As we step into 2024, the realms of Customer Experience (CX), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and contact centers are poised at the brink of transformative change.
Let's explore the exciting, realistic predictions that are shaping the future of these industries. These are part prediction and part wish list for what I would like 2024 to become.
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!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
As we step into 2024, the realms of Customer Experience (CX), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and contact centers are poised at the brink of transformative change.
Let's explore the exciting, realistic predictions that are shaping the future of these industries. These are part prediction and part wish list for what I would like 2024 to become.
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!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
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:Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center, contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items. Take back in your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing of AutoQA. It's really great to be back. I've never been this, I guess, long away from the podcast. We've taken about a month off Not was not intentional had a little bit of COVID at the beginning of the year which turned into pneumonia. But I want to get right into this. It's 2024 now. We've been posting a ton of content as 2024 has happened. So if you're into any of the contact centers, into CX, into AI as it relates to CX, make sure that you're at least following me on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:I'm on TikTok as well, so all my TikTok friends, I did go live here and what I want to talk to you guys today about is I did a LinkedIn newsletter which, as I was sick with pneumonia, I took about I don't know, maybe four or five days, did a ton of research, did a lot of just thinking about what are some of the tools that I expect to be coming from an AI standpoint, from a customer experience standpoint, here in 2024. This is half wish list, half things that, as I've been talking to people in the CCAS space and consulting and talking to some of the AI vendors, what is real and, again, what are some of the things that might be we're really close to but maybe a year away. I think that hopefully this is an interesting topic that will make people think a little bit again. This is some of the things that I see that are coming in 2024. A little bit of wish list but, I think, pretty realistic. Number one and these are no particular order and I just, if you see me looking here on TikTok or anything, I do have a bunch of notes that I have up here. I want to make sure that I hit on all this stuff because there's so much data.
Speaker 2:Number one is getting into and again I don't like to say this because it sounds so I don't know hyperbole, it's not to the point but hyper-personalized customer experiences, using AI to really drill down to looking at all of the aspects of the customer, looking at the CRM, looking at previous purchases, looking at the last times that they've talked to us right. Taking all of the data that we have on a customer not just the telephony data and things that are in a CRM on the interactions with us, but looking at the website on purchases that they've made. Trying to really drive an experience of being predictive, right, instead of just listening to a customer and trying to figure out what they want, right, and I think that goes to our predictive analytics, right. So, being able to kind of utilize some of this agent-assist things but understanding customer's tone, understanding how they've been interacting with us in the past, being able to send them to certain customer service agents that maybe deal with somebody who's a little bit more talkative or a little bit more irritated, right. These are very subtle things, but things that we've been wanting to do for a really long time, and I think that finally, with some of these algorithms that are coming from an AI standpoint, we'll be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Number two is real-time translation. So me being a USA Contact Center to be able to have all of my agents be able to literally speak any language there is in the world that's coming this year Real-time multilingual support. So somebody from France that speaks French or speaks Italian or speaks is from Kenya and has that type of dialect, right For us to have a two-way conversation where I hear everything in English, my voice goes back to them in French in real-time and it seems like it's totally seamless. There's companies that have been at CCW last year and the year before that have started down this path and I think this is the year that we'll really start to see that. So any type of USA company can now fully handle European-type customers and again there's no longer really an even a need we always struggle here being in Pennsylvania for bilingual agents no longer that need, just because, again I think we'll be able to have full translation with what's coming with, fully integrated into kind of our CCAS platform. I think that we are also going to start to see number three.
Speaker 2:We have to start to think through some of the ethical AI and some of these privacy concerns and also some of the TCPA the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and how this kind of flows from a legality standpoint. For an example, I did a big post on TikTok. In a video in a green screen there's an ad that I always see and I don't know if a lot of you guys see on TikTok, but it's this guy who talks about this having an army of AI bots that can go out and do all of your cold calling for you. Well, currently, as it's placed right now, that's illegal. That's basically I will say basically, because it's not exactly, but it's basically a robo call. In November 15th, the FCC I forget to FCC with the FTC, I think it was the FCC basically said hey, listen, we have to do a deep dive into the legality of having AI bots make outbound phone calls and cold calls to customers, because currently, even us as a human being can't do that. We have to have express written consent and permission from that customer if I'm going to cold call them or if I'm going to call them on a cell phone. B2b is a little bit different and you get away with that. Oh, by the way, bighs, who will kind of product our use of my hair it's called FUDDI, fuddi, fuddi great stuff.
