McAfee’s Digital Transformation Journey: Leveraging Conversational AI Platforms
2020 is an unforgettable year for many companies as the COVID pandemic changed everything. Work-from-home conditions have put a lot of strain on customer support teams as case volumes spiked and contact centers challenged to operate outside their centralized technical infrastructure. With support teams dispersed, delivering superior customer service experiences is more difficult now than ever; faced with agent burnout, contact center tools’ main obstacle is the inability to scale and extended customer service wait times. To solve these newly added challenges, organizations are showing high interest in implementing and deploying new digital solutions like Conversational AI platforms.
Recently, Aisera CEO Muddu Sudhakar sat down with Aneel Jaeel, Senior VP of Customer Success Group at McAfee, to discuss their digital journey to solve current and future customer service experience challenges. This blog summarizes the key takeaways. Click this link if you would like to watch the full Fireside Chat with McAfee and Aisera.
The Need for Digital Transformation to Stay Agile
McAfee manages over half a billion users worldwide, hundreds of millions of devices, and 20 billion lookups every day across various verticals. Jaeel sought to boost service agents’ efficiency and shorten resolution time to scale and improve the customer service experience. He knew that the impact of terrible service experiences would lead to low customer satisfaction, bad brand reputation, missed conversions, and revenue loss. Three years ago, he led McAfee’s digital transformation journey, and when COVID hit, it was critical that their employees remained responsive and empowered to attend to customers’ needs properly.
The foundation of digital solutions already in place softened the impact brought on by COVID. Companies that didn’t have any digital solutions later scrambled to realize how critical it is for customer and business success. Jaeel mentions,
“We couldn’t be where we are today without the digital transformation of some of the investments we made in Conversational AI and some of the digital transformation we did. Without that, it would be extremely difficult.”
Not all AI and digital solutions were created equal. Avoid the hype when you are taking steps towards the digital future. Before implementing any new solutions, Jaeel made sure he could answer these questions:
- What is the expected outcome?
- How is this going to help my customer reduce their efforts?
- How is it going to increase the productivity of my employees?
- How is it going to enhance my customer service experience?
- How will it impact my bottom line in terms of cost?
If you cannot address one or more of the questions above, you should question the validity of the solution you are looking to deploy or implement.
What did McAfee Want to Achieve by Deploying AI-Powered Solutions?
Automation Reduces Consumer & Enterprise Efforts to Improve Service Efficiency
Customers always want more for less; they expect resolutions and remediation to be fast and easy. Leverage automation to solve business growth issues and the chronic problems of siloed systems and high data volumes—deliver superior customer service experiences effortlessly. Conversational AI’s ability to leverage knowledge bases to automatically resolve customer queries and Conversational RPA’s ability to automatically perform back-end remediation resulted in McAfee achieving 70% case deflection, freeing up agents from mundane routines to focus efforts on what matters.
Conversational AI Platforms Deliver Guided & Personalized Experiences
Customers want personalized and guided experiences that result in quick resolutions to get on with their day. Jaeel mentions consumer services industries like airlines were doing an exceptional job at achieving this.
For example, when contacting customer support, your phone number is on record, and they can immediately identify you and your most recent airline ticket purchase. They can then offer suggestions to cancel, change the flight, or ask for flight status. This service experience is seamless, leaving customers satisfied with how fast and easy it is.
Capture Consumer Attention in 10 seconds with a Conversational AI Platform
Ten seconds is how long it takes to lose the customer’s attention. Customers are not browsing for information in the support portal. They specifically go to the support page to solve a specific problem about a particular facet of a product or service that you offer. Within those 10 seconds, whatever knowledge article displayed needs to be the right reading material that captures the attention and solves the customer’s problem. To ensure that the information served to customers is relevant to solving their problems, McAfee leverages Aisera’s natural language Conversational AI platform.
Jaeel explains, “What we were able to do when we deployed Aisera was if you take 100-word, 200-word, or 250-word knowledge articles, using Aisera’s ML model. It can identify and highlight that one sentence within the 150 or 200-word knowledge article that solves the problem, and that is the secret sauce because there we see automatic deflection.”
A Multichannel Customer Service Experience Boosts Customer Satisfaction
Whether through chat, phone, SMS, or email, customers and users should be able to engage in the medium they most prefer whenever and wherever. Conversational AI platforms make communication with customers seamless, serving customers with an asynchronous resolution model. This gears customers to utilize the new digital media over traditional as it enables them to interact with your brand on their terms.
Synchronous model – When customers need to stop what they are doing to engage with the brand. For example, when a customer must call support, there is a 30 min wait to reach an agent. In this situation, the customer cannot hang up as they lose their place in line, meaning the customer may spend over 30 minutes trying to get an issue resolved. By the time the customer does reach an agent, they feel frustrated by the experience.
Asynchronous model – This is when customers can engage with the brand without logging into the web portal to wait for a response. In this situation, service is more accessible, allowing customers to revisit when and where they want to take further actions—saving customers time and effort with little to no idle time improving brand perception and customer satisfaction.
In summary, there is no doubt that McAfee saw instant value from the implementation of cloud-native digital services like Aisera’s Conversational AI platform. The ability to quickly auto-resolve requests and leverage knowledge articles to multi-thread dialog resulted in optimizing customer service metrics including an 80% improved customer experience, a 75% increase in agent productivity, and a 70% uptick in CSAT.
To get the full story on McAfee’s deployment of Aisera’s Conversational AI platform, download the case study or book a free conversational AI demo today!