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.