When traveling to a new place, knowing precisely where it is and having a plan to get there is crucial to ensure a successful journey.
After all, if you start heading in the wrong direction, the journey to your desired destination will take longer than necessary.
In the world of AI and generative AI (GenAI), this metaphor is especially applicable.
AI has generated a lot of press and internal urgency. Senior leaders are telling teams to “get on with it.”
As such, many have rushed out the door and made missteps, with several public failures throughout 2024. That resulted in bad PR, upset customers, and even lawsuits.
Instead, contact centers should press forward with context, understanding, and clear business objectives. That starts with understanding the breadth of AI and GenAI applications and how they can help your business.
Contact Center AI: More Than Bots Alone
Adopting AI goes beyond simply implementing a bot or automating a few processes; it’s about building a comprehensive strategy that meets your business objectives, whether it be to enhance the customer experience, improve the efficiency of frontline teams, managers, and analysts, save costs, or myriad other goals.
Achieving this requires understanding AI’s current limitations and capabilities and how it can realistically help you achieve the desired results.
Creating such an all-encompassing strategy may sound intimidating. However, businesses can follow the “crawl, walk, run” approach.
A “Crawl, Walk, Run” Example
Many contact centers will start their GenAI journey by leveraging auto-summarization solutions.
Noting this use case, Steve Nattress, VP of Product Management at Enghouse Interactive, said:
“AI Summarization condenses long conversations into just a few sentences, saving time both at the start and end of calls. This allows agents to quickly review previous interactions at the beginning of a call and streamlines post-call wrap-up by identifying next actions and eliminating the oversights and inaccuracies of manual summaries.”
In addition, auto-summarization can automate ticket tagging to categorize customer interactions. With that comes more accurate data, which leaders can harness to better understand ways to improve their processes, products, and services.
Leaders may analyze those tags to spot product issues and broken processes, prioritize contact center journeys, and consider broader AI use cases to fix, automate, and enhance those experiences.
Consider the Quick Wins That Will Build Confidence
Like any major change, widescale AI adoption won’t happen overnight. For instance, many contact centers still struggle to implement a true omnichannel experience. Indeed, as recently as 2023, over two-thirds of contact centers were still not omnichannel. AI will also take time.
Yet, many customer service leaders are under pressure to implement AI. So, consider the quick wins that will instill confidence from above and complement the broader “crawl, walk, run” strategy.
A simple voicebot that detects intent and routes contacts in place of a conventional IVR is an excellent example of where to start.
At a later date, the contact center can augment its voicebot capabilities with a GenAI-based virtual agent. With the appropriate guardrails, the virtual agent can help automate targeted Q&A queries, match the question to a predefined knowledge base article, and present relevant responses in a proper tone. Virtual agents’ responses can also be evaluated for accuracy, just like human agents – only they are available 24 hours a day.
Also, because the virtual agent can detect intent, it can ensure that queries without related, qualified knowledge content pass directly to a live agent.
Understand the Fundamentals of Contact Center AI
While developing a “crawl, walk, run” strategy, there are plenty of best practices to follow. Here are three excellent examples.
- Establish Measures That Align with Key Objectives
Clear-cut objectives and actionable metrics should be part of any AI implementation.
Even if the contact center is simply deploying automatic summarization, it should consider the impact on wrap-up time and agent availability, along with the overall associated improvement on average handle time (AHT), wait time, service levels, and ultimately customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Alternatively, suppose a business chooses to use AI to automate agent evaluations. In that case, it may track whether supervisors can spend more time coaching agents instead of manually performing evaluations on only a subset of calls.
Diving deeper, Nattress notes:
“Be sure to measure the right customer, agent, and business-focused metrics, and maintain agility by setting regular checkpoints to review results.
“Adjust your targets as needed to ensure your business continues to receive the maximum benefit from your chosen solutions,” he concluded.
- Carefully Communicate the AI Strategy with the Contact Center Team
Employees may have concerns about AI relating to job security, mistrust, and hyper-surveillance.
As such, effective change management and clear communication are key.
According to Nattress, that “involves explaining how the AI solution works, what’s happening, and why it will benefit the team in the long run.”
Also, keep that communication loop open. Alongside sharing performance gains openly, consider checking in with employees – possibly through a “voice of the employee” survey. Analyzing these surveys using AI and sharing the results can help foster transparency and engagement.
- Don’t Just Switch It On and Walk Away
AI and automation may offer the illusion that a contact center can “just switch it on and walk away,” but that’s a major mistake.
For instance, AI-driven knowledge management output is only as good as the source content, which needs to be continually enhanced and maintained.
As such, contact centers require a dedicated, agile team behind these transformations, continually monitoring, optimizing, and improving the system.
Without that, AI and automation projects won’t achieve their long-term potential, and businesses won’t realize their full investment.
Get to Know the Wider World of AI
From AI routing engines and bots to virtual assistants and conversational intelligence, the contact center hosts an array of AI applications and use cases.
There’s a lot of hype swirling around these applications. But Enghouse Interactive aims to cut through it.
“Our AI solutions are not about deploying AI for the sake of it; they’re about strategically leveraging technology to deliver real business benefits for our customers,” said Nattress.
“They are designed with a laser focus on practicality, affordability, and security while driving measurable outcomes. And that’s the key: measurable outcomes are how we assess ROI.”
Nattress dives deeper into how Enghouse customers are achieving that ROI in the following webinar: Introducing EnghouseAI – Practical AI for Smarter CX
