Editorial
The Gist
- Tech evolution impact. AI in contact centers revisits lessons from the past, setting realistic expectations for modern challenges and opportunities.
- Customer service balance. Despite advances, technology like IVR must balance efficiency with genuine human interactions to enhance customer satisfaction.
- Agent productivity boost. Tools like speech transcription and agent assist significantly improve agent efficiency and accuracy in contact centers.
AI, AI, AI... As speakers at conferences and authors in articles tout the benefits of AI in contact centers, it often seems pitched as the "silver bullet" for enhancing every aspect of the operation. This includes improving customer experience, reducing costs and decreasing attrition, among others.
AI in Contact Centers Is Revolutionary With Caveats
AI is transformational, and there are numerous use cases where AI in contact centers has provided tremendous value, but lessons must be learned from the past so that realistic expectations are established regarding how and where AI can succeed in the contact center. There must be an understanding and acceptance of where limitations may exist along with the identification of hurdles that must be overcome to take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity.
A major area of opportunity where AI can support customer needs is related to self-service, which includes the use of conversational IVR, chatbots, etc.
Related Article: The AI Contact Center: How AI Is Revolutionizing Customer Service
VR's Promise and Pitfalls in Contact Centers
Looking at the past, widespread use of interactive voice response (IVR) in contact centers took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s. IVR allows callers to follow the prompts on a menu by either pressing keys on the telephone or saying numbers into the phone. Business cases were completed projecting a reduction of 40% to 60% of call center agents as a result of increased customer self-service.
IVR was promoted as a revolutionary technology with the benefits of providing a new service opportunity for customers and more importantly, requiring fewer customer service agents. Business cases primarily focused on the positive financial impact of IVR but did not effectively analyze what needed to be done to assure an outstanding customer experience (or even just an acceptable customer experience). Forty years has passed since the launch of IVR, we now have more customer service agents than we ever dreamed of, along with a significant number of customers frustrated and annoyed with the experience they have with IVR.
Related Article: AI Workplace Integration: Contact Centers Require People-First Mindsets
IVR's Mixed Success in Customer Service
Did IVR fail? Absolutely not. IVR provides a tremendous self-service capability for many customers and does eliminate the need for a significant number of customer service agents. From a customer experience perspective, IVR falls short in several ways, which include interacting with unfriendly user interfaces (e.g., multilayered confusing menus) and lacking a “human touch” when needed, limitations resulting from the increased complexity of service interactions, among other factors.
Conversational IVR, where callers can speak naturally into a telephone, can close some of the gaps, but advocates of AI for customer self-service must understand that conversational cannot overcome all of the hurdles resulting from customer preferences along with limitations of the technology.
Related Article: AI in Customer Service and the Evolving Role of Contact Center Agents
IVR Struggles With Complex Customer Issues
Examples of potential limitations include unclear results on whether conversational IVR will successfully comprehend a customer's request to change an airline reservation after spending 1-2 minutes explaining the reason for the change, such as being assigned a special project at work that alters vacation plans.
Additionally, it's uncertain if IVR can effectively show empathy when a customer needs extra care or connect all dots to resolve multiple issues in a single contact, such as when a customer calls about a non-operational wireless device and then requests a pro-rated credit for the downtime.
Related Article: AI in Customer Service: How to Empower Your Contact Centers
Voice Tech Challenges in User Compliance
A major challenge in effectively deploying voice technologies is the vast number of users interacting with IVRs, both outdated and modern. Organizations must recognize that this large group cannot be trained easily, may be unpredictable, and it is nearly impossible to make them adhere to the standards and processes embedded in the technology.
The adoption of voice driven technologies such as Alexa, Siri, etc., by households will help train individuals to successfully interact with voice technology and drive acceptance of advanced voice technologies by consumers.
But there is another issue that contact centers face with this technology. If Alexa or Siri work as expected 90% of the time (because of user error or a technology gap) that may be OK. But from a customer service perspective technology must approximate 100% accuracy and effectiveness or else customers lose trust in the technology.
AI Boosts Contact Center Agent Productivity
The greatest near-term value of AI in contact centers may be related to improving the productivity and effectiveness of contact center agents. Examples of AI tools that can improve contact center productivity and agent effectiveness include speech transcription and agent assist.
Looking at the past, two groundbreaking technology office tools that took off in the 1980s, word processing and spreadsheets, provide a comparison of a revolutionary change in the workplace targeted to specific work groups, administrative and financial staff.
Word processing eliminated the need for carbon paper and white-out and in many cases, retyping a page to make a document presentable. Spreadsheets (e.g., Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3) reduced the need for calculators, paper and pencil, and extensive manual human effort to display financial analysis and perform sensitivity analysis.
AI Tools Streamline Contact Center Tasks
Speech transcription automatically converts and summarizes speech into a written format, which reduces the need for a contact center agent to type notes and enter them into a case. This reduces the time an agent spends on an interaction and provides an audit record that is easily understandable. Agent assist brings information such as answers to questions and next recommended actions to the agent. This reduces the need for the agent to search for answers among various reference materials to respond to customer inquiries.
There are some similar characteristics between productivity enhancers such as word processing and spreadsheets and AI capabilities such as speech transcription and agent assist. In the case of word processing and spreadsheets, the training of users of these technologies is focused and little, if any, additional effort is required of them to utilize the technology. Similarly, the users of speech transcription and agent assist are limited to the contact center and little, if any, additional effort is required of them to utilize the technology.
Word processing and spreadsheets revolutionized workplace productivity across all parts of the organization. Hopefully, the introduction of speech transcription and agent assist, along with other AI based productivity enhancers, in contact centers will have a similar impact.
Regardless of the ease of use and effectiveness of these tools, some level of caution is still required. Typos and grammatical errors still exist in word processing documents (much fewer with spellcheck) and individuals still make errors in spreadsheets and therefore some level of review is required. Similarly, customer service agents should still review transcribed conversations for accuracy and clarity and organizations must make sure that information they provide to agents is accurate and relevant.
AI Tools' Impact Beyond Simple Fixes
Many AI advocates claim that the introduction of better tools will improve other contact center challenges such as attrition. Individuals who project reduced attrition as a result of these types of tools should probably tamper some of their excitement…AI does not replace a poor supervisor or low pay. Looking to the past, it is also difficult to determine whether the introduction of word processing and spreadsheets reduced attrition because they made individual jobs easier.
Looking forward, it will be interesting to see how internal AI tools such as speech transcription and agent assist transform and are utilized and accepted by individuals outside of the office. The spread of the use of word processing and spreadsheets from businesses to consumers took off with the use of personal computers at home along with enhancing word processing features such as spell check and realizing the power of spreadsheets for uses outside of number crunching (design a simple table).
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AI Poised to Transform Contact Centers
The effective use of AI provides a tremendous opportunity for contact centers to address many of their challenges. AI will allow customers to interact with organizations more effectively and may revolutionize work in the contact center in a similar way as word processing and spreadsheets.
But it is critical to reflect and learn from the past to understand the needs, habits, preferences of all constituencies to assure that expectations are realistic and exceptional positive results are achieved going forward.
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