Speaker 2:I think we're going to start to see some of this, because there is some confusion on the sales side of using AI, making outbound calls, using these AI avatars, which really is just a really good robo call. So I think we'll start to see some of that kind of really pan out. There's also a lot of talk about having to state if an AI person is actually not to fool people. So even on the customer service side, if you're using an AI bot, we don't want to fool them into saying it. So there's some legislation that's out there right now that basically says that companies are going to have to disclose whether they're using human beings or bots. So I think that that's kind of interesting too. So we're going to start to see a lot of focus, I think, on AI in general at the federal level. But I think it's going to tie into a lot of customer experience, customer service, sales, telephony. All of that stuff should start to be kind of formed out and worked this coming year. All right.
Speaker 2:The next thing is the blending of human and AI interactions. I think we're going to start to see voice. I was very disappointed that from a chat GPT standpoint in most of the C-Cast players, when we can't really use voice yet to do AI meaning we need to have transcripts. So anything from agent assist to, if you're doing automated QA, like we have a company called AutoQA, we're fully automating quality assurance on a full form. That would be done on Excel or on spreadsheets or on your platform. We still have to go out and get a transcript and then have the AI basically quote would do analytics on that transcript to find out what's going on.
Speaker 2:But you're going to start to see voice, I think, in 2024. So you'll be able to upload a voice file to chat GPT and have it do that analytics and do the analysis and be able to ask questions on that, instead of just having to take that voice file, get a transcript, then put that onto chat GPT for it to utilize and learn. And why is that important? Because while we can get sentiment analysis from a transcript by what people say, it's also really important in how they say it and it's very difficult, obviously in a transcript to find out how people are saying things. The reason that this is important is we can get these bots and these chat bots on a customer service side to start to hear and understand tone and understand if a customer is starting to get ticked off and starting to get irritated and instead of just asking it more questions, you'll be like, hey, you know what, let me send you to my supervisor, which means a human being. And I think that those are some of the seamless things that I think will be a little bit better for it to understand when people are starting to get pissed off and just starting to get ticked off or somebody's really, really happy. The level that we can start to train the bots then and the avatars and the AI and the LLMs. I think it does make a big difference when voice is now involved compared to just looking at transcripts.
Speaker 2:All right, something that's been coming and I probably could have put this on every single year, but I really think, with all of this AI technology, that contact centers this will be the beginning of the final move for all of these contact centers to the cloud. Most contact centers still are not in the cloud. Most contact centers throughout the world are still on-prem, which still blows my mind, which makes it extremely difficult to utilize any type of AI model, especially things that are in the cloud. So cloud adoption. So if you're an investor and again, this is not investing advice, just some anecdotal things I still think the Genesis, the 5.9, the UJets, the nice CX-1s there's so much more bandwidth that they can go from a customer base, because so many people are still not ready or have not moved from an on-prem to AI. Now you could still do AI on-prem, it's just a lot more difficult. The other thing I think you're gonna start to see is a lot of consultants come out in this AI space. Most companies are not ready. They're not ready at all for AI. They don't realize they think that they talk to an AI vendor. They think they can just plug and play a bot onto their website and instantly it's gonna be able to answer any questions. It's not even close to the truth.
Speaker 2:Three things you really really need. Number one you have to have full integrations Integrations into all of your data sets from your telephony. That makes things a lot easier. Number two you need to have a robust KMS or knowledge management system. So all of your policies, your procedures, how do you sell? What does this tool, what does this thing look like? If you wanna do any type of agent assist, it needs to learn, it needs to know your product, needs to know your processes. So, having a really robust KMS if you already have that and you've been doing that for five or 10 years, you're way ahead of the game, because most people do not have, don't have a KMS, and I think that those are really two things that you really really need to do that. And then again you gotta find the right vendor as well, because there's so many shady I mean every single my chatbot is greatai company, not saying that they're not all great, but they're not all great. There's very few of them that are third party chatbot guys and AI guys that are actually good. Everybody's thinking I can just set up a couple chat GPT type LLM chatbots and I'm in business, when again, that's been a huge issue, I think, and we'll start to see that.
