The impact of AI on the CX workforce isn’t isolated to the frontlines. Professionals across the business are seeing their jobs change and new roles emerge.
The CX team at app platform Airtable is looking for people with technical skills beyond what existing team members have to propel the department forward, Sean Simons, senior manager of AI support, said during a panel at Customer Contact Week Las Vegas last week.
“I think anybody that's in the support space or in the operations space aspires to be as proactive as possible,” Simons said. Airtable is using data from its operations to create a roadmap of where the creation of new CX roles can help it improve its operations.
CX teams are changing in multiple ways. The prevalence of AI is creating roles that require previously unheard of skillsets and fresh opportunities for internal promotion. It is also putting CX teams at the center of cross-department collaboration.
The change is affecting CX leaders as well, according to Ashlee Booker, senior manager of CX operations at employee scheduling company Homebase. As AI takes care of more busywork, CX leaders are able to focus more on strategy and shaping how the business evolves.
Growth in AI opens up new roles
AI is creating positions dedicated to designing experiences for updated forms of customer contact, and teams are exploring how to find the right people for the job.
One example is Airtable’s recently hired “AI agent architect,” who is tasked with designing automated journeys for a variety of use cases, according to Simons. While support is the role’s bread and butter, it also works with the marketing team to find other customer journeys automation can improve.
That role can only exist because the Airtable team has been able to show a very clear impact in its initial AI deployments, according to Simons. Early wins helped shine light on how AI was helping the CX team, which made other parts of the business interested in investing in and partnering with the team.
Finding the right candidate for a new position can take some degree of compromise, Simons said. Airtable wanted its first “AI agent architect” to be “the perfect unicorn that can do everything for us,” but as it turned out, that perfect candidate doesn’t exist yet.
“We were really looking for a combination of operational and support expertise, as well as practical applied AI execution,” Simons said. “What I found as we interviewed a lot of candidates was that people were very heavily on one side of that spectrum. There was nobody that was quite in the middle or checked both boxes.”
Change opens new opportunities
The evolving CX function is creating new career opportunities for the frontlines by giving experienced customer service agents a chance to apply their knowledge in new ways.
A lot of Homebase’s AI trainers come from its customer-facing teams, according to Booker. These workers know both Homebase’s product and the average customer support journey well, which makes them suited for designing automated support journeys.
“We're moving tasks over to software, and who better to do it than our customer-facing team?” Booker said. “It's actually created new career growth for our team, more movement and more excitement, so it's been just amazing to see that.”
The addition of a promotional path that goes beyond the contact center and opens up back office roles for customer service agents is exciting for leaders as well as frontline employees, according to Craig Reines, founder and CEO of consulting firm ServiceHive.
Employee experience has always been important to strong customer service, and now leaders can offer their employees a stronger career path than before, enabling a fresh approach to recruitment and retention strategies, Reines said. “That's a huge operational change moving forward.”
The CX team becomes connective tissue
The modern CX team isn’t just about serving customers. CX professionals are becoming the lynchpin that ties together the increasingly interconnected business functions AI has created.
“I think we're at a point in CX where you're bridging the gap between product and engineering and customer experience,” Booker said.
One way Homebase handles this is offering VoC data to other teams to help them understand how their efforts are affecting sales volumes or other KPIs, according to Booker. In this way, the CX team treats other leaders the same way it would any other customers.
CX teams also need to partner with the technical teams who can build out the tools they need for self-service and other functions, according to Booker. Homebase’s CX team gets involved with other department’s hackathons to help bridge the gap between functions.
Airtable’s leadership follows a pod structure where different teams contribute their own expertise to help deploy tech investments, according to Simons. The CX team has access to plenty of data that can assist the pod alongside input from other functions.
“Our LLM is fed by transcripts from customer calls, demos from the marketing team, pitches from the sales team, internal content feedback,” Simons said.
