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How to maximize value with AI-assisted customer contact centers
In this video episode of the EY Microsoft Tech Directions podcast, discover the latest innovations in contact center technology and how they are transforming customer experiences.
In this conversation, professionals from the global EY organization focus on the evolving landscape of customer service and contact centers. They explore the challenges faced by service leaders, the impact of modern technologies like generative AI (GenAI), and the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the EY Customer Experience Accelerator in transforming customer service operations.
Speakers:
Jonathan Kazemaini, Executive Director, Microsoft Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP
Courtney Seuss, Manager, Solutions Engineer, Ernst & Young LLP
Terry Walls, Executive Director, Americas Co-Leader - Digital Customer Service, Ernst & Young LLP
Key takeaways:
Understand the latest innovations in contact center technology and their impact on customer experiences.
Gain insights into the strategies and leading practices for implementing advanced contact center solutions.
Learn about the challenges and opportunities in the evolving landscape of customer service.
Explore future trends in contact center technology.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is available below.
Kristie Reid
How can organizations harness the potential of GenAI in the contact center? One step at a time. Hello, I'm Kristie Reid, Microsoft Business Applications Lead for EY. This is Tech Directions where EY and Microsoft professionals explore transformative cloud solutions. In today's conversation, we explore the rapidly evolving landscape of customer service and how contact center modernization doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Courtney Suess
Hi. Welcome to our discussion today reviewing the evolving landscape of customer service and contact centers. In today's discussion, we're going to talk about the mission and the challenges faced by service leaders and the technology hurdles of legacy contact centers, and the transformative potential of modern technologies today. I'm Courtney Suess. I am a sales engineer, part of the Microsoft practice. Today I'm joined with Terry and Kaz. I'll let them introduce themselves.
Terry Walls
So, hey Courtney. So I'm Terry Walls. I lead our customer service practice here at EY on the business consulting side.
John Kazemaini
I'm John Kazemaini, I go by Kaz. And I lead our national Microsoft contact center consulting practice.
Suess
Terry, I'll start with you.
Walls
Okay.
Suess
So, you've been working with customer service organizations for almost three decades now.
Walls
Yeah.
Suess
What drives the mission of contact centers, and how have they evolved recently?
Walls
Yeah. So if you think about contact centers over the last 30 years, one of the things that has been tried and true about contact centers for the most part is, how do I make sure that I am providing a great service, but do it in a very efficient and productive way? The challenge has been is that the technology up until the last few years, hasn't really been an enabling tool to do that. Right? So, that's the first thing.
The second thing is agents in today's world, they're not getting those easy calls anymore, they're getting all the hard calls. And they used to use those easy calls to take a mental break throughout the day while they had hard calls coming in. Now, every call is a hard call and that can be a significant strain on somebody. And they're spending eight hours a day doing nothing but highly emotionally charged, very difficult calls to resolve. So, those are the things that we've seen resolve or evolve here over the last few years.
Suess
What are some of the business challenges service leaders are experiencing?
Walls
Well think the most important thing that business leaders think about today, they're under continuing pressure to reduce costs. Cost to serve is going to be a number one challenge for most customer service executives and the like. But at the same time, the expectations around the customer experience have significantly gone up over the last few years. And most executives think that in order to reduce costs, they have to do it at the expense of the customer experience. Or if they are going to improve the customer experience, they have to significantly increase their cost to serve. And those two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can do both at the same time.
The most important thing that they need to be thinking about is how do I reduce customer effort? And if I can reduce customer effort, I significantly improve my lifetime value of that customer. So, Kaz and I have a lot of these conversations with our clients on a regular basis in terms of, what are the tactics and strategies that you can do to enable better experiences, but at a significant lower cost?
Kazemaini
I mean, you're absolutely right. The number one KPI in my point of view is customer effort score. If you can reduce customer effort, all other KPIs that are important to contact centers, the traditional ones, average channel time, average speed of answer, average cost to serve will be reduced.
Suess
And to kind of piggyback off of that, and this is a question tailored for Kaz, business leaders are not the only ones that have challenges. Legacy contact centers often are on-premise or hosted and managed by internal IT. What technology challenges are you seeing?
Kazemaini
I mean, the biggest one right there is just siloed systems. I have my AS/400 here, I have my legacy ERP here, my order management, my CRM, and so forth. Now bringing it all to the cloud gives you the ability of creating that data harmonization. So now, I have a true 360 view of the customer. Implementing a modern CRM like Microsoft Dynamics allows me to have the abilities for true case management, true omnichannel, true self-service capabilities. And now with Copilot, having gen AI at the front lines for the customer.
