Insights from Customer Contact Week (Nashville)

LAST UPDATED: October 30, 2025 at 1:00PM

by Braden Kelley

One of the sessions I had the opportunity to attend at Customer Contact Week in Nashville featured Brian Cantor (Customer Management Practice), Gene Kropfelder (Ally Financial) and Scott Rhinehart (Alorica). Two overarching themes of the session were that bringing technology and human elements together continues to be a challenge and that with every interaction you are either building or destroying trust. Gene highlighted that his outlook is that people don’t need another bank they need a better bank, and this mindset is something that he tries to help permeate throughout the organization. Two ways they try to be that better bank in customer experience terms is by first, creating transparency around the wait times in different support channels and second, by trying to make every interaction feel different/better than the interactions they have with Ally’s competitors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was obviously a focus of the session and the fact that personalization requires knowing the interactions a customer has had and what they’ve been exposed to, but AI (or humans) have to leverage that knowledge in a helpful and not a creepy way.

When it comes to AI, it’s not what AI can do, but what does it do better and what activities should it take on. Implementing AI in any situation should start with a shared understanding of what problem you’re trying to solve, clearly defined outcomes (work backwards from these, utilizing well-defined checkpoints), a well-communicated WIFM (What’s in it for me?), and a crawl/walk/run approach. Don’t go too big too fast.

We have learned along the way that artificial intelligence can be very useful for helping support agents lean in with the information they (and customers) need. AI as a tool to summarize research query responses versus a list of search results (links). AI can help us understand where agents are spending the time and serve as a knowledge base auditor (article inconsistencies, gaps, etc.).

One important question that came up is “How can we help with handle time?”:

• CSAT and NPS are important but handle time is important not just for the company (cost) but also for the customer – so they can get back to their life

A more challenging question that all contact center managers must ask is “How do you measure AI satisfaction versus human satisfaction?”:

• The reason this is a challenging questions is because most of the easily solvable questions will go the AI and the cases that often don’t have a good resolution will be the ones that go to humans
• At the same time we need to consider the impact of automating certain types of calls (often the easy ones). Will this make the human’s job more stressful (no easy calls)? Will they need more breaks as a result?
• In the quest for efficiency be careful not to have your humans provide a robotic experience (reading scripts, no authority or decision making capability or flexibility)

Our humanity (both customer and employee) will always be important. Both have to learn to trust AI outputs, impacting the rate and amount of adoption, especially if you don’t have a plan for how to build that trust over time. And, it is important to have human retain accountability – AI generated, human reviewed before submission (i.e. call summaries). Finally, it is important to understand that while we may view the digital native generations as preferring a technological solution, the reality is that even the younger generations will still reach out for a human touchpoint on important questions/issues. So we humans are safe – for now.

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Image credits: Customer Management Practice

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