it helps reduce the noise by automatically resolving the most routine customer inquiries, so your agents can be freed up to be efficient and handle some of these really important customer calls that require that human touch,” Sabino explained.
This is why LivePerson is taking a best-of-breed approach to the modern Contact Center as a Service, partnering with vendors to bring voice conversations into a unified Agent Workspace. Others are the experts in voice, but LivePerson can seamlessly connect all the communication channels for the best contact center operations.
2. AI should be human-centric
Contact centers are innately human-centric, and AI should be as well. There are many opportunities to digitize and automate within traditional contact centers, but at LivePerson we believe it starts with using AI to make your contact center agents’ job easier.
“I believe AI gives people the fuel to do a better and more impactful job, which ultimately results in happier customers,” said Sabino.
Customers expect consistent service across all platforms, and LivePerson is excited to bring voice into the fold. The new Agent Workspace for Voice brings voice and messaging together to create a seamless experience for both agents and customers.
When you combine voice and digital channels, you can improve agent efficiency, reduce training time, and decrease operational complexity. The Agent Workspace for Voice is powered by new, best-of-breed voice integrations that allow brands to bring their current voice provider into the LivePerson platform and allow agents to take calls directly within the LivePerson Agent Workspace.
By unifying the experience for messaging and voice agents, brands can standardize their business processes, systems, and contact center operations and still deliver a connected experience for the customer. In particular, our new technology called Copilot offers a new suite of generative AI agent assist tools that boost agent productivity and can improve customer satisfaction.
Get to know AI Copilot
Copilot is here to help — humans, that is. Take a look at what Copilot offers:
- Copilot Assist provides agents with instant, contextual recommendations drawn from your business’s existing knowledge base, website, or systems like your CRM and CMS.
- Copilot Rewrite is a writing assistant integrated directly into the agent workspace to help improve communication. (Sometimes AI learns grammar best practices so that we don’t have to!)
- Copilot Summary generates brief summaries of previous customer interactions, providing agents with instant context and allowing them to efficiently address customer needs.
- Copilot Translate (coming soon!) breaks down language barriers with real-time translation, allowing agents and customers to communicate in their native languages.
(You can learn all about the key features of Spark-introduced customer experience solutions in our product announcement.)
3. Conversations drive customer service — and revenue
Conversations happen throughout the entire customer journey, from pre-sales through customer service, post-sale. These conversations provide a wealth of information about customer expectations and what they want or wonder about — and contain opportunities for revenue generation, as both Signet Jewelers and Mr. Cooper found.
Madhura Deshpande, Vice President of Digital Shopping and Sales at Signet Jewelers, the world’s largest retailer of diamond jewelry, shared how they’re leveraging generative AI tools to mine their conversations for selling signals. “It was a pleasant surprise. We actually found 30 really high potential conversations that have strong selling signals,” she said about their initial test of 100 conversations. The team is now qualifying those leads and thinking about how to scale their proof of concept.
Signet uses LivePerson and AI extensively to empower their sales agents and orchestrate a highly personalized buying experience. This approach earns them a 90% CSAT score.
It’s really the quality of a conversation that leads to revenue generation. When your business sells high-value items like an engagement ring or a home, the purchases are emotional as much as they are a financial decision. A lot of conversation orchestration is required to ensure the customer interaction is successful.
Mr. Cooper, the largest mortgage company in America, also employs AI to this end.
“We’re big believers in the human element, and technology should make for a better, more personalized, more relevant experience,” said Chris Maloney, Chief Marketing Officer. “That’s the key to what makes LivePerson so brilliant for us: We want to connect you as quickly as possible to the right person who can help you with your unique needs.”
For Mr. Cooper, this means connecting buyers or homeowners to a licensed loan officer who can answer very specific questions about rates, provide quotes, or confidently advise buyers on whether to take on a home equity loan or refinance.
4. Measure what matters for the best contact center transformation
Customer satisfaction is the end-all when it comes to metrics, as Frost Bank knows. Both a legacy and pioneering FinServ brand, serving Texans online and across 155 branch locations, Frost prides itself on a contact center experience that always connects a customer to a human, without first navigating a phone tree or chat bot. “When you call or message us through LivePerson, you get an agent right away,” Jacob Coull, AVP, Contact Center Product Owner, explained. “That’s the way Frost has been since we started the contact center.”
The efficiency of the platform enables this for the team, and Frost is on to something — our conversational banking research revealed that 25% of banking leaders say it’s acceptable to put customers on hold for more than 10 minutes. Yet 1 in 2 consumers said they’ll consider a competitor if they’re left waiting longer than 10 minutes.
Both Frost and BECU, a not-for-profit credit union with 50+ locations in Washington state and South Carolina, find that AI improves the customer and agent experiences. Emily Barron, Sr. Product Manager, Conversational AI and Messaging at BECU, shared their process for getting internal alignment around their use of AI and how their deployment was a huge success. So much so that they’re looking forward to adding AI chatbots to find additional efficiencies, such as removing inactive messaging conversations from the agent workspace until they become active again.
Similarly, Frost Bank embraced GenAI after doing its due diligence. As Coull explained, LivePerson’s auto summarization capability helps chat agents when they need to quickly review a previous conversation. This customer data is also added to their system of record and is available to agents on other channels or to bankers within a branch location. “The customer has a seamless experience, not just siloed to chat,” Coull said.
Here too, the proof is in the metrics: Frost’s customer satisfaction score is 91%.
5. The ROI for AI comes from enabling your agents
LivePerson clients are finding that AI is impactful and shows a quick return on investment when it’s deployed in the digital contact center in service of the agent. Agent-facing AI tools allow them to be more efficient and serve customers with more context, leading to more personalized conversations.
“One of the most effective ways we’ve seen LivePerson customers deploy generative AI is within their contact centers and by putting it in front of human agents first,” Sabino explained. “This allows them to increase operational efficiency by improving agent productivity, increasing customer satisfaction through enhanced personalization, and even realizing revenue-generating opportunities as a result of omnichannel analytics and the new insights they gather.”
LivePerson Copilot can be deployed quickly and with confidence. Alex Kroman, LivePerson’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, explained:
“At LivePerson, we are laser focused on helping our customers realize the ROI of AI, and we’re doing that in a number of different ways. You’ve already heard about Copilot, our suite of agent-facing AI solutions. Unlike some of our competitors, we’re not trying to create an all-seeing, all-knowing AI agent to fully automate the customer experience end to end. That’s not what enterprises want, and it’s certainly not something consumers are ready for. What we are releasing is a set of AI agents tuned to handle key conversational use cases that can be orchestrated together to produce the customer experience you want while keeping the control that you need as a business. That puts you in the driver’s seat to manage GenAI and other digital technologies.”
In this way, you keep your conversations factual and helpful, and help your human agents work more efficiently, focused on the conversations that matter most.