Walls
I think one of the things that Kaz and I are both excited about is that Microsoft has decided to invest in a standalone contact center as a service product, CCaaS. And if you look at it, a significant number of clients are still sitting on outdated, premise-based telephony systems that are not connected to anything. There's a huge opportunity to make basically a huge leap in your ability to start to deliver some of these seamless experiences that their customers are asking for.
Suess
Yeah. And I think going along with that, another question is around how can the tools and technologies help the customer service team? I think we kind of spoke to some of it, but are there any other tools or call-outs you would make?
Walls
Well, Kaz mentioned Copilot earlier. I think one of the things that you see, and it goes back to this whole point around agents, just they're handling hard today, right? So it's like, it's not like how do I make it easier for the agent? It's like, how do I help the agents handle hard better? Right? And so one of the things that in terms of from a generative AI perspective that you see embedded within Dynamics for service and Copilots, the ability to summarize the calls. So this isn't just about creating a transcript, it's about summarizing it. The summarization now, I don't need to have to type, I can listen to the customer and I can engage with the customer. It's created a summary that auto-populates certain things, and it allows me to be more focused on the task at hand.
The second part of Copilot around agent assist capabilities is instead of having to look across 12 different databases to find a piece of knowledge, as the conversation is happening, Copilot can offer up suggestions around knowledge articles or links to certain parts of the systems or whatever. So, I'm not trying to figure out where I need to go while I'm also trying to multitask and listen to this angry customer talk to me.
Suess
When we're thinking about that and we're thinking about the scale of what it takes to provide a service to customers seem somewhat daunting, is there a good place to start or how we have that conversation with customers to get them going on this journey?
Kazemaini
Yeah. I mean, it definitely depends on the outcomes they want to achieve. Right? Different contact centers and specifically in different industries are at different places. So we definitely always take a crawl, walk, run, fly approach. Some people just need the basics. They need to get off of Excel and Outlook and MS Access solution and just onto a modern case management solution. Then there's ones that are a little bit more advanced where they need true self-service. I need a self-service portal, I need a chatbot.
Then there's ones that are a little bit more advanced. I need true omnichannel, I need IVR, I need social media, I need you name it, bring your own channel. And then there's the large really complex ones, the most advanced contact centers where I need voice biometrics, behavioral analysis. I need genAI at the forefront for both my customer and my agent. And the great thing is with Microsoft Dynamics customer service, it's all there.
Walls
Yeah. I think the trap that so many people fall into in this industry is that they want to start with feature function widget first. And what Kaz just talked about is where we go and have the conversations with the clients are we ask the questions, what business problems are you trying to solve? And we start to understand what those problems are and the challenges and the constraints that they have. The great thing is that the Microsoft Suite has every capability that you need to transform your customer service operations.
Suess
When we're thinking about solving those business challenges, we've created the Customer Experience Accelerator and how we believe it can help organizations. Kaz, you want to talk a little bit about what Customer Experience Accelerator is?
Kazemaini
So, our CXA solution actually starts with our core business consulting team. So maybe Terry, you can talk a little bit about the templates, the assessments that we've created. And then I could go a little bit deeper into the technology piece behind it.
Walls
The thing that I feel very strongly about what differentiates EY from a lot of our competition is that, again, we look at the business problem first and we lead with outcomes. We have assets and IP to help a customer service organization understand what truly is driving costs or what's driving a poor experience. And so we have those that then connect to then, well, what are those journeys specific to your industry that have the choke points, the issues, the pain points, et cetera, that allows you then to design what that experience should look like? And then when we have that, then we lead into in terms of our assets, our accelerators, and our capabilities that Kaz and the technology consulting team can bring to the table that can accelerate speed to value.
Kazemaini
And that's really the beauty of CXA. The best way of describing it is it's a playbook for customer service transformation. So we don't lead with the technology piece, we lead with the business outcomes. And what's unique about CXA, like Terry said, it's industry specific. So a lot of organizations out there, what they do, they go into a customer and say, "What are your pain points? Here's a whiteboard, let's go draw what's going on. Tell me about your customer journey." Where with CXA, we have done that legwork for you. Our team has done so many implementations, we've created templates.
