Knowledge may be power, but when it comes to solving a particularly thorny customer problem, there’s never enough information for most contact center personnel. The key is to provide customer support staff with multiple channel sources and plenty of data to resolve whatever issue there may be.

“Omnichannel is really going to be a key theme here,” said Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, on the opening day of the Enterprise Connect event in Kissimmee, Florida. “The organization that you’re trying to engage with has a contact center that can follow your trail and follow your data to be able to understand what the real issue is.”

Martin spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, and they discussed the emergence of new tech tools to enhance customer support and the need to balance innovative approaches with humans on the front lines of consumer dialogue (see the full interview with transcript here).

Move toward automation

To power a responsive omnichannel experience, companies are increasingly turning to automation. Cloud-based tools can now capitalize on artificial intelligence to mine important insights from a wealth of customer interactions gathered over time.

“It’s how machines and intelligence can augment what centers are doing,” Miniman said. “We want both the consumer and the employees to have a better experience. There’s the promise that AI and automation and robots can all help with that.”

The goal is to reduce churn, the loss of customers who become dissatisfied with a company’s products or service for whatever reason. It’s why businesses are leveraging technology such as AI to reduce customer erosion while being mindful that machines still can’t do it all.

“It’s not about completely transforming to AI,” Martin noted. “There has to be a human/AI combination to really extract the most value from these experiences. That customer experience is table stakes all the way up to the C-suite.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Enterprise Connect event.

Photo: Enterprise Connect 2019