Speaker 2:The other thing is the cost of AI. I've spoken about this a lot, the smaller organizations and talking about, for us, contact centers. So if you're a 50 seat, 25 seat, you're a 30 seat credit union in South Carolina, it's very difficult to be able to purchase some type of even from a generative AI chatbot company that will create ROI for you, right? It's just so expensive at this point, I think, and it doesn't have to be. You know, I guess, that there's been a lot of R&D to get to this point for some of these companies. But you know, if you're, if you're using a chat GPT type tool or there's development of that, I mean, it literally is so cheap now that I Think we'll start to see the price of this come down as the market is getting flooded with with all these you know right, wrong or different, all these chatbot companies and these AI Cx companies that you know, we'll have to see some of those prices go down. I think that would be one of the benefits. But again, you got to be really careful because there's there's so many bad, bad companies that are out there trying to do, trying to do AI All right.
Speaker 2:Another Prediction is is I think you're gonna see agent assist go to a different level in in 2024. You know, I'm kind of calling it like context aware, right. So looking again at everything, not just what the customer said on that call like agent assist right now is basically and again, I would probably have some of my chat or agent assist friends at own companies yell at me for this but Basically it's, you know, if I'm talking to you and you say, hey, my, my dishwasher, I have a, you know, my, I have a model number HP for Dishwasher and it's it's broken, and as soon as the AI hears that, it then pops me as the agent all the information that I need on that dishwasher, right, so I don't need to go look or search and it might even give me certain specific things to pop, to say to that customer, to have its talk a little bit more, to get a little bit more information, so that I can get more More information popped to me. So it's basically using what the customer is saying to do all the searching Right and to give that that customer or that that agent as much information as possible. So You're gonna see that go to different levels, like looking Understanding. As soon as a customer starts talking, it's gonna go look at all the social media Post what have they talked about. Looking at all their previous history, maybe already know that they purchased that dishwasher, right. So I think it just starts to get better. And again, with voice, we can start to have a motion detection too. So you know the AI can say hey, your, your tone is a little bit fast Now. That's kind of here now, but I think a more More use cases of so your tone is fast, you're a little bit short with this customer. Hey, you're talking over this customer. You know all of those types of things that turns agent assist almost like into a supervisor assist as well.
Speaker 2:I think you'll start to see that in 2024, one thing I guarantee you'll see, because we are working on it and you know work close to it and I know that there's there's three or four large enterprise companies is is auto QA right. So fully automating quality assurance processes, so Automating the scorecard. So, whether you want some type of proprietary scoring or you want the actual form that you've been using, maybe an Excel or your C-Cast platform, your QA platform, to be able to have AI and I call this kind of a chat GPT type product right. So auto summarization is is a chat GPT type product. Auto QA is a.
Speaker 2:I'm using these, these LLMs Right. These are really like back-end use cases for the LLM, because the front-end use case of having an LLM chatbot is super scary Still. But these back-end use cases where a customer can't go and kind of manipulate what the, what the bot is saying, I think is a really good use case for this stuff. So that's gonna save a ton of money, right, and I think this will actually raise customer experience because you're getting more forms, you're getting more scores on cuss, on your, on your agents, better outputs. You know to behave. What a four things. Not only that they did bad Well, we're some awesome things that this agent has been doing right. To give them a like a little bit of a thumbs up. What are you know? Can you summarize the call? Give me four things the agent is doing poorly on. Four things the agent did really great on. Please score the call.
Speaker 2:You know what is the sentiment of the agent from the beginning to the end, like all these different types of outputs that you could never get. If you're just or maybe you could get you'd have to listen to the call, make some analysis. You know a five-minute call is going to take you 25 minutes to score and now you can do hundreds of these things at a time that's coming, which means that the roles of the contact center start to change. Right, so there's no more, there's no person doing QA anymore. Maybe that person now becomes a coach, they become a supervisor, they can do some other things to to enable the agent, more than just doing the mundane that's a five, that's a three. Yes, she does disclosure. She read perfectly that's a five. Right, and take that all and let the AI do that.
Speaker 2:One of the things I'm most excited about is kind of the fusion of workforce management with intelligent routing right, so to be able to Kind of set your day and forget your day and have AI be the call center manager and this is very close because the tools are there, they're just not really integrated in together. Basically, you could say I have five different skills. I have customer service, I have a sales skill, I have a logistics like a shipping. I have a password reset and just an overall customer service bucket. Most companies, they want their sales queue to have a really good service level. Then everything goes there. Let's say we want a 90 percent of our calls and answer within 10 seconds or less. In our sales queue, our main customer service queue, we want that to be 80 percent of the calls and answer within 30 seconds or less. And then everything password reset is 20 percent of the calls and answer within 60 seconds or less. Just tears like that. We can basically tell the WFM or this intelligent routing, this workforce intelligence platform that most of these CCAS guys are creating. This is what I want.
