As customer expectations continue to evolve, contact centers must adopt new technologies to stay relevant and deliver exceptional experiences. While AI is poised to play an increasingly central role, the optimal balance between AI and human agents remains a critical consideration. Here we explore the primary ways AI and other rising technologies can enhance contact center operations today, as well as the limitations that will necessitate an ongoing human presence.
The Role of AI
AI will play an important role in automating simple, repetitive tasks to free up human agents to focus on more complex customer interactions. This includes using AI for self-service, providing agent assistance, and generating deep insights through the use of interaction analytics.
AI-powered virtual agents can handle straightforward tasks like address changes and policy explanations in a natural conversational way. But there are limitations – AI can make mistakes, hallucinate, and struggle with complex or nuanced queries. An AI-generated transcript, for example, could simply make up information that was not covered in the call due to a hallucination. It is, therefore, important that AI virtual agents undergo rigorous testing and review to ensure that they deliver a positive customer experience.
Another important use of AI is interaction analytics, which can provide valuable insights into the root causes of customer issues by analyzing intents and sentiment. This extends the importance of the call to the enterprise by providing information that can be fed back to other departments to drive continuous process improvements. Engaging the entire company, not just the contact center, in the customer experience is key. Sharing insights from interaction analytics helps teams outside of customer service understand how their work impacts the customer.
Real-time translation capabilities are important, especially for contact centers serving multilingual customers, allowing agents to communicate effectively regardless of language.
AI autoscoring is also important. AI can analyze interactions at scale, to surface the most important or problematic conversations, rather than relying on manual sampling. Michael McCloskey, CEO at Bright Pattern, stated: “AI autoscoring of agents and interactions is necessary for continuous process improvements. If you’re just going to sample things, you are likely to miss important insights. But AI can look at 100% of the interactions and surface only the ones that are out of threshold.”
Another important role for AI is agent assist to provide suggestions to the agent for an improved customer experience. Here, AI can enhance the agent’s performance and overall customer satisfaction.
McCloskey said, “While AI will play an increasingly important role, there will for some time be a need for human agents to handle complex queries and provide empathetic support that AI cannot completely replicate for now. I think that it’s some ways off before it [AI] replaces humans… If you overuse AI, you’re just going to frustrate customers.”
The rapid advancement and decreasing costs of AI technology is enabling more widespread adoption in contact centers. McCloskey told us: “The technology has moved incredibly fast in the last year. In addition, the costs have come down dramatically making it more affordable and increasing adoption.”
Staying Ahead of the Curve
As customer expectations continue to evolve, contact centers must be nimble and innovative in adopting new technologies to stay ahead of the curve. While AI will undoubtedly play a central role in automating routine tasks, augmenting agent capabilities, and generating valuable insights, human agents will remain essential for handling complex queries and providing the empathetic support that customers demand.
Furthermore, technologies like real-time translation and advanced interaction analytics will be crucial for serving diverse customer bases and driving continuous process improvements across the organization. By embracing a blended and sophisticated technology stack, contact centers can future-proof their operations and solidify their position as true customer experience hubs.
