At the conference held last week in London, Emma Dark, director of customer experience and operations at Cuckoo Broadband, said that AI could help with the “heavy lifting on insight” to free up teams for other work.

“You can’t look at every video, you can’t look at every verbatim,” Dark said.  “Rather than a person sitting there and listening to interactions, the technology is picking up sentiment and really driving action plans for teams around coaching, and knowledge and education.”

Dark said that brands needed to have a defined plan for what AI could bring to the table for it to be a success. “Make sure you are really clear in the organisation around why you are using [AI] and where you are using it, so it doesn’t become a vanity thing and it becomes something that’s really intentional and something you are using in designing customer experiences. It is about using it with purpose.”

She added that she wanted “the centre of excellence to be the humans” in a business and hoped staff would see AI as a skill-building opportunity rather than a replacement for staff.

“There will be emerging roles, and new KPIs will come along with that,” Dark said, adding that she expected new customer service positions beyond those that currently exist to appear to support the use of AI and “to be the buddy of the technology, to make sure it doesn’t go rogue and that the empathy, personalisation and sentiment remains true, even if a lot of the experience has been digitalised”.

Dark also said that consumers and customers “are more vocal” since Covid-19, and that has meant a large number of forums have appeared in which customers can be voice their frustrations with customer service.

“We cannot be complacent as leaders in customer service and experience – I think it’s right those public forums are there to keep us on our toes,” she added. “But customers just want the basic things to be right – just make it simple, help them find something very simply, and if they need to speak to you, don’t make that really difficult and onerous.

“It’s really important we keep our pencil sharp, we keep our people at the fore and continue to champion delivering great experiences for customers and the person behind it.”

Dark said of her approach to CX that: “What has worked well for me in the past is three principles. First of all, getting an exec sponsor. It is really important to have accountability at the top – that individual who will allow you to change the culture of an organisation by putting the customer first.

“Then I would say make everyone responsible for the customer. Don’t have a situation where the customer service or customer team are responsible for customer experience. It is about the whole organisation getting involved, seeing what part they play and holding them accountable for customer experience as well.

“The third thing I would say is to keep it simple. It is about keeping it simple, getting it right and building on things.”