A Customer Experience that Blends AI and the Human Touch

There has been a lot of hype around AI and many organizations have set forth initiatives to make sure they’re taking full advantage of everything AI has to offer from a customer experience perspective. Still, there are a lot of challenges that come along with deploying AI in these scenarios.

When using AI in a customer experience (CX) capacity, organizations often face the same primary challenge: a lack of human empathy. However, there are ways to use AI to benefit your CX without loosing a human touch.

Evolving your CX using AI should not be about replacing human agents. Instead, focus on elevating your human agents and using AI as a tool to make your customer experience more efficient.

In doing so, the interaction between AI and humans in places  such as contact centers will involve humans overseeing AI as a supervisory layer. This approach will ensure that, together, they’re delivering an enhanced level of CX while maintaining human connection and upholding the ethical standards your customers will continue to expect.

You should start with very low complexity use cases. It’s easiest to begin with the routine queries and interactions that customers have with human agents. For instance, resetting a password or providing an update on an order status.

Let’s say you own a grill company, and a customer wants to return a part on their grill. Whether it's the grill top, igniter, knobs or the whole thing, relying on AI to decide for the customer whether that part is returnable is subjective. It's not always hard and fast rules. Allowing AI to frontend those interactions but utilizing a human to oversee the exchange and intercept subjective inquiries unbeknownst to the customer, allows organizations to blend the best of both worlds without the customer being transferred.

For organizations unsure about where to begin, the CDW Customer Experience team provides the expertise to get started with confidence. Leveraging deep industry knowledge across multiple verticals, CDW can help you identify use cases that can be fully automated with AI — and just as importantly, determine where human intervention remains essential.

Our experts will guide your organization through the right questions to ask when designing and launching an AI solution to ensure it aligns with both business goals and customer expectations.

From there, our customer experience team builds a strategic roadmap for AI success — one that maximizes ROI, safeguards service quality and enhances customer satisfaction. Beyond implementation, we continue to help customers evaluate and evolve their AI strategies, identifying opportunities for improvement and mapping the next steps in their intelligent automation journey.

Determining what to automate can be tricky, which is why CDW provides a strategic consulting engagement to get to a use case level. During this consultative engagement, we go through the challenges that your organization is looking to solve, taking technology out of the situation entirely. After we can determine what an ideal outcome looks like, we apply the appropriate technology. Sometimes AI can be integrated, and other times tasks remain with a human. Or maybe it's a blend of both.

The goal is to understand the outcome a customer seeks and apply the right technology to improve your CX or financial efficiencies. At the end of the day, we look for faster resolutions. Nine out of 10 times, the use cases we look for are repetitive tasks that AI can perform faster and with greater availability.

Should I implement a complex use case first?
Some IT teams feel they must start with a complex use case to make an impact on their organization. That’s the wrong place to start. The simplest use cases, those with lower complexity and repetitive tasks, are usually the ones that provide the most return on your investment simply because they're repetitive.

When repetitive tasks go to human agents, you’re wasting resources. Humans should handle escalations and edge cases while AI takes care of routine, repetitive tasks.

In what scenarios is it critical to keep people in the loop to preserve empathy and personalization?
People should be in the loop when we need to build an empathetic and emotional connection with a customer. Typically, when someone calls a contact center to chat with an agent, it’s likely because they have a challenge or problem. The goal should be to solve that problem in the most frictionless and efficient way possible and make it a personalized experience for the customer.

Ask yourself: Does this situation require emotional intelligence or human judgement? Some interactions, such as tracking the status of a package, are simple, data-driven tasks that can be automated. However, when a customer calls frustrated because their expedited package arrived late and damaged, the experience shifts. A human touch becomes essential to understand the issue, express empathy, apologize, and take corrective action like issuing a refund or reshipping the item free of charge.

How much time does AI really save organizations?
It really depends on the use case. For repetitive tasks, AI can sometimes complete the task 60-70% quicker than a human can, and at a larger scale. A virtual agent can be available 24/7, even in those hours that you're not staffed, allowing customers to interact with an organization at their availability.

