The Evolution of AI in Reshaping the Contact Center Tools of Today

Imagine having the power to reshape customer experience in your call center with artificial intelligence. What if you could emulate the behaviour of your most effective agents, optimize IVR, manage workforces, and even facilitate self-service with AI? Get ready to explore how AI is transforming the world of customer service, as we delve into these possibilities and much more. From digital twins to generative chatbots, we bring you the inside scoop on how AI models are revolutionizing customer interactions.

Moving on from AI's current impact, we'll also step into the future trends that are shaping the contact center universe. Ever thought about AI translating customer conversations in real time or using augmented and virtual reality applications in your call center? Perhaps you've considered the potential of blockchain technology to bolster your customer data security? We'll dissect these trends, discussing their potential and how they can be harnessed for your business. Whether you're interested in improving agent feedback, optimizing call routing or exploring the advantages of a cloud-based system, this episode is packed with insights. So buckle up and get ready for a deep-dive into the world of AI in call centers.

If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

This is advice from a call center geek a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all, from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Laird.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center and contact center podcast. We try to get you some action of items to take back in your contact center improve the overall quality, improve your agent experience, hopefully improve your technology today and in your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO here at Expedia Interaction Marketing. Expedia is a 600 seat BPO outsourcer, contact center outsourcer, located here in northwestern Pennsylvania. How's everybody doing on this Monday morning?

Speaker 2: 1:32

A kind of a fun episode that I think all of us have been thinking about a lot I know I have been thinking about this a lot of again is where are we going? Where's the future? If you talk to any AI contact center vendor, they're going to tell you it is all generative chatbots and that the contact center agent is going away and all the focus really right now is just on that. When I think that there's just so much more to how AI can impact the contact center, impact the tools that we are currently utilizing, make the experience different and better, while still having that kind of that human element to it, i think there's going to be some companies that are just going to try to go all AI, all generative and see how that goes. But I think that the people and the companies that are really going to have success with this are going to look at some of the tools that we're going to talk about today and see how AI is changing them, evolving them, how they can be so much better. Let's look at what my thought is maybe for the next five years out Something that is relatively close but talking about the IVR, talking about agent assist, talking about call routing, workforce management, workforce intelligence, training Let's take a look at all of these things and see, okay, if we really really do a good job with our AI and we infuse this stuff, i think we can get a tool, an overall platform. That's just so much better than just saying, hey, all we're going to focus on now is a chatbot and then being able to do things in your IVR.

Speaker 2: 3:07

So again, i am live here on TikTok. If you guys have any comments on TikTok, please let me know. The TikTok comments are always normally a lot of fun. And then I'm also live here on LinkedIn. If you guys have anything that you want to add, we'll do this as kind of an AMA. So any questions that I have as you guys go. If it's relevant to the conversation and I think it adds value, i will add that as well.

Speaker 2: 3:29

All right, so let's start with this Again. These are the kind of the 11 things I have a list here of the IVR agent assist, call routing, advanced analytics, workforce management, workforce intelligence, ai for self-service, for training, language processing, augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchain. I know that's a huge list, but well, let's just kind of skim over some of this stuff too, and then, if there's something that's more interesting that you guys want to talk about, i can get deeper into it. All right, let's talk about the future of agent assist. Now, if you guys don't really know what that is, agent assist is where, currently, you could be on a call with me and real-time transcription is happening. So all the words that you are saying and I'm saying are being transcribed, and AI is then looking at this conversation and prompting the agent to do certain things. Right, hey, look for closing signals here. Hey, make sure that you're not talking over the customer. Right, prompting them like a supervisor assisting that agent.

Speaker 2: 4:35

This is evolving really, really fast. You know, i've had my friends at Balto on level AI have come on, but a lot of different organizations have come on to talk about agent assist, but I kind of like the thought process of really evolving this, almost to having a like a digital twin where you know your most effective agents. So let's say you have 10,000 agents, you take your top five agents and AI can look at how they are solving problems. What are some of the things that they're talking about? What are they asking? Right in this digital twin, right, that kind of sits with you instead of just kind of looking at words and trying to put things together. But looking at words, put things together but then take a full analysis of who the best five agents are, find out how they work through AI and then again make all of your agents like your top five. So I think that that's really cool. That's something that I think can be relatively done in a quick kind of way.

