Digital transformation has been a buzz topic in the contact centre world for a few years now, and it seems like many of the future trends are already here. According to a Forrester survey, the key business driver of digital transformation is improving operational efficiency, followed by revenue growth and cost reduction.
From chatbots and virtual assistants to process automation and real-time analytics, contact centres have experienced a true rebirth since their original form.
Looking to the future, AI coupled with automation will most likely get in every crevice of contact centre technology – whether it’s human-assisted or entirely working on its own.
CX Today welcomed Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer at Sabio Group, to take a closer look at the pace at which AI & automation entered the contact centre space and how it’s going to develop in the coming years.
Where it all started
Contact centres have been working with some form of digital technology since their inception; however, the turning point in the adoption of automation and AI happened not too long ago. Dorman points out the year 2016 when natural language processing, driven by virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Home, started exposing more consumers to speech recognition technology and enabling contact centres to start adopting speech capabilities in a more cost-effective way. He says:
“The major cloud vendors made natural language technology available to developers through easy-to-access APIs. This democratised the technology, making it available to contact centres which enabled voice to be treated as a digital channel.”
Needless to say, the mass adoption of chatbots, voice bots, and different types of cloud technology significantly sped up the process of deployment of these solutions. What was previously available only to huge enterprises has now become accessible to organisations of all sizes.
Yet, enticed by the idea of cutting-edge AI, more often than not, businesses don’t fully commit to what is needed to fully exploit the technology and ultimately eventually fall short of ambitious automation goals.
Trial and error
When it comes to mistakes organisations make with AI and automation, they can happen to anyone. To avoid beginner mistakes, it’s crucial to analyse the organisation’s needs and goals and deploy solutions that will support them. With particular customer-interacting technology, organisations should invest in both technical and operational resources to make it work effectively and deliver ROI, emphasises Dorman.
He also adds: “Businesses that are serious about voice and chat-based digital transformation need to make sure they take the long view, invest properly, and build the right team around it. It’s key to engage in the operation, from developing and optimising to making sure that the back-end technology infrastructure is capable of fulfilling customers’ requests.”
With the right toolset in place and the right implementation, its success is almost guaranteed.
“If you bring both those things together, the leading technology with great design, that is when you’re able to really extract huge amounts of value and see almost immediate results”, adds Dorman.
Be process-first, not tech-first
As Chief Innovation Officer at Sabio, Dorman advises that companies should be looking to start small with digital transformation and implementing automation and AI. “It’s good to start simple and quickly build and iterate towards a more complex and sophisticated solution using customer data from live interactions as your guide”, he said.
For the intent modelling used for the base, start with classifying the customers’ questions that come in and refining the responses to narrow down what the customer is contacting about. Avoid trying to ‘boil the ocean’ – in other words, implementing something that is way too complex to start with, as you will likely end up building the wrong thing or wasting effort on lower value processes. Adopting a more agile approach may be worth tens of advanced solutions that haven’t been well-thought-out.
Dorman makes a comparison: “The reality is a bit like when you have a new starter in a call centre, and you put them on the simple things first. It’s the same with an AI-based solution. You expose it to a few questions and then you gradually train it week by week, day-by-day, month-by-month, and over time it gets to the point where it’s able to achieve its full potential.”
Looking to the future, digital transformation will get to a point where automation will be at every corner of our lives. With so many companies still in their early stages of AI adoption, we have yet to see what contact centres will look like in the next few years.
Sabio offers expertise on several platforms thanks to its strong relations with a number of leading technology partners such as Google, Amazon, Twilio, Genesys, Avaya, Verint and Microsoft. This enables Sabio to bring the best technologies paired with agile methodology to their customers’ focus. Besides collating piles of data that sits across business’ channels into structured and digestible information, Sabio helps organisations deploy AI solutions at scale and helping their clients make the best out of the latest digital transformation technology including voice automation, virtual assistants and knowledge-based bots.
Learn more about Sabio’s capabilities by visiting its website.