So, we know in specific industries what does a good customer journey look like? What are the top 300 functional and technical requirements? What are the challenges? What are the best practices when implementing this? Not just from a technology aspect, but from an organizational change management aspect. And then of course, what we do is leverage Microsoft Dynamics, customer service, Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and other Microsoft services to enable those requirements and outcomes.
Walls
We don't build product and we don't have necessarily a technology product. Our ability to bring our services, our assets, our accelerators can help a client understand in terms of where and how they can capture that value. And then help them to make sure that they do capture that value.
Suess
When we're talking about that value or that return on investment, how have we seen the Customer Experience Accelerator benefit clients?
Kazemaini
Really it depends on the outcome that they're trying to achieve. Some of the things might not be technology related. It's just help me create a better operating model for my organization. I acquired these organizations, I need to merge the contact centers together. What is that appropriate operating model? And leveraging our assets, our templates and accelerators, we have the ability of helping that customer optimize their operating model. Other ones might be reducing the cost to serve while not derogating that customer experience.
Walls
We can get down to the brass tacks of, what are the most important things that client needs to configure without wasting time? In these pre-configured journeys, again, they're very industry specific. So instead of having to spend a lot of time going and develop a bunch of journey maps and spending time doing all that, we've already got that. And so it's 90% of the way there, and then it's like 10% tweaking based on what the client needs at speed. We're focused more on outcomes, and so how can we get the client moving as fast as possible so that they can get those outcomes with their investment?
Suess
Absolutely.
Kazemaini
And that's what customers actually want. They don't want to pay for documentation. They don't want to pay for their own people to sit in a room for six months to write user stories. Let's do it six days. EY has done this so often they have that playbook. Let's use this as our starting point, as our template and hyper-personalize it for our organization.
Suess
When we're thinking about genAI, where from your personal even professional lives and how that's being incorporated now, where do you see genAI impacting customer service teams the most, or has the most potential?
Walls
What generative AI has done, especially in customer service, is by deploying from a call or contact summarization upfront, I am building a data fabric. I'm building data. So now I know exactly, what are the knowledge articles that I need to write based on the prevalence and the pain or the contacts that I'm getting? So, I think that's one of the biggest advantages and opportunities that I think that clients will take advantage of in the next year or so.
Kazemaini
One huge thing I see is a revolution in communication. What I mean by that is one of the biggest pain points in contact centers is staffing agents with the right language skills, French, Spanish, Mandarin, whatever. I don't have to do that anymore. If someone wants to speak in their preferred native language, let them speak and the application will automatically in real-time translate to English. It's going to revolutionize the world when it comes to communication.
Suess
So when we're thinking about Dynamics 365 contact center, how is that different from traditional contact centers or even the CRM technology?
Kazemaini
It is the world's leading genAI contact center solution, both from the customer service point to the omnichannel. Microsoft is the leader in genAI in the world. And again, it goes to our most important key message that we've been trying to deliver, reducing the customer effort. Dynamics 365 is 100% designed to reduce that customer effort. And then leveraging things like CXA and EY, we can hyper-personalize those for that unique industry or for that unique customer.
Suess
All right. So thank you, Terry, thank you, Kaz, for sitting down with me. And we're really talking about the transformation of contact center. So in parting, what advice would you give to organizations looking to start this transformation for their contact center?
Kazemaini
So one of the key takeaways is take a crawl, walk, run, fly approach. You don't have to do big bang. So based on the outcomes that you want to achieve, you can roll out dynamics in a very modular fashion. And then leveraging things like Copilot, you can augment those capabilities. Keep what you have, bolt it on top, and then we can actually help you create that roadmap to get to that ultimate future state.
Walls
Yeah, I think in addition to or add to Kaz from a key takeaway is if you don't know where you need to crawl first, we can help you figure that out. So if you think about it, one of our traditional strengths is identifying in terms of, how do you quantify those opportunities? So how do you find something? Especially if you need a victory up front in the crawl phase, we can help be find that. So the idea of this, oh my goodness, I have to go build the death star to be able to capture the value, you don't need to do that. So, we can help you identify what that path to value looks like for your organization.
Suess
And get those easy wins.
Walls
Absolutely. Absolutely. Even if the easy isn't so easy to see up front, we can help the clients figure that out.
Suess
Thank you, guys.
Kazemaini
Appreciate it.
Walls
Thank you, Courtney. Really appreciate it.
Reid
I hope the crawl, walk, run, fly approach to a customer contact center transformation provided inspiration for your business. For more insights from EY and Microsoft leaders, visit us on ey.com/techdirections.
