No amount of cost-cutting or efficiency measures has as significant an impact on your bottom line as improving customer value does. However, measuring customer value can be tricky, especially when you don’t have the right tools.
Artificial intelligence has entered the chat.
That’s right — AI-powered tools can be the key you’re missing to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) and maximize customer value. Here, we’ll take a closer look at how your contact center can leverage AI to boost customer experience (CX), measure customer lifetime value (CLV), and cement customer loyalty with help from Observe AI.
What Is Customer Value? A Detailed Definition
Customer value is a perception of how much your product or service is worth to the individual buying or receiving it. Customer value is often seen as subjective because it can vary from person to person and is based on specific and unique interactions.
There are four types of customer value, which include:
- Functional value: The worthiness of the product or service based on how well it performs its intended function
- Emotional value: The value of your product or service based on how the customer feels when using it
- Social value: The perception of social benefits, like status or reputation, that a customer receives from using the product
- Monetary value: The actual price for a product or service that a customer is willing to pay
Understanding the perceived benefits of your business’s product or service is key to meeting customer expectations, improving CSAT, and nurturing loyal customers. Customer value is closely linked to customer quality management (QM), which plays a huge role in building customer relationships.
Why Customer Value Matters for Contact Centers
For contact centers, measuring customer value is imperative for managing brand reputation and improving customer interactions. Knowing customer value is the first step to calculating customer lifetime value (CLV), which tells you what you can expect each customer to be worth over the course of their relationship with your brand.
Once you know your customer value and CLV, you can unleash powerful business insights that will increase customer engagement, reduce churn, and boost customer retention.
Customer value can be measured and improved through the use of AI, and it’s time for your contact center to join the effort. Studies show that by 2026, contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80B with the help of AI. Savings like that can help you combat staff shortages and increase operational efficiency, while freeing up your agents to focus on customer needs.
Meanwhile, a “good” CSAT rate is considered to be between 75-85%, but the national average CSAT hovers below that at 73%. Being average simply isn’t good enough.
The Challenges of Understanding and Maximizing Customer Value
So, you know you need to measure customer value if you want to satisfy your customer base and uphold your value proposition… but why is it so hard?
Data Silos
Your business generates an enormous amount of customer data, but if you aren’t gathering and analyzing that information, it doesn’t do much good. Data silos lead to fragmented buyer personas, which can compromise the customer journey. With the help of AI, you can use machine learning analytics to streamline and capture your data, helping you make informed decisions.
Lack of Context
When you don’t understand customer value, you have no way of quantifying the perceived value your customers place on your product or service. Without context, it’s difficult to grasp the emotional, social, or functional value of what you’re offering. Monetary value is easier, but if sales are slipping, you may be questioning why the pricetag doesn’t match up with overall customer value.
Inconsistent Agent Performance
Every agent will have an occasional off day, but if you notice an agent’s performance looks more like a rollercoaster ride — really low lows and really high highs — the issue may be a lack of understanding about customer value.
Additionally, when agents are pressed for time and have to balance customer support interactions with after-call work and tedious, ineffective coaching, they’re less likely to take the time to learn and navigate customer value.
Limited Feedback on Customer Interaction Quality
When you don’t have clear oversight of every customer interaction, it’s easy to give the wrong feedback or to miss out on giving feedback at all. Customer interaction data can be extremely valuable, but it isn’t always possible to leverage it without the right tools. AI can help harness that data so you can deliver the right feedback to your agents and boost CSAT.
How AI Helps Contact Centers Understand and Deliver Customer Value
So, what is the business value of contact center AI? See firsthand how these tools help uncover deeper customer insights, streamline operations, and support agents in delivering standout service at every touchpoint.
Creates a Holistic View of Each Customer
AI doesn’t just collect data. It’s shows you exactly what your customers actually care about, helping you go above and beyond basic surface-level demographics to build complex buyer personas. Observe.AI analyzes 100% of customer interactions to identify patterns in behavior, sentiment, and intent.