Speaker 2: 5:34

I know the AI is really evolving in that space and I think that that's something that you're going to see. You know, from that standpoint, call routing is fascinating to me. I just think that it's so interesting. Guys, i'm gonna just get through this and then, if you guys want to join the live, i have no problem, but let me get through some of this stuff and then please, please, please, let's join and let's have that conversation.

Speaker 2: 5:59

You know, call routing again for me is fascinating because I think it's evolving right now. Well, like, we are utilizing a ton of data sources to route calls, right, so if you have your CRM, a call comes in looking at you know specific pieces of data within your CRM which makes that go to a certain specific agent. Or you know, moving you up and down a queue based on if you're a VIP type customer, those kind of things. So call routing I think is really cool. But I think getting into biometrics, right, getting into your voice tone in the IBR I'm understanding who's irritated, who's not irritated. Looking at tone, right, instead of just kind of saying you know, press one and go to the next available agent, right, there's so many. You know ways that AI can be utilized from a tone, from a voice, from looking at all of your previous interactions with us, right, or with this company, or maybe not even with us, but maybe what you're looking at on social media too, right, ai can go, look, paint a huge picture of you and then be able to route calls in a specific way. I think you're gonna see that that is evolving again extremely rapidly as well, and that's something that I think will be changing, because call routing can't just stay where it's at with most companies of next available person in line. There's just so much more data that we have now to be able to make really good and better decisions with. I don't wanna say who to give service to, but who to prioritize, maybe different things to, right. If this is the third time you've called in, you're super frustrated. Why should you have to wait in line? You can move up to the top, some things like that that I think are kind of basic, but you can see how that can get pretty advanced as well.

Speaker 2: 7:35

Advanced analytics you guys who have followed the podcast know I'm a huge analytics guy, and analytics right now is a reactive process. It looks at past interactions, what customers have said, and then we kind of as an analyst, make decisions on what are the trending keywords, what is the sentiment, using all of this data, right? So the evolution of this is, i think, obvious. I mean, maybe not for everybody, but I think it seems obvious to me right? The next thing that we're gonna see is prompting right. No more the bubbles, right, that have been kind of the industry average.

Speaker 2: 8:13

It's prompting for questions. Hey, you know, what are the top 10 things, top negative things that were said about this product yesterday? What are the top five things that marketing can take back to improve the packaging of our product? All these different types of things, right? So instead of just looking and trying to define these things, to actually ask it and have AI go quote, unquote, think for you And then the next step of that is not only thinking for you but prompting you and telling you what's going on without you having to prompt right. Just hey, this is what happened yesterday here I know you guys are interested in this and then telling you how to fix it right. We have to get our average handle time down by 35 seconds. I think that will have a huge impact in the sentiment. And we have these three agents that are struggling to maintain call control. Here's three different things that we wanna send them from a training standpoint that we've created, that AI's created So to have kind of this full package of analytics where it's not only telling you what's going on but giving you real world ideas of how to fix it right. That's super powerful And I think what I've seen from some of the C-Cast players are where things are going.

Speaker 2: 9:22

If you saw Barack Barack, the CEO of Nice CX-1, if you saw his keynote right, this is a lot of stuff that he was talking about that is being worked on right now, which is really, really, really cool. So I think that that's something that you're gonna see for sure within the next five years at least us being able to prompt and ask questions. Workforce management needs to evolve a lot right Now. Ai has done an absolutely unbelievable job of changing workforce management when it comes to forecasting and doing the modeling right. It's now. It's badass, right, even compared to where things were like two years ago. Things will change, so I think that there's a huge element to that.

