How AI is Shaping Customer Communications: Insights from Engage CTO, Allan Christian

At Trust ’24, we had the opportunity to sit down with Allan Christian, CTO of Precisely Engage, to discuss how AI is transforming customer communications and what the future holds for this technology.

In this Q&A session, Allan shares insights into the AI-driven technologies Engage is offering clients today, the feedback they’re receiving from customers about AI-driven innovations, and the emerging technologies that will further enhance their products in the future.

What AI tech are we providing our clients with today?

There are two existing examples where we use AI-powered technology today in our live production services:

Within our SaaS platform, one of the communication channels we support is conversational chatbots. This channel was designed as a deterministic chatbot rather than being AI-trained. We did this as it matched our customers’ risk profile at the time, as they said they were not confident that their data was AI-ready and wanted to avoid bad publicity, which can often hit the headlines.

Where we did use AI was for understanding the intent of messages. We needed the bots to be able to identify and process the customer’s intent from the words entered into the dialogue with the chatbot. This was achieved using natural language processing with great success. By doing this, we could provide governance of the conversation and enable organizations to know if they needed to escalate the chat to another communication channel or to a live contact center rep for resolution.

A second example of AI technology is for organizations wanting to use personalized and interactive video to communicate with their customers. A significant cost of this type of video production has historically been the creation of a voiceover and, specifically, the recording of variables such as names, addresses, and ongoing management of the changing content. To solve this, we leverage AI text-to-speech to convert text automatically into amazingly realistic human-sounding audio in different and configurable languages, styles, and tones—this ensures the communication is as personalized as possible, without heading back to the recording studio.

What feedback is Precisely Engage hearing from clients or customers about their experiences with AI?

We are hearing a lot from organizations on this topic, and it varies based on their maturity with AI.

Organizations tell us that when they talk about business transformation within their own offices, that means AI. If there is a conversation about their operational efficiencies, again, it ends up in a conversation about AI.

Organizations are increasingly talking to us about their “AI budget” and want help in trying to work out where to apply it, or if it’s even appropriate. They are unsure where to start, especially when items in their current state are deemed “too hard” or “not broken” to transform.

Another common feedback topic from organizations is interest in how AI could improve the productivity of their workforce and reduce the time for changes to communications to hit production.

Often, I find that organizations apply their personal experiences from consumer-accessible services, and this can cloud their judgment as they apply that experience to their business contexts.

We operate in a world of regulated communications, and some organizations are still extremely risk-averse to change and want formal confirmation that AI tech is NOT being used for their production workloads.

Helping customers from all of these viewpoints is complex when designing global enterprise solutions, but that’s the challenge our teams enjoy solving.

What emerging AI technologies do you believe would add significant value to our products?

When our teams are working on a new solution, we select the appropriate technology at the time for the scenario. We are seeing more and more opportunities to use AI within our solutions, but we do not start from a point of “how does AI solve this?”

If you believe what you read, AI technology can often be seen as the answer to all problems, and while it can help solve many, it’s not appropriate for all. I would say that every day, the latest AI development is causing us to rethink decisions and examine if something can be solved today that would not have been feasible in the past.

In the future, I expect to see significant value delivered to our customers through the use of AI in several areas:

• Analyzing the effectiveness of delivered customer communications across all channels
• Recommending the future content and channel of subsequent communications to maximize and optimize the customer experience—this could be based on the historical success of their own communications and perhaps those of peer organizations
• Aiding in the planning of future customer communications campaigns

Note that I would expect all of these examples to still require a configurable level of human approval before distribution is approved, especially for regulated communications.

Finally, a topic very relevant to communication technology is migration challenges. Many organizations have used the estimated migration effort as a reason to stick with the status quo and not evolve their platforms. I expect to see rapid evolution of migration capabilities. In our domain, this has often been reliant on legacy proprietary formats and structures. If we are able to reduce the time to migrate in a safe and controlled manner, this could provide significant value to our user base and enable them to focus on their business growth rather than supporting communication technology.

How do you see AI being used to solve the governance and compliance challenges organizations have?

In the domain of customer communications, there are requirements appearing each day across our global customers connected to governance and compliance. Personalized communications require data about humans, and humans have to consume them, so there are always new developments and challenges to keep up with.

We are all consumers of communications from businesses. We are all very aware and familiar with receiving transactional communications as emails, SMS, PDFs, and chats. While there will be evolution every year in all of them, I would say that more can be expected in video communications. Video communication continues to change at the most rapid pace as new outlets emerge, often from social media. If you pair the evolving channels, also consider accessibility compliance challenges. The ways that humans create, interact, operate, or consume communications will always evolve, and with it, the accessibility requirements will increase—AI will help us with these challenges and provide the guardrails to make compliant communications in an efficient manner.

Away from the delivery channel of communication, I expect to see AI used more in the world of audit and assurance. Here, requirements may change rapidly depending on the country or domain in which a customer is operating.

With globally scaling, multi-tenant technology, AI-enabled technologies will likely provide specific governance and compliance assurance so that when a change is made, it is compliant with the current business or regional rules.

To prepare for AI and meet evolving customer expectations, it’s crucial to begin by modernizing your traditional customer communication technologies. In our paper, 4 Essential Steps to Modernize Traditional CCM for Digital CX Success, we explore key strategies to streamline technology, enhance personalization, and boost engagement.