Some high-value customers may frequently ask about advanced product features or consistently express frustration with billing. With these AI insights, you can tailor the customer journey for each group.
This information allows agents to engage on a more personal level. Instead of treating every interaction the same, they can personalize conversations based on past interactions and known customer preferences. Over time, this improves CSAT, builds long-term loyalty, and increases the overall customer lifetime value.
Provides Real-Time Sentiment Analysis
It doesn’t always help to know how customer sentiment has shifted after the fact. With tools like real-time sentiment analysis and NPS tracking from Observe.AI, supervisors can monitor how interactions are trending in the moment, whether frustration is escalating, or satisfaction is building.
The platform flags emotional shifts during a call, so supervisors can jump in or adujust coaching strategies when necessary. This empowers agents to improve call quality mid-conversation.
Automates 100% of Interaction Monitoring
It’s impossible for any contact center manager to be on every call or interaction at once, but it is possible to get a complete 360-degree view of every interaction. With AI tools, supervisors can be even more involved in interaction monitoring, with features like screen capture capabilities that will guide more personalized and effective coaching.
Pearson, a leading education company, and Concentrix, a global customer experience provider, partnered with Observe.AI to transform their contact center performance. When they decided to leverage Observe.AI’s automation platform to analyze 100% of their customer interactions, Pearson saw a 50% decrease in negative sentiment and increased their NPS score by 25 points!
Observe.AI helped turn Pearson’s overwhelming volumes of data into actionable insights, leading to measurable improvements in both agent effectiveness and business outcomes.
Guides Agents With Real-Time Assistance
Every agent needs backup sometimes, especially during tough interactions. When supervisors can’t jump in right away, AI-powered tools like real-time agent assist step in automatically. These systems analyze the live conversation, detect emotion and sentiment, and create responses, smart scripts, or compliance reminders in the moment.
If escalation is needed, AI can trigger intelligent handoffs or flag the call for a supervisor to assist or review. This kind of instant support helps agents feel more confident and stay, even in high-pressure moments.
Fosters Personalized and Empathetic Interactions
It’s easy for agents to forget that how a customer feels is just as important as how much they spend. Understanding emotional and social value is critical to improving customer interactions and engaging with empathy.
AI assistance can support this goal with real-time tools that analyze tone, sentiment, and conversation context, then suggest empathetic phrases or alternative language to de-escalate tension. Personalized response prompts can guide agents to acknowledge customer emotions, reference previous interactions, and speak to each individual’s unique situation, not just their transaction.
Personalizes Agent Coaching for Increased Value
Coaching and training are key job functions for any contact center manager, but trying to coach without insights is a waste of time. AI can automatically score calls, identify trends, and suggest specific coaching opportunities geared to individual agent performance.
Instead of generic feedback, supervisors can deliver targeted training based on what the data shows. This helps agents improve faster, feel more supported, and better deliver on customer value.
Steps to Start Prioritizing Customer Value With AI
Ready to measure customer value accurately with AI? Here are the steps you need to take to get started:
- Identify the benefits of your product or service to your customer.
- Analyze the cost of that product or service, being sure to include any investment of time, onboarding, knowledge building, etc., needed to get started.
- Conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine if the two are aligned.
- Audit customer feedback to better understand overall sentiment and customer expectations.
- Compile your findings and begin researching AI-powered tools with specialized functions for contact centers.
- Gather data metrics from your AI platform and leverage them to collect actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.
- Monitor and make adjustments until you see improvements in CSAT and customer value.
How Observe.AI Can Help You wIth Customer Value
Getting started with AI can sound like an overwhelming prospect, but it doesn’t have to be. Start with a comprehensive AI platform like Observe.AI, which offers numerous valuable tools tailored to your business needs. With Observe.AI, you can choose everything from conversation intelligence that improves CX and delivers performance results to Summarization AI, which eliminates the need for after-call work from agents.
That’s just the surface of what we can do for you and your contact center at Observe.AI, and we’d love to guide you on this AI journey. Set up your free demo today and let’s get started!
