Fallacy: AI Is Hard to Deploy
Businesses operating contact centres are increasingly looking for methods to raise customer satisfaction while lowering expenses and labour workload. Here comes artificial intelligence, which can help contact centre employees reply to clients more quickly, be more productive, and enhance client experiences.
AI has the key to assisting companies in lowering the expense of operating contact centres. According to a recent prediction from the research firm Gartner, AI would save human expenses in contact centres by $80 billion by 2026.
Despite its potential, the technology is still very poorly understood. Let’s examine some prevalent notions about how AI will affect contact centres.
Fact: Customer Success Requires AI
In many sectors today, customer experience ranks above pricing, product quality, and all other distinction-making elements. For instance, OnePoll researchers found that 54% of consumers (including 57% of millennials) said they would think about quitting a business after just one negative experience. Long hold times are being experienced by customers due to overworked contact centre staff.
Through the deployment of intelligent bots that enable quick and accurate self-service, conversational AI may offload many of the high-frequency, low-complexity questions. This is demonstrated by a recent poll from cloud contact centre provider Five9. According to its 2022 Customer Service Index, 94% of respondents believe AI can improve customer service.
The Myth That AI Will Replace Human Agents
Agents’ role is becoming significantly more vital thanks to AI, not less. Smart bots or virtual agents can help customers start a conversation with a business, but when the conversation gets complicated, the client will almost likely ask a live agent for help. When such happens, the agent is essential in providing the customer with prompt, correct service in order to maintain a pleasant engagement. Although human agents won’t be required for every interaction, when they are, they must deliver best-in-class service.
Fact: AI Can Boost Agent Intelligence
Customers expect agents to always know the correct answers to their questions, but acquiring that response frequently necessitates putting the customer on hold while the agent looks for data in other systems. AI systems are able to compile data from many systems and present agents with suggested actions.
Examples include capabilities that offer automated support, contextual advice, and recommendations for actions to take during live contacts from several of the biggest contact centre vendors, such as Cisco, Five9, and 8×8. These days, contact centres need to take this important step. Agent productivity was mentioned by 48% of contact centre experts in a survey as a justification for increased AI investment.
The Myth That AI Must Be Perfect
The idea that AI must be completely correct at the point of deployment is one of the most pervasive fallacies about the technology. Actually, for AI to benefit an organisation, its accuracy only has to be superior to that of humans.
It’s crucial to realise that while AI engines provide agents with recommendations, inaccurate data is fed back into the machine learning algorithms to help them improve. Although conversational AI was slow to take off, researchers have made significant progress in this area by fusing classical speech AI with emotion and attitude detection, increasing the accuracy of intent. Although AI isn’t flawless, one of its best qualities is that the results improve with time. Therefore, corporate executives will benefit more by embracing technology as soon as possible. Waiting for perfection can only hurt your company’s ability to compete.
False: AI Is Difficult to Implement
At one point, businesses had to hire data scientists and develop their own machine learning algorithms, making it difficult to integrate AI into contact centres. The majority of the labor-intensive work has been done by contact centre providers nowadays, who have integrated AI right into their systems to relieve customers of any strain.
Simultaneously, AI has been incorporated into many traditional contact centre capabilities to enhance functionality that requires no involvement from the business at all. For instance, contemporary call routing algorithms incorporate some form of AI to improve their ability to direct clients to the appropriate locations. Customers can now type requests rather than selecting from a menu of responses thanks to chatbots that can now understand natural language.
The cloud represents the biggest development in the application of AI. Older, in-house contact centre solutions featured monolithic software stacks that demanded expensive updates to implement a small number of enhancements. As a result, businesses tended to modernise only occasionally.
With the cloud, contact centre providers can, at their discretion, adopt a continuous innovation approach and continuously add features. This implies that customers may use new features right away, without enterprises having to undergo time-consuming and frequently dangerous software upgrades.
Contact centres are utilising AI, and the technology is developing swiftly. Moving forward, businesses should anticipate an acceleration of features.
