Generative AI promised to provide the spark that would light a fire under CCaaS innovation.
Now, with the first embers coming to light, few vendors are blazing a trail of ingenuity. Instead, almost every CCaaS provider has made the first same move.
That move is to develop a solution that auto-summarizes customer conversations.
How does it work? Well, after every customer conversation, it’ll create a transcript, redact sensitive information, and send it to ChatGPT – or another LLM – to generate a summary.
Agents can then copy and paste this into the CRM, cutting down on post-call processing, simplifying their workflows, and lowering handling times.
That drives a better agent experience, lowers queue times, and cuts business costs.
As such, the innovation gives end-users a quick and easy win. It also allows them to get more comfortable with generative AI before vendors release more ingenious inventions that may set the CCaaS world alight.
Yet, even at this early stage, some auto-summarization solutions are more advanced than others.
What to Look for In An Auto-Summarization Solution
One CCaaS vendor to release a LLM-powered auto-summarization tool is Cirrus Response. It’s the first capability Cirrus has added to its new AI Assistant.
Yet, despite it being the first capability, the offering has advantages over some of the other summarization tools flooding the market.
For instance, Cirrus allows the summaries to filter through to a central CRM, so agents don’t have to manually copy and paste them across to another platform.
“We call it client-side customization,” adds Ben Males, Revenue Operations Enablement Manager at Cirrus. “Users can go in, integrate their CRM with an API, and build their own post-contact flows.”
Another critical feature is the formatting of summaries. Each summary should have the same look and feel – states Males. That makes it easier for agents to handle future customer interactions as they flick through the previous call notes.
Moreover, supervisors, quality analysts, and coaches can more easily scour summaries, spot trends, and extract learnings to support agent development.
Finally, the CCaaS provider should allow the user to pull these summaries through as metadata to enable contact centers to extract further value from the solution.
Adding Value to Auto-Summarizations
Summarizing a customer conversation is not the only facet of an agent’s after contact work. For instance, they may have to tag tickets, send follow-ups, and enter data into different systems.
Working with a vendor that can mechanize most of these tasks and orchestrate a post-contact processing flow - which includes the automatic entry of summaries into the CRM – can shave precious seconds off every contact.
Now, consider the auto-summary metadata and how that could add value to various contact center activities. Males gives the example of reporting:
“We already have tools to monitor customer intent. Combine that with auto-summaries, and businesses may highlight various trends across your most critical contact center journeys.”
With conversational analytics on top of that, contact centers may also see how sentiment swings across contact reasons and conduct root cause analysis.