Excitement, confusion, and frustration abound regarding the effectiveness, benefits, and contributions of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, in contact center technology today. Vendors are inundating c-suite executives and contact center leaders with promises of massive productivity gains and staff reductions.
However, while companies are realizing some benefits, AI/genAI-enabled applications are not yet delivering their full potential. While they are maturing rapidly, they are still in their infancy. As a result, best practices to optimize their use are just emerging. This means there is disillusionment with these solutions, which is common for new products. It's going to take time, but many of them will succeed.
GenAI is proving to be the missing link for many applications used in contact centers and customer service organizations, as well as other functions, including back-office operations, but it's not magic. Regardless of an application's underlying technology, its success depends on the quality and capabilities of the solution, integrations, and effort and resources dedicated to implementation, maintenance, and training. And when it comes to genAI, having the appropriate data is another critical success factor. While the genAI-enabled systems being delivered to contact centers for agent augmentation and self-service are maturing more rapidly than other technologies, they are less than two years old and need more time, resources, and best practices to reach their full potential.
Using AI Responsibly
When it comes to AI, particularly genAI, organizations should proceed with caution due to their innate capabilities. AI must be used responsibly, with ongoing human oversight, guardrails, and testing to avoid hallucinations and other responses or outputs that jeopardize companies and their employees and customers. The key is having access to appropriate data and a process for keeping it current. An important learning from some companies that have implemented genAI is the need to start by cleansing data sources and repositories to ensure they only contain relevant and appropriate content. This has always been a challenge, and while AI can help with the effort, it must be continually addressed.
AI technologies have been added to dozens of systems and applications used by contact centers and their employees to enhance the process of delivering and receiving service. Two of the primary categories for these solutions are agent augmentation and customer-facing self-service. GenAI-enabled agent augmentation applications include real-time guidance (RTG), automated quality management (AQM), and automated post-interaction summarization, each of which are built on a foundation of transcription and conversation analytics.
Agent Augmentation Solutions
Source: DMG Consulting, September 2024
GenAI is boosting transcription accuracy and expanding conversation analytics' insights to deliver an enhanced wave of RTG functionality to agents, enabling them to assist customers more quickly, improving the resolution process. AI (including genAI and machine learning) increase the effectiveness and validity of AQM solutions, allowing managers to more rapidly identify and address agent performance opportunities. GenAI is also being applied to revolutionize the automated post-interaction summarization and wrap-up process by creating more complete, concise, and standardized documentation than agents can compose in less than half the time, as well as ensuring customer commitments and follow-ups are properly noted.
Customer-facing self-service is another contact center technology where genAI is expected to make strong positive contributions. Conversational AI (CAI) solutions are being implemented to replace or upgrade outdated interactive voice response (IVR) applications and respond to and handle digital channel traffic. An important benefit of genAI-enabled CAI is its ability to automate a larger percentage of inquiries to reduce reliance on live agents and lower operating costs. Companies implementing their first customer-facing self-service solutions should expect high automation rates. Companies upgrading an already-effective IVR system should anticipate incremental benefits, including a more conversational, hyper-personalized CX.
Quantify Your Benefits
Agent augmentation applications and genAI-enabled self-service systems have great potential to deliver measurable benefits to organizations. As contributions vary based on a variety of factors, including which applications are used (since no two solutions are identical), enterprises need to track effectiveness in their own environment. More successful organizations will establish a continuous improvement process to enhance and increase each system's benefits on an ongoing basis; this also applies to customer-facing self-service and agent augmentation tools.
AI/genAI are game-changing technologies that, when properly implemented, leveraged, maintained, and enhanced, will improve the CX and employee experience (EX) and boost productivity. Applying the right AI-enabled solutions in contact centers and self-service environments should yield quantifiable benefits, but it might take more time than vendors promised. Companies should invest in the agent augmentation and self-service solutions mentioned above, but they must be realistic about the benefits as it will take the right combination of solution, internal effort, expert resources, time, and ongoing attention to do it right.
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.