Speaker 2: 10:11

But the other piece of this, too, is from a workforce management standpoint is looking not just at humans, right, But looking at if you have generative chatbots, where you are in self-service and starting to staff right. Accordingly, based on not only human beings but also on the digital aspect of where we are with the chatbot, where we are with these kind of takeover bots, right, and really mold those things together. I think is something that needs to happen and something that will happen because we're gonna have these other tools And we can't just say, all right, because we have this tool, we're gonna take 10% off of our head count. Now let's actually include them in it so we can kind of see where we are from a staffing standpoint. But these kind of hybrid teams of humans and robots, i think is being thought through in a lot of WFM platforms and we'll have an impact here in the next five to six years.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Workforce intelligence is a really cool tool again that allows the moving of agent skills without a human being right. Just looking at business roles based on, maybe, call queues, those types of things. I still say the back in the day, the Avaya Business Advocate was absolutely awesome with this and it would do predictive wait times And I think that that's where we're gonna get to really next and get kind of back to that right To not just say, okay, if my service level goes to 79, to bring agents in, but to look into the IVR right To look into what type of chatbots are happening and where they are in the process and what percentage of those go to a live agent, To look at all of that, the type of customer that's on. What were they talking about last time? What is their average handle time based on the last four times that they've called in? Like taking all this data in and thinking and saying, okay, the predictive service level for this is going to be under 80% in the next six minutes. Let's move agents in there now to handle these type of calls or let's send a couple more of our generator bots to handle this, maybe on our website. Those types of things I think you're going to be able to see, and the prediction and predicting of things happening in the contact center, happening with customers, happening with queues I'm just going to have a huge impact and make us so much better when it comes to actual staffing. You kind of add in that call routing into the workforce intelligence and kind of meld them together.

Speaker 2: 12:45

I think you'll start to see that with a really, really powerful tool I mean we can talk about the generator of AI chatbots evolving into kind of fully autonomous agents that can do a ton of things. I mean I think that there will be some of that happening. I'm still interested to see how they're going to engage, how they're going to show empathy, those type of things without being fake, because I think a lot of it is going to be a lot of fake. I still think that you are going to see where customers or companies talk about USA customer support. I think we're going to talk about human being customer support and using all these other tools to make the experience better, to lower our headcount, lower our cost but still have an awesome USA. I'm going to say USA agents because we're USA BPO handling these types of calls without having to go full AI and losing some of that.

Speaker 2: 13:38

One of the things that I've talked about this on the AI standpoint is you're going to lose a lot of analytic data. When you're using a transactional chatbot, you're going to have a problem. This is how you solve it, and then we're going to go about our day. When you have a human being talking, we talk about stuff, right? Maybe when you're waiting, hey, how else can I help you? Oh, you know what My granddaughter loves this new toy. It's absolutely amazing. I wish it was red instead of white. But other than that, things like that, like these little anecdotal things that you think are nothing, but when you're using analytics, you start to hear that 20% of the customers are saying these types of things And maybe from a marketing standpoint, it is better if you change that to red. I think we're going to lose a lot of that when you get rid of that human element and from the analytic thing And you make everything transactional. So that's something that I'm keeping my eye out on too, to make sure that we don't lose a lot of that, at least with our customers. I think AI is going to absolutely evolve contact center coaching and it's going to make awesome agents, Not only from the standpoint of training and having these kind of modeling where we can really role play with a AI person or customer or flip it around and have them be the agent and I must be the customer, but I think from an agent assist standpoint, that's going to evolve as well into kind of real-time coaching And we can say we kind of have that now.

Speaker 2: 15:05

But I'm talking really looking at after every single call hey, your tone was a little fast or the speed of your call was a little fast. Hey, you talked with the customer a couple of times. Let's make sure that we're looking at this And again, you're not going to flood the agent with all this stuff, but maybe at the end of the shift or anytime that the agent wants to have a little bit of feedback. We can be constantly giving them these types of things And then not only that, but sending them the training like how do you get better with that? And having that all evolve, maybe specifically right for them. Like, okay, janie, here's the things that I had I heard on these three calls. I'm having the AI do this at this segment, right here. If you would have just looked, listened for her closing signal she wanted to sell you, right.

