Dive Brief
- The lion's share of customers have had a complex support issue in the past year, but half report their issues were never resolved, according to a ZingTree survey released last week. The survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers defined a complex issue as requiring multiple interactions, took more than 30 minutes to resolve, or was related to a high-stakes topic like finance or healthcare.
- One-quarter of those with complex support requests abandoned their issue in the last year, and one-third spent multiple days trying to resolve their issue before giving up.
- Most respondents said they don’t mind using AI — when it solved their issue. When AI was involved in handling a complex support issue, the report noted that it failed to understand the issue, didn’t provide a “transfer to human” option or did not pass the issue context along.
Dive Insight
While generative and agentic AI is becoming more adept at handling basic support issues, the technology can be stymied by complex issues, often stemming from various operational and call flow design issues.
Brands can start to overcome these roadblocks by putting basic integrations in place to pass context along. Experts also urge organizations to review how their service function is structured and to adopt an omnichannel communications approach.
When channels aren’t properly integrated, context doesn’t get passed along. That can lead to the age-old customer frustration problem: having to repeat what they just said, according to Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst with Valoir, a technology analyst firm.
“The bot doesn't help me. I get to a human, and I have to repeat myself,” Wettemann told CX Dive.
The technology already exists to pass an interaction’s context from AI to a human agent, and the integrations are doable, as well, if oftentimes laborious.
Wettemann recommends a basic step: Enable session IDs so that the system can reconcile customer conversations if they move from one channel — email, chat, voice — to another.
However, many organizations today have distinct groups within their service function tasked with handling each communications channel. That is, one group handles email, another handles chat, and yet another handles live calls.
This fragmented approach can complicate an organization’s ability to pass the context of an interaction from chat to voice, for example.
“Organizations often treat channels and systems as separate experiences, while customers see one relationship,” Jeannie Walters, CEO of CX consultancy Experience Investigators, told CX Dive in an email.
While this channel-based approach was the result of legacy infrastructure limitations, in today’s cloud-based world, handling communications modes separately is no longer necessary from a technical standpoint.
“Before [contact center as a service], I had to have contact center infrastructure separate for certain reasons. That's not true anymore,” Wettemann said. This split continues to exist due more to “inertia and politics than actual technical hurdles today.”
