Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s generative AI (GenAI) that’s sweeping business leaders off their feet.
Indeed, investment in GenAI has soared over the past 18 months, and the contact center has been a primary target of that spending.
Gartner research underlines this, finding that 47 percent of enterprise GenAI investment has focused on service - alongside sales and marketing.
There are several possible reasons. First, many use cases were already within the customer service sphere in more complex forms.
For instance, businesses could already auto-summarize contacts with NLP models that vendors spent hundreds of hours engineering.
Now, large language models (LLMs) have wiped away much of that engineering – allowing contact centers to leverage these use cases more quickly and cost-effectively.
Yet, perhaps the most compelling reason for that investment is in how GenAI could augment conversational AI solutions.
As Conversational AI Interest Rises, So Does the Need for a Blueprint
Via test runs of ChatGPT and other LLMs, business leaders caught a glimpse of a future where GenAI-driven conversational interfaces handle complex customer queries.
In many cases, that excitement has created pressure on service leaders to deliver such solutions.
Gartner has recognized this, highlighting how improving self-service is one of the top three priorities service leaders have to enhance customer experience in 2024.
However, 51 percent of those service leaders who indicate self-service is a priority also named it a significant challenge for 2024 – citing data disorganization issues and organizational resistance.
As such, they need a blueprint for implementing conversational AI, and Cirrus - the CCaaS vendor that uses AI education as a core differentiator - is giving it to them.
Indeed, a Cirrus expert can take leaders through the following steps in much greater detail.
Step 1 - Get the Team Onside
The first phase of any conversational AI project is securing buy-in from critical business stakeholders.
After all, as Gartner highlighted, organizational resistance is a primary challenge for organizations when implementing conversational AI.
Consider people up the business chain and give them confidence that the contact center can take the reigns of the project so it's not imposed upon them later.
Yet, also think through how to secure buy-in amongst the contact center team. In doing so, the leader can frame themselves as someone who wants to make their lives easier instead of being that person who demands change.
Then, as Tatum Bisley, Product & Technology Evangelist at Cirrus, recommends:
“Work closely with your team to familiarize them with the technology and gain insight into where to integrate it into existing processes. This step is paramount and ignites their creativity.”
Swisscom did an excellent job of this, working with agents to build out bot flows that not only automate the most common queries but also those that frustrate them most.
In doing so, they achieved buy-in by actively mitigating their most bothersome problems.