Speaker 2: 15:44

Getting really deep into the training aspect, i think is something that we haven't talked enough about because nobody cares about it, because we're trying to get rid of agents. Right, the AI of today is trying to get rid of agents. We're not trying to improve agents. And again, there's so much opportunity, i think, for those that are looking to improve agents to make them really good, to make them quicker, right, to get really to the point, to make the experience better. I think is an unsung thing right now in the industry and I don't see anybody really working on it, but something that I think we'll start to see in the next five years.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Language processing for calls is going to happen quicker than five years, right? So if you're Spanish speaking customer. I'm English speaking to have no lag in our conversation, and anything that you say comes to me in English. Anything I say to you comes in Spanish and we can do that for all the languages, right? So I think this is a huge boon for the USA Contact Centers, right? So many times you went to Europe, in the Middle East, because the languages are so amazing, right? There's so much difference in every country. It has so many, has the ability to speak so many different languages. We're kind of stubborn here in the States and we speak English and, if you're lucky, you speak Spanish too. But I think this will really be able to then have USA Centers be able to handle any calls anywhere in the world, which I think will have a huge impact in what I do from a VPO standpoint and what a lot of USA Contact Centers are too.

Speaker 2: 17:19

Augmented reality and virtual reality is in the metaverse has been a joke and I've been probably its biggest advocate and it's been kind of just jammed in my face because it's been very difficult. I still think it's coming much slower than I initially thought. I was wrong on kind of how quickly I think that this thing was going to evolve, but there's with Apple coming out with their new gods again. I know they're three grand of $3,500. They're crazy expensive. So there's not going to be a lot of people that are just going to kind of do but they're looking at a cheaper. They say within the next two years I'll have a cheaper version out that will even be better than what they have now. To start to look at having office meetings that way, having the Zoom meeting and this things that we're doing online be gone. Even right now we could be having a virtual reality podcast where you guys could be sitting there with avatars and I'm just basically talking and you guys are asking questions and we're having a conversation back and forth. That's coming. That's going to happen. I think that can have the biggest impact in the contact center when it comes to having the human element and maybe you could have an avatar that has AI that does that too. But I think virtual reality in the metaverse we're sleeping on. I don't tell that to Mark Zuckerberg because he slept on that pretty hard and I know he's taken a beating for it, but I think it's just a little early, but that thing's coming. That thing's coming as well. I'm almost most excited about that And kind of.

Speaker 2: 18:44

The last thing I wanted to talk about, too, is the blockchain. We still have huge security breaches. Data is not secure. How we've not figured out to implement the CRM with blockchain technology to really lock down our customer data is really beyond me. I think that you're going to really see this happening with when you go to voice authentication tied into the blockchain, which is only going to release certain things if you can hear it, and the blockchain is going to kind of quote unquote be smart. I think that there's a lot to be said with the security of the blockchain.

Speaker 2: 19:20

Again, i think the blockchain gets a bad wrap because everybody thinks crypto, everybody thinks NFTs and right now, those things are like pariahs. But I still think that there's a place for that from a security aspect that no other tool or no other security apparatus can really handle. That's what I got, guys. I mean, that's kind of what I've been thinking about. Right, where does the tools that we have? I mean, again, just like people didn't want to move from a on-prem base platform because they paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for it. They didn't want to move to the cloud, so they said, okay, what do we do with the tools that we have and how do we get them kind of cloudified? I still think you're going to see this too. The amount of companies are going to be petrified to move to a full AI model with generative chatbots is the only source of support. I think it's going to be extremely low. So then we need to look at all these other tools that we're utilizing and say where are they going to be And what impact are they going to have on the customer experience and on our contact center, and I think a lot of these tools are going to get really, really good and have some really slick features that will incorporate that AI model into it.

Speaker 2: 20:32

All right, guys, if you do not have any more questions. I really appreciate everybody. Again on LinkedIn. I know there's a ton of people. You guys wanted to kind of do a talk with me here on TikTok as well. Just wanted to get through it. If anybody has any other questions, if there's anything that anybody wants to talk about with this, i can hang out for another minute or two, but I'm going to bail out here on LinkedIn And I will talk to you guys on LinkedIn next week. Take care, guys.