AI and Automation in the Contact Center – Part 2

Making AI Work for You

So, what is the way forward?

Focus on the potential benefits. Move from ‘outside-in’ thinking (‘Hey, that’s cool’) to ‘inside-out’ (‘How can we use it to reduce spend, or improve CSAT? What problems/ pain points could be helped with a little automation?’).

Broadly, for AI to be of benefit to your contact center, it must either:

• help reduce headcount (and therefore salary bills) by providing customers with better self-service options
• make it easier/ quicker for
  – agents to provide the help customers need
  – new agents to become proficient
  – supervisors to identify what can be improved
• complete tasks more quickly, accurately, or efficiently than agents/supervisors.

Practically, there may be a trade-off between these priorities. Gains in one area may outweigh losses in another. The trick is to provide an appropriate balance of satisfaction for your business.

Adopt AI with Care

Many contact centers would like to augment their existing system without rip and replace. So, choose tools and approaches that allow incremental transformation, and assess whether the gains brought by the tool are worth the time and effort spent in adding it.

Some other recommendations:

1. Use AI as co-pilot/ collaborator to supercharge human agents to do the best job they are capable of. Take what humans are good at (empathy, ideas) and marry it with what machines are good at (repetitive tasks, sifting through and summarising an enormous volume of data).
2. Be transparent about using AI, whether customer- or agent-facing
3. Engage a partner/ vendor who understands the space
4. Expect to be surprised. The gains might turn out to be in unexpected places.

AI the Sytel Way

Sytel has been in the AI business since we engineered our predictive dialer algorithm in the mid-1990s, which takes all inputs from all current states and runs simulations in milliseconds to calculate/ re-calculate the optimum dialing rate.

And there is much AI already embedded in other Sytel processes, e.g. our multisession, multichannel blending (intraday automation).

We are specialists in core contact center functionalities, which are designed to be able to integrate with any 3rd party tools in a composable cloud environment. So rather than competing in the new AI arms race, we offer our customers choice, via two future-proof opportunities:

1. to augment and enhance with any tool they wish, including any new generation AI tool, via our comprehensive APIs.
2. to interface with AI processes via our no-code agent scripting product and present feedback, prompts, etc within the agent desktop.

Are you ready for the future? The AI revolution is here.

Read more about our APIs for integrating 3rd party applications here. To talk to an expert about Sytel’s contact center software or arrange a demo, just talk to us.