To fix customer service in Australia, put AI to work for employees

Australian business leaders can't seem to crack the customer experience (CX) code. According to the ServiceNow Customer Experience Intelligence Report, customer service has gotten increasingly worse over the past three years. Australians are waiting longer than ever-spending a combined 107 million hours on hold, 11% more than the previous year.

We spoke to Simon Bowker, head of customer workflow solutions for ServiceNow in Asia Pacific and Japan, to get his insights on waning CX and how to fix customer service in Australia.

Why does Australia's CX quality keep getting worse?

Demand for better CX has grown, but supply hasn't.

On the demand side, consumers' expectations continue to increase. Some companies are doing well, offering fully connected experiences. As a customer, I see these front-runners and expect more from other organizations-especially when prices are rising.

On the supply side, increasing costs make it harder to hire at scale. Leaders have historically done a bad job of putting their stakeholders at the center of their technology. Completing even the simplest tasks can be time-consuming with legacy systems, making everything slower for both employees and customers.

Many employees have to rely on clunky, problematic technology to deal with more demand from customers. With the wrong foundations, it's inevitable to end up with a downward spiral that's increasingly expensive and daunting to fix.

Where should leaders start to improve CX?

If you transform work for your No. 1 asset-your people-it will naturally improve how they then serve your customers. But if your people aren't empowered to do their best work, and technology is burning productivity instead of boosting it, then you don't need to be an economist to see there's a problem.

So how do we improve employees' experience of technology? Do we just rip and replace what we have? That's almost like rebuilding the company from the ground up.

We believe you can augment existing systems instead of replacing them. This is where AI plays an incredibly important role. If you use AI strategically, you can scoop data out of complicated back-end systems, make intelligent sense of it, and deliver the right information to employees in a clear and timely way that lets people do their best work.

What's more important: AI for customer or employee solutions?

Start with employee-facing systems if you have to choose, but ideally, you want to apply AI to both, covering as much of the customer journey as possible.

Chatbots, for example, can be used on both sides of the experience equation. If I'm a customer with a specific but relatively straightforward issue, a customer-facing chatbot can give me what I need quickly and efficiently.

Some issues involve a lot of information in a lot of systems, or may be too complex, unique, or nuanced to be understood by a machine. In those cases, you need a highly skilled person, increasingly like a personal concierge, who can solve more difficult problems.

These employees can also benefit from a chatbot that validates policies, checks that they're up to date, and gets data from multiple messy back-end systems. If you start with employee experience, you can apply AI to accelerate processes, decisions, and outcomes-which streamlines every step for customers.

Why are leaders getting tech and process debt in CX?

Inertia can create a huge drag on CX. Leaders often think, "Change is too hard. We just have to continue with what we have."

The global banking industry illustrates another path. Banks rely on mainframes from the 1960s and '70s for their core systems. The "too hard" mindset would say digital banking is impossible-replacing the mainframes would come at enormous cost and potential disruption.

But with online banking, we've seen the augmentation of that back-office infrastructure by putting something more modern and flexible on top of it. Banks had to do that because there was such huge demand for online banking that they couldn't afford to say it was "too hard" anymore.

There's always a trade-off between effort and reward. Smart leaders realize, "I need to solve this now. Otherwise, I'll lose market share." The best time to shake that too-hard mindset is as soon as possible, before you reach a point where your competitor can do something in two minutes that takes your company 20.

Is there any impetus for brands to get out of that "too hard" basket?

Disruption can come from anywhere: newer digital-first firms, overseas market entrants, and so on. The customer expectations and market share composition of your industry can change overnight, like we've seen with banks and fintech. This makes the market concentration we've historically seen in Australian industries more susceptible to upheaval.

Thankfully, at many of the enterprises we talk to, leaders recognize that AI can make the problem of "too hard" transformations easier to solve. Once you start with AI, the improvements tend to compound and accelerate very quickly.

Find out more, including stories of successful CX transformations, in our full CX report for Australia and New Zealand.

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