AI Won’t Eliminate All Agents, But It Will Make Them Better

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most impactful global technology disrupter in the past 50 years, including for customer experience (CX) organizations. Alarmists continue to communicate their fears about the effect of AI on contact centers and customer service organizations, but this should not stop or even slow companies from implementing these new and impressive solutions. While the relevant issues reflected below need to be taken into consideration, the benefits for customers, employees, productivity, revenue, and companies' bottom lines are significant and should not be delayed. The key to success with AI, as with any new systems or tools, is to implement properly.

AI is a transformative group of technologies that, when applied along with appropriate operational and procedural changes, can alter and enhance the dynamics and cost structure of CX functions. But this does not mean AI will fully eliminate the need for human agents, as many vendors promise. Enterprises should assess the practical realities and weigh the pros and cons of any new application prior to making investments, which is also the case for AI solutions. Here are the top 10 factors organizations should consider as they decide when, where, and how to invest in AI-enabled CX systems and applications for their contact centers and customer service operating environments:

1. Businesses need to improve their CX while containing servicing costs. Companies have spent millions of dollars over the years on CX improvements but have gotten minimal results as many enhancements were not sustainable. AI technologies, particularly generative AI and agentic AI, enable companies to partially or fully automate many tasks previously handled by human agents. With the proper controls, guardrails, and oversight, contact centers should use AI to complete a growing percentage of customer interactions via omnichannel conversational AI self-service systems.
2. Agent attrition is a major challenge and expense for contact centers. This has always been the case for these departments, but the issue has been exacerbated in recent years due to the lack of qualified candidates and the increasing cost of staffing these complex operating environments. AI-based agent augmentation/assist tools, such as real-time guidance, next-best-action, and automated post-interaction summarization, empower employees, improve their performance, boost engagement, and make their job more rewarding.
3. Consumers increasingly prefer self-service, if it works. A growing percentage of customers want to help themselves as long as they are offered tools that can easily and quickly do the job. However, when consumers begin their journey via a bot, they still expect to be able to reach a human agent if needed. Even if customers transfer from a bot to a live agent, the cost of service should be reduced when some portion of the interaction is automated.
4. Previous generations of voice self-service solutions automated up to 90 percent of customer service inquiries in some institutions. Many companies have relied on self-service systems to automate a large percentage of voice interactions over the past four decades; however, these solutions do not handle the growing volume of digital conversations. Many appear to have reached the limits of their legacy self-service systems' benefits. Omnichannel CAI platforms leverage genAI and increasingly agentic AI to address more voice and digital inquiries than earlier self-service solutions. Additionally, many conversational AI offerings are designed to identify and expand their capabilities on an ongoing basis, which will increase their value for organizations and their customers.
5. There are circumstances when conversing with a live agent benefits both the customer and organization. Consumers might want to interact with a live employee regarding complicated, emotional, or time-sensitive issues. Businesses dedicated to delivering an outstanding CX still need to provide the human touch, even if their self-service solutions could handle 100 percent of their inquiries, which is not the case today.
6. Human agents are inherently more flexible and empathetic than conversational AI solutions. No matter how intelligent and conversational a bot is, it cannot be as responsive or empathetic as a well-trained and caring agent. Consumers should be allowed to easily request escalation to a human employee who has received the history and findings from their automated counterpart when the conversation is transferred.
7. GenAI has great potential for improving the CX, but it must be carefully managed.This technology can understand what customers say (whether spoken or written), source data from large language models or other content, and deliver a human-like response. However, guardrails and governance must be applied to ensure the answer is appropriate, such as grounding the response in trustworthy data from sources like the company knowledge management application.
8. The need to support voice interactions is not going away anytime soon. The death of voice has been overstated, as it does not make sense for most companies to stop supporting this channel. The ability to call an organization is viewed as the option of last resort for consumers who also believe they have the right to speak to an agent, if necessary. Speech remains the most ubiquitous, comfortable, and effective form of communication for many people.
9. The growth of digital interactions is picking up momentum with each passing year. It's expensive and difficult for businesses to properly staff an ever-expanding number of digital channels with human agents. Those that want to meet their service levels and deliver an outstanding CX need to deploy omnichannel conversational AI solutions to automate much of their traffic while providing a consistent experience via all media.
10. Privacy, security, and compliance must be addressed in all solutions. AI is new and exciting, but like every enterprise technology, system, or application, it needs to comply with companies' privacy, security, compliance, and integration requirements.

Contact centers are people-intensive operating environments that have gone through many beneficial automation initiatives and transitions over the years, with more to come. AI offers companies new and amazing opportunities to enhance and transform these operating environments, but when the hype is removed, it's just technology that has to be properly implemented, integrated, and managed.

Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, is an expert on contact centers, analytics, and back-office technology. She has 30 years of experience helping organizations build contact centers and back-office operating environments and assisting vendors to deliver competitive solutions. She can be reached at Donna.Fluss@dmgconsult.com.