How do organizations ensure that AI remains ethical?
That’s where human validation and interaction comes into play. Humans still need to provide some level of oversight for AI interactions that aren’t repetitive, rinse and repeat transactions.

Let’s revisit the grill company example. Even for something as simple as a return, a grill company might not want AI giving out a new grill to every customer that calls regarding a bad part. Human interaction is best suited to make decisions that need a little more strategic oversight, expertise and training to approve.

AI should be treated like a new hire. If you hire a new employee, are you going to throw them on the phones of your call center and let them do whatever they want for the first six months? No. Employees have a supervisor or manager reviewing their interactions and providing feedback along the way.

Organizations need to ensure AI is doing what they expect it to do — following company protocols, adhering to company standards and providing customer satisfaction to the highest level.

Will AI take over jobs and replace humans?
There is going to be a significant shift in which AI will handle a lot of tasks previously handled by people. However, we will still need humans to serve as the orchestrators and approvers, coaching and supervising AI.

That said, it will be essential for people to know how to work with AI. You will need to train it, provide guidance and supervise its performance, just as you would with any other employee in your organization.

The customer will never see some agentic AI, but the back-end bots will be specifically and purposefully built to handle particular tasks. For example, you could have a warranty claim bot and an order status bot that handles specific tasks and can also communicate with each other to interact.

If you think about the app model on your iPhone, you have an app for everything. That’s where AI is going. There's going to be an AI app for everything in contact centers, allowing AI bots to talk to each other. They will be built explicitly to stay contained in the area that they're meant to, which adds a layer of security.

For example, if a bot is created to provide updates on orders, such as status and tracking codes, and it’s asked whether a product can be returned, it will not be equipped to answer that question. However, because it’s purposefully built, it can connect the customer to another bot or coworker trained in that area of return and warranty, who can help with that question. Meanwhile, on the customer’s end, they will feel like they are experiencing communication with a single agent.

Agentic AI is a new technology that is evolving rapidly, presenting constant changes. If you’re contemplating incorporating it on your own, you may find it throws a lot of curveballs.

CDW experts draw on extensive cross-industry experience to anticipate issues — such as data integrity and security — that others might overlook. Our team of data scientists and engineers is equipped to refine your data and ensure smooth deployment. With a comprehensive, full-stack solution, we provide the tools to deploy, monitor and test agentic AI, delivering successful outcomes.

Our historical knowledge that we’ve gained across different implementations while working with every industry vertical allows us to operate with the efficiency organizations expect from their IT teams but might not receive if they’re not well versed or staffed well enough to take on implementing agentic AI.

If you’re required to do more with less and you’re unable to engage a provider such as CDW, level set with your executives. Any integration that impacts the way people work should be calculated and well-thought out, even if it requires a little more time.

Scaling AI implementation from pilot to production is a major challenge. You must think about the data set for augmented data, the biases that AI could bring and potential inaccuracies it could deliver. Then you must make sure that you have an encompassing governance plan. That’s where the human element comes in. This isn't technology that you just set and forget. People are an essential part of it.

Many believe AI will autonomously adapt and evolve to meet customer needs, but that’s a misconception. Effective AI for CX requires a strong governance model and ongoing human oversight. To maximize its impact, organizations must ensure data quality, uphold ethical standards, implement robust change management, maintain customer-centric design and keep the technology focused on its intended role.

CDW provides a strategic consulting engagement designed to help customers define their AI road map and desired business outcomes. We start by developing a proof of concept, testing the environment, and validating that it delivers on its intended objectives. Once proven successful, we help transition the solution into a production state, working closely with the customer to monitor its performance and ensure it continues to operate as expected.

Our experts fine-tune the environment as needed and can even manage the virtual agent long-term, ensuring continuous optimization and reliability. In short, CDW can support the customer through every phase — from ideation and implementation to ongoing management — taking the complexity off their plate entirely.