Thousands of people have most likely experienced disillusionment with AI. The AI’s response to a question or task was unsatisfactory, vague, or even wrong. The fault lies not with the AI, but with the human, who asked the wrong question or misunderstood the capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence. The same applies to AI in contact centres.
Various analyses are competing to offer optimistic predictions and superlatives about how groundbreaking AI is for the functioning of contact centres and business-customer interactions. It is estimated that three quarters of contact centres are already using some form of AI. Analysts at Genesys predict that up to 85% of customer interactions will be virtual. Indeed, artificial intelligence has the potential to change the way contact centres operate on several levels. AI can help streamline processes, automate routine tasks, and enhance the personalization of customer interactions. It has the ability to process large amounts of data in real time, allowing for faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries.
However, there is one big “BUT”. Just as a chatbot is ineffective if given a poor prompt, AI in a contact centre will be only half as effective without proper deployment. The biggest weakness of AI is, in fact, the human element.
A practical example of misunderstanding AI’s role can be illustrated with a case study. One of Soitron’s clients wanted to deploy a voicebot for initial customer contact in their contact centre. However, during discussions with the client, it became clear that more than half of their orders came from Vietnamese merchants. Deploying a voicebot to service these customers would have ended in disaster. Simply because there is no language model in the world that would be trained on Czech with a specific Vietnamese accent, nor is it likely to in the future. Attempting to deploy a voicebot on this language-specific group of Czech residents would not only lead to frustration among Vietnamese customers, but also among human operators who would have to subsequently iron out the consequences of a poorly executed AI deployment.
Many companies in the Czech Republic have historically relied on AI solutions from local suppliers. While these solutions may have offered benefits in the past by catering to the specific needs of the “Czech pond,” they are no longer sufficient. Today, the leading role in AI has been taken over by major global platforms such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon, which have managed to overcome previous shortcomings in customization. For this reason, we recommend considering the systems of these global giants as the foundational AI technology in your contact centre.
Many local companies still use multiple local AI providers, arguing that each excels in something else. This often results in a single contact centre employing a chatbot from one provider and a voicebot from another. Soitron also uses various technologies within the same process, but ultimately, the customer has a single AI provider, and that provider is Soitron.
So, the technology is important, but it is not a panacea. When you compare cars like Audi, Mercedes, and BMW, you’ll find that they offer drivers much the same basic features. The same is true for different AI platforms. The real quality comes from how AI is integrated into company processes and the contact centre.
The right approach to leveraging AI’s potential is to integrate it throughout the contact centre, into communication processes, and into interactions between the company and its customers. The most important part of the work happens before even considering the best platforms or implementation.
Soitron and its consultants must first correctly identify and analyse the processes that the customer wants to automate with AI. Only then can specific implementation and utilization scenarios be developed. These might involve chatbots, voicebots, support for human operators, synthetic voice identification, processing large volumes of data, or any of the thousands of other possibilities.
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