Halvard is the Chief Product Officer for Boost.ai, a provider of next-generation conversational AI for enterprises operating at scale.
Early iterations of contact centers were simple, with customers dialing in to ask about delivery dates, product availability and support for a previously purchased product or service. While wait times have always been a challenge, the volume of products and services offered today exacerbates this exponentially. Even with support quality remaining a top priority, it seems the contact center industry as a whole lags behind. Industry experts predict it will be at least a year before higher quality and more sustainable experiences arrive for both support agents and customers. When searching for solutions, it’s easy to focus on top-of-mind issues like agent retention; however, I believe there is an underlying mismatch that’s yet to be understood. Delivering quality support by way of contact centers needs to be rethought with the advent of AI. New partnerships forged between existing teams and budding technology will not only boost support capabilities but also provide relief in key areas such as wait times and self-service capabilities.
The Post-Covid Era Contact Center
Digital transformation in many contact centers was well underway before Covid-19 arrived, but the pandemic’s impact paired with recent advancements in generative AI has heightened consumer expectations and accelerated pre-pandemic timelines. Today’s centers grapple with how many resources they can allocate to customer and employee experiences, as the “great resignation” and remote work continue to shift their workforce’s priorities. The bottom line is contact centers of all sizes must do more with less.
For those wondering just how critical this issue is, reports indicate that 1 in 5 customer service agents are considering quitting every week. As retention rates become critical, contact center managers need to ensure employees are as satisfied with their work as customers are with the company’s product or service. If dramatic changes in the workforce weren’t enough cause for concern, consumer expectations regarding digital experiences have solidified at a heightened level even as other aspects of life return to normal. This has further compounded demand on contact centers and their agents, inducing a high-volume stress cycle that is tough for many to recover from.
Replacing Human Jobs Isn’t The End Goal
Consumers are wowed by tools like ChatGPT, as their creative ability to generate essays on Bugs Bunny in the style of a Steven King novel is entirely within its creative wheelhouse. However, these results can be deceptively convincing so long as notions of what these fictitious results should look like aren’t outlined beforehand.
Generative AI is currently capable of producing understandable responses for a large majority of requests, but its accuracy when responding to specific inquiries such as bank account balances, or delivery timelines for customer orders, isn’t as impressive. For contact centers, delivering the correct response the first time, every time, is vital. Because of this, keeping a human in the response loop is still a must. As it stands, narrow AI produces more accurate and replicable responses within the scope of its knowledge base than its generative counterparts. While some fear that the proposed cost-benefit of replacing entire support teams with AI will come to fruition, financial savings isn’t the only aspect enterprises consider when developing support capabilities.
There’s no doubt AI’s role in the modern contact center is expanding, but to be truly beneficial to the organization, it must be integrated in tandem with live agents. Integrating an agent-assisting chatbot into cloud-based contact centers solutions like Genesys Cloud or Twilio Flex can essentially give human agents “superpowers,” enhancing productivity with an always-available assistant that allows for increased response times, reduction in inaccuracies, and overall streamlining of efficiency.
How AI Will Impact Contact Centers In The Future:
Within the first quarter of 2023, over $10 billion in investment deals centered around AI were announced as cross-industry applications continue to garner interest from Silicon Valley VCs and beyond. A large portion of this investment is directed toward generative AI developers and as such contact centers are likely to see the largest impact within the training time for new virtual agents. For those looking to onboard new virtual agents, or are starting to consider how virtual agents can best help, here are a few things to consider:
Understand the Status Quo: Current AI solutions are best suited to help supercharge the capabilities of live agents. The optimal approach to this conversation both with developers and existing support agents is to understand how the technology can best assist the existing model, rather than fully replacing humans in the loop.
Assess the Customer Support (CS) Flow: Once you actually understand your organization’s CS flow, it’s necessary to assess the potential for AI to impact each point of this process. A chatbot placed on your homepage might make for a flashy new feature, but if your front-end support funnel is already optimized, the downstream impact will be negligible. Asking how, when and where in the flow AI will make the largest difference is critical to a successful implementation.
Before Launch, Build a Feedback Loop: Virtual agents, just like live ones, require continuous feedback in order to improve, and approaching the integration of new AI with this in mind will ensure a smoother process for all. By building a feedback loop between agents and AI managers, opportunities for continuous optimization and improvement of output quality, process and end-to-end automation with back-end systems exist before the AI’s first day online.
The industry is on the cusp of a major leap in terms of both innovation and appearance, as virtual agents, some of whom are being named, start to become staple co-workers in the back and front offices around the globe. Considering the average consumer mindset on the practicality of AI in business, it will take time to build trust and create bridges between the current standard of service and the self-service model of the future. That said, AI as a tool is here to stay and will only see further usage in contact centers, taking on roles within quality assurance, customer experience and even sales.
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