Frost & Sullivan: Is AI in customer service the missing link to lasting brand loyalty?

The AI era is changing the face of customer service and its role in business. AI’s ability to vastly improve self-service opens the opportunity to upskill agents to meet more complex demands and improve customer satisfaction. This results in customers wanting to stick with a brand for the long term. 

Customer experience (CX) is finally getting the attention it deserves as a crucial component of brand loyalty. As Alpa Shah of Frost & Sullivan recently noted, “Our 2024 CX customer survey revealed that for the first time, improving brand loyalty and awareness is the top business priority for 75% of businesses across all major sectors.” 

This trend piqued our interest, and we wanted to dive deeper to figure out how CX leaders can approach AI in customer service and its impact on agents and customers through the lens of brand loyalty.

We commissioned the latest Frost and Sullivan vBook with the goal of providing the starting blocks for businesses to navigate new AI innovations and the need to upskill agents with brand loyalty in mind.

In Frost & Sullivan: Next Evolution of Customer Experience: AI, Upskilling, and the Contact Center’s New Role in Building Brand, you’ll find out why this shift is occurring and how to find the right balance of AI and human involvement to positively impact how customers view your brand. Grab your copy now or read on for a sneak peek at the insights you’ll find inside. 

Contact center AI is pushing the boundaries on what’s possible in the contact center. By implementing new AI innovations in self-service, businesses have the opportunity to train their agents to solve more complicated issues. Agentic AI makes this possible with little human intervention by making decisions based on real-time intents and historical customer data.  

Some businesses, possibly your own competitors, are taking this up a notch and moving from dabbling in conversational AI to overhauling their customer service organizations to include comprehensive AI experience orchestration — or Total Experience — as we call it at Zoom. This involves putting customer experience at the center of the organization and making all employees responsible for delivering the kind of service customers crave. 

AI doesn’t and shouldn’t push humans out of the customer experience; they are still a crucial part of the service a business provides. Even though agentic AI is improving chatbot solutions, agents will still tackle those trickier conversations that require a human touch. It’s sink or swim, and the businesses that get ahead and deploy new AI capabilities while arming their agents with the right skills will be the first to reach the finish line. 

To tackle the changing landscape, Frost & Sullivan suggest that contact centers be prepared to “Blend AI-first UCaaS and CCaaS and harness AI-powered analytics to upskill their agents and be successful.”

Businesses know humans aren’t going anywhere and are a key part of a ​​good customer experience. In fact, Frost & Sullivan’s vBook reports that 46% of businesses plan to increase their contact center seats and 84% find that average call handing times have increased or stayed the same. They also found that 75% of businesses plan to invest in their contact center staff, with higher spending on performance and knowledge management.

What’s important to consider is how your agents’ roles will evolve now that contact center automation has the potential to be more widely integrated to improve customer service. The key is to upskill your agents with product-specific knowledge and appropriate listening skills to deal empathetically with trickier customer queries. 

This shift correlates with consumer expectations that interaction with live agents should be a positive experience. According to recent Zoom-commissioned Morning Consult research, 85% of consumers expect agents to be friendly, and 82% expect them to be knowledgeable.  

Finding the right balance between humans and AI innovation is crucial.

Let’s be real. Many of the engagements contact center agents must deal with are issues with your product or service. What if you could avoid more of these interactions by proactively identifying issues before a customer reaches out? That’s where proactive support comes in. 

Frost & Sullivan’s vBook dives into why proactive support is the way of the future and how agentic AI stretches its possibilities and makes it much more feasible. Because AI systems can analyze vast amounts of data from across the contact center, they can identify trends and predict potential issues and pain points. With this knowledge, you can provide the solution before the problem occurs, creating a moment of delight that feels human and thoughtful. For example, a retailer can detect when a customer might run out of one of their favorite items and send an alert to remind them to stock up.

Customer service is moving toward proactive support, with 90% of IT decision-makers looking at ways to get it off the ground. As CX leaders, you need the right technology partner to get this right. 

With 63% of consumers leaving a brand after just one or two bad experiences according to Zoom-commissioned Morning Consult research, it’s clear that customer experience is a fundamental component of brand loyalty. Frost & Sullivan’s vBook dives into the relationship between brand and customer experience and explores why the contact center’s role in building brand loyalty and advocacy is taking center stage. 

When it comes down to it, contact center automation gives businesses the ability to build strong emotional connections with a brand through exceptional service. It gives agents and supervisors time to focus on delivering the kind of personalized service customers want consistently across channels. This gives your team the time to build more thoughtful conversational flows and develop their skills rather than just trying to get through the day.  

One of our customers, Topaz Services, a “Hotel Contact Center,” is seeing the brand benefits of a consistent omnichannel experience:

There’s no doubt about it: contact center AI is here to stay, but so are humans. When you find the right balance, the opportunities to transform your contact center into a brand loyalty hub are vast. As Zoom’s Chief Product Officer, Smita Hashim, noted in a recent keynote: “The more human AI becomes, the more time we have to be human”. And it’s that human connection, that emotional bond, that builds brand loyalty.

Frost and Sullivan's vBook pinpoints some key strategies to help CX leaders:

• Leverage evolving AI technologies
• Respond to changing consumer expectations
• Keep up with increasing demands across the customer journey. 

With their helpful recommendations, your contact center will be ready to ride the wave of agentic AI innovation, knocking down the competition on the way.

Set your contact center up for success and get your copy of Frost & Sullivan’s vBook: The Next Evolution of Customer Experience: AI, Upskilling, and the Contact Center’s New Role in Building Brand. 

Reach out today to speak with one of our experts who would be happy to talk through what our AI-first Zoom CX suite can do for your business.