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Generative AI has great capacity to solve the challenges of contact centers, both improving customer experience and increasing efficiency among agents. But for a contact center beginning the journey of transforming their business with AI, the technology can seem overwhelming.
Last month, technology company GoDaddy and conversational AI leader Interactions hosted a webinar about how AI will impact the future of contact centers and how organizations can take advantage of this technology to improve their business. Ryan Smith, senior director of customer care strategy and operations at GoDaddy, and Phil Gray, chief product officer at Interactions, discussed how generative AI addresses common contact center issues and how to balance human interactions with AI-enabled virtual assistants. Contact centers that embrace AI can expect outcomes like automating even complex tasks, providing high quality customer experience and improving agent engagement, while driving operational efficiency.
Leveraging Real-Time Capabilities of AI
According to GoDaddy’s Smith, using AI with human understanding in real time has led to many desirable results. Data collection and analysis is a process that has been greatly sped up and improved because of AI’s real-time capabilities. For example, they’ve been able to better collect customer feedback and share the data with internal product teams. One major lesson GoDaddy learned was that the vocabulary they use to talk internally is not what they should use to talk to customers.
“Eventually, we have to match our vernacular to match customers’, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who buy our products,” Smith said. “We [have] to learn from them and adopt their ways.”
Keeping a Human in the Loop
AI should be used to augment the work of call center agents, not replace them. That’s why Smith advocates for what he calls the “human-in-the-loop” approach. GoDaddy specifically uses Interactions’ human-in-the-loop-enabled process called “task orchestration” to make contact center work more efficient.
Smith gave the example of a customer wanting to cancel part but not all of their order. Before task orchestration, the customer would be transferred to a live agent, and they’d likely have to face long wait times. This puts more stress on both the agent and the customer. Once GoDaddy adopted the Interactions Virtual Assistant (IVA), this process was improved with task orchestration. When the IVA receives a request for part cancellation, it enables a digital human agent with step-by-step instructions. The AI maintains control of the conversation, without having to transfer the interaction to a live agent, and the customer is able to complete their task with self-service without even being aware of the AI-agent collaboration happening.
What’s great about this experience is that by introducing AI, the flow of the interaction goes more smoothly, and customers feel more at ease, Smith said. Contact centers can expect happier customers, faster and more efficient interactions, and more positive feedback from agents internally.
Another benefit of human in the loop is that it gives contact centers the chance to train their AI on more complicated interactions. “There are always edge cases where a model can’t do something,” Smith said. However, human-in-the-loop allows the technology to learn from humans managing these edge cases, ultimately helping the algorithm learn and become more advanced.
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Automate What You Can
Some contact centers see a clear binary between simple requests and complex requests, Smith said. The simple ones can be automated, but the complex ones cannot. However, he added, this is the wrong way to look at complex interactions. Contact centers can identify smaller tasks within a complex interaction that can be automated, freeing up more time for agents. “If you can’t automate it all the way, find the pieces that you can automate [smaller chunks of the larger task] so that the humans are only doing what they have to do,” Smith said.
“That will help with retention as well,” he added. Agents don’t want to do the same repetitive tasks on a loop until retirement. They want a job that can be more engaging and fulfilling. Automating even 10% of complex interactions can help agents feel like their job is less monotonous and more interesting.
Key Takeaways From the Webinar
Smith stressed that AI is here whether you like it or not. People skeptical about the technology should find out where they can embrace it and how it can benefit them. That may mean dipping your toes in and learning at your own pace. Contact centers, similarly, must discover how to embrace AI rather than resist it. The choices are to experiment with AI — or fall behind. These companies will miss out on outcomes such as labor optimization, higher customer satisfaction scores and shorter average handling time.
While companies may face difficulties when beginning to embrace a new technology, it’s ultimately worth it, Smith said. There are many subject matter experts who have experimented with AI early on, so as contact centers start using AI more, there are many sources of knowledge out there to help them through the challenges they face.
To learn more about how AI transforms the contact center, Interactions pulled short, digestible highlights from the webinar. Watch these highlights in the link below!
Watch the webinar “The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm” here!
