Afiniti's late November 2023 introduction of a new brand, CX AI, caught my attention as this company is one of the largest yet under-the-radar AI providers in the customer experience (CX) space. Afiniti's AI pairing has been adopted by some of the largest global brands to supersede rules-based routing by matching customers to the best agents for maximized outcomes.
Eager to learn more about this new launch, I turned to a company webinar where Caroline O'Brien, Afiniti's Chief Data Officer and Head of Product, unveiled details of CX AI.
Amid the hype around generative AI (Gen AI), Caroline reminded us that while large language models excel at content-focused tasks like creation and summarization, they are not a cure for every business problem. Great at automating simple conversations like product returns, Gen AI has limitations in situations demanding nuance.
Interactions such as sales or billing disputes require high degrees of empathy, persuasion, and adaptability only provided by humans. This is the problem CX AI helps address, making the most of a company's finite human resources.
Caroline noted that today, AI applications are over-indexed on cost reductions. Instead, she recommends looking at AI through the lenses of 3 use cases: automation, augmentation, and optimization. CX AI focuses on the latter.
Afiniti's core capability optimizes the pairing of customers to agents by weighing predicted outcomes against wait times. Built-in A/B testing enables continuous measurement by regularly pausing AI pairing to baseline performance. This optimization approach has historically driven over $2B in annual revenue gains for its clients.
With CX AI, Afiniti is taking its technology to the next level, applying it to three other decisions required to maximize the outcome of each customer interaction:
Which channel to steer the customer to
Which personalized offers to make
How to motivate agents through gamification and rewards
Afiniti focuses on optimizing decision-making across contact center processes, seeking to yield superior business outcomes overall rather than merely reducing costs.
You can watch the webinar here