The future of AI in the contact center: Webinar highlights

Learn about the adoption of AI in customer service and the key predictions for the future.

Recently, Talkdesk hosted a webinar on The future of AI in contact centers that featured Paul Lasserre, global segment lead – applied AI Solutions at AWS, Margi Deinlein, customer insights manager at Talkdesk, and Jay Gupta, director of product marketing at Talkdesk. The panel discussed the present-day challenges holding organizations back on a progressive path to AI maturity and how these limitations can be overcome in an increasingly automated world. They also discussed the evolving perceptions of AI and its maturity in the field of customer experience (CX).

Why are there gaps in AI investment vs. AI maturity?

In this webinar, Margi Deinlein from Talkdesk discussed the results from a recent global survey of over  900 CX professionals. These results indicated that 69% of CX professionals believed in the importance of AI in the contact center, endowing contact centers with a pivotal role in accepting the challenge and adopting AI to create value. However, just 14% said that they were using AI in transformational ways. The results demonstrated a maturity curve of AI adoption, where there is a wide interest and demand for these technologies, but actual AI maturity is lagging in some circumstances.

Paul Lasserre, from AWS, explained that there are thousands of businesses using machine learning, and this technology feeds on pattern recognition, making contact centers one of the most suitable departments for applying this technology due to the abundance of repetitive customer queries that require similar answers. However, the success of adopting, operationalizing, and driving value from this technology depends on how accurate the AI-model is. There is a tendency to focus on the initial implementation of AI, rather than the long-term maintenance and training of the AI models.

Jay Gupta highlighted that this is a critical step between basic AI adoption and transformational AI adoption. In direct response to this, Talkdesk has developed AI Trainer, that enables contact center agents to continuously train AI models to improve accuracy, without requiring the assistance of a data scientist.

Has the bar for gold standard self-service already been set?

Customer expectations have adjusted to the rapid digitization of customer service, with companies like Amazon demonstrating what good customer service feels like. 84% of organizations believe customers currently expect the ability to self-serve 24/7, and 72% of CX professionals believe customers expect a more automated experience than what is currently offered by their company. However, the investment and interest seems to be outpacing actual maturity, with 69% of companies having invested in self-service tools, but only 36% of those are actively using self-service automation.

Jay Gupta, from Talkdesk, highlighted that as businesses become more digital-first, companies enable themselves to serve more customers in more places. One way that AI can help is in dissolving language barriers; the potential for AI to assist organizations with better communication and language support is growing, and will drive better self-service options by enabling smooth communication to customers in all geographies over the next few years.

What role does AI play in impacting the role of human agents?

AI is not a replacement of humans, and the myth that robots are going to take over has been largely dispelled. Margi Deinlein, from Talkdesk, highlighted that 79% of CX professionals agree that AI is largely an assistant, or a helper for human agents, versus a replacement. And a further 82% believe AI will not only enhance human jobs, but will actually create new job opportunities in the contact center.

Paul Lasserre, from AWS, further discussed how AI is repositioning humans as a focal point of the contact center by freeing agents from mundane, repetitive tasks and empowering them to do what they do best—provide high quality customer service and apply human empathy and judgement on more complex cases. In addition to this, the domain expertise and desire to do more ‘higher-order’ tasks in the contact center places agents and AI as the ultimate power couple in the contact center.

How AI can drive a more secure customer experience.

AI is a great ally for all organizations, including the most data sensitive businesses, such as banks and hospitals, to further enhance security and privacy. As AI matures, it will help streamline essential security processes, such as anomaly detection, multi-modal authentication, and identify and confirm a person’s identity over the phone using biometric data and voice recognition. The end-customer will ultimately benefit from these process improvements through a better, safer, and smoother service journey.

In this  on-demand webinar, you can find out more about:

• The evolving perceptions of AI and its maturity in CX.
• What are the top predictions for the future of AI in the contact center.
• How are global organizations achieving superior CX with AI.