Today’s contact center agents must be able to communicate with customers
not only on the phone but via social media, instant messaging, video
conferencing and web chat. How can humans do it all? Increasingly, they
can’t.
That’s why many companies are implementing bots powered by artificial
intelligence to work in their contact centers and communicate with their
customers. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions
will no longer be managed by humans.
Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google are all building virtual assistants
and chatbots that can respond to voice queries and engage in a fairly
natural dialog with users. Even Taco Bell has a TacoBot that
helps customers place pickup orders for select menu items.
In theory, virtual assistants will greatly improve the customer experience,
because AI bots can store endless amounts of data and access relevant
information at the right time to give customers exactly what they want.
Would you like Sprite with your Crunchwrap Supreme? AI bots can also help
organizations boost efficiencies and reduce costs, because organizations
will no longer have to operate contact centers staffed 24/7 by employees
around the globe.
In fact, AI is already dramatically changing contact centers. It’s making
contact centers more efficient with bots that can quickly answer the
questions most commonly asked by customers. AI is even helping to predict
customer behavior, providing advice to customer service reps on how best to
solve a particular issue.
If AI can improve the operation of contact centers, that’s a win for
customers and companies. In many ways, contact centers are the heart and
soul of the enterprise. They’re often the most intimate point of contact
between a business and its customers, and what happens—or doesn’t happen—in
the contact center can make or break the customer experience.
Potential for Error
Conversely, the better AI gets, the greater the potential for error. As AI
handles more—and more types of—data, the complexity of its data
interactions grows and so does the possibility for mistakes.
Thus, as contact centers move toward automation, it’s crucial that
companies be able to observe the effectiveness of their customer
interactions and their AI solutions. They must be aware when interactions
wander off-track—because their customers certainly will.
If a company deploys a chatbot and the bot misbehaves, customers will
notice it right away. And if the misbehavior is egregious enough, it can
damage the company brand. Perhaps you remember Microsoft’s
Tay bot disaster of 2016, when it took Twitter users less than 24 hours to turn Microsoft
Tay from an innocent chatbot modeled to speak like a teenage girl to
misogynistic, racist monster.
Experience Monitoring is Key
So how can your business take advantage of AI while guaranteeing a
consistently excellent experience for your customers? You need to
constantly monitor the experiences you deliver. Monitoring enables you to
identify issues fast so you can take rapid action to protect the customer
experience. You can keep systems humming and nip issues in the bud—in
real-time.
For instance, with AI you still need to monitor the time it takes to
complete a particular interaction and know if the customer was satisfied
with the experience. AI promises to alleviate many of the burdens
associated with the contact center, but you still need a complete view of
the customer experience. You still need to avoid issues and delays that
frustrate your customers. And, best case, you will need to identify those
issues before your customers do.
You will also still be required to record customer interactions if you are
in a regulated industry. Aside from asking a human to check every recorded
voice call, which defeats the purpose of using bots, you will need to
invest in call recording assurance technology. This helps validate the
physical presence of the recording files on the servers and then validates
their audio quality using complex algorithms.
Regardless of humans or bots interacting with customers, the quality of the
communication remains very important, including voice quality. The best
responses are worthless if they cannot be understood. Organizations
considering AI and bots for their contact center first need to ensure that
they are proactively managing voice quality.
Contact Center, RIP?
AI is poised to radically transform the customer experience. And we’re only
at the beginning. In a
2016 worldwide survey by Xerox, 42% of respondents predicted that the contact center as we know it now
will cease to exist by 2025. Indeed, the steady progress toward deeper
implementation of AI in the contact center is inevitable because it will
allow organizations to improve service levels and reduce costs.
However,
those responsible for implementing AI and bots into their contact center
would be wise to remember, when there is only one human on the line and
that is the customer, there is nobody to hear them scream.
Thank you for such an interesting read Skip!
Totaly agreeing with you that contact centers are the heart of the enterprise similarly, customers or callers are the heart of contact center, so serving them with best services is the only goal for an organization. Chatbots with AI implementation is a deadly combination that helps to achieve this by providing insights from past conversation and avoiding the errors in future. Hoping that these technologies will make some better changes to contact center world in the coming years.
Agree with the author to some extent, AI will ease and simplify the customer support issues, robots won`t be annoyed or frustrated by some hard customers, they won`t take personally offends that call center agents come across from time to time. But, on the other hand, a lot of call center agents will lose their jobs, as their work will no longer be needed. And, of course, AL won`t be able simply to understand human problems, as sometimes people call to support departments just because they want some communication.