Speaker 2:I have this dye trying to get me to these service levels. So it will look throughout the day who's scheduled, when are they scheduled, how long is their handle time been overall, how many sales do they have? And start to move agents in and out of different skills based on the call volume that's coming in, to be able to look into the IVR, see that there's five calls in the IVR that are about to hit skills. So this one's about to go out of service level. So I'm going to move agents over before those calls even hit so that my service level doesn't take a bump at all. All of that stuff is coming and it's really cool to have your own mission control manager where they're going to basically look at all the KPIs, look at what every agent is doing, look at the staffing and be able to think all of those things at once to find out what is the best possible amount of agents and what agents need to be in specific skills at specific times.
Speaker 2:Pretty cool, I think that that's going to have a huge impact in the customer experience. There's things now like every single C-Cast player has what nice CX-1 calls it Workforce Intelligence. That does this to a certain extent. But when we tie in workforce management too, with how the calls are supposed to come, with scheduling of calls, with schedule adherence, with KPIs now of what handle times are and what their sentiment is, who's being nice, who's not like to have the perfect agent ready to answer the call from a customer Every single time that customer is getting the right agent at the right time, based on the service levels and those KPIs that we wanted. That's something that really excites me and I'm fired up for that. I posted that on TikTok and LinkedIn did a video on that and a lot of people were really talking that through.
Speaker 2:One of the things that you've seen or I have seen in 2023, but I think it will get really good is AI power training and simulation. How do we train associates and get them ready for the phone? We have ChatGPT, who can be a customer. We have these AILLMs that can pretend that they're customers. They can use voice, we can use chat. These simulated training environments, I think, are going to be the way that agents get trained in the future, especially from a work-from-home model, to be able to have 15 different customers a really ticked-off customer, a nice customer, maybe someone who's a little bit older that wants to talk long, somebody who wants to get off the phone quick, a rude customer. Be able to handle all of this stuff and understand how to deal with all of these customers before they take their first call. From a customer service standpoint, you could do this from a sales aspect, too, if you're making outbound sales calls from, maybe people are submitting things for demos. You're trying to get them signed up To go through those type of processes.
Speaker 2:I think is something that you're going to see more and more and more A lot of companies that are starting to do it For us after we do a QA. I think this is the next low-hanging fruit, which is auto QA, and then if we get that off the ground, we'll be I don't know auto education, something like that Again. You'll start to see that and I think it's a really cool and really good use case. We talked about voice over transcripts. You're going to see again voice and the way the transcript go away. Transcripts are paying the ass and a lot of times they're not 100 percent either. I think that that's important. From the negative aspect, if you are a contact center agent or you work in the field, I do think that we're about to see a 20 to 25 percent reduction and headcount overall globally from where we were even this year and the year before. It's not even just the generative AI chatbot that's taking that from a self-service model, but it's all these other efficiencies that companies are starting to have.
Speaker 2:Think about autosummarization If you're a 1000 seat contact center and let's say that you're after-call work. So once the customer hangs up, you have five minutes of work to do and most of that is memo-ing or typing in the notes of what happened. Well, you don't have to do that anymore because there's autosummarization. So literally as soon as the call is done, the LLM most of the time it's a chat GPT type tool listens, reads the transcripts, autosummarizes, it throws it in there right into your CRM, whether that's Salesforce, zolhosa and that's the other thing is is there's been RPA, which is robotic process automation, rpa, and basically that does all the back-end work. So let's say there's like five forms that you need to send out after this and you fill out the customer's name and their address before you send it out to them. Rpa then can boom, go, do all that, go through it literally type the stuff in as it's happening. So your memos are done. If you have RPA, that's done. Your 1,000 seats can shrink to that maybe 10, 15 percent less, because you just cut off about 20 percent of the time that a customer or that an agent needs to handle it. So again, I think there's some real efficiencies that can happen that are outside the call that are kind of going to go back office after the call is done, that are starting to become really really mature and really good.
Speaker 2:For me, specifically, I think being a BPO, a business process outsourcer or a contact center outsourcer our role has to change or we're going to die, right. So the role of us cannot just be to have people that were hiring for agents to answer calls, but we have to be a real technology roadmap partner for our customer. We have to understand AI inside and out. We have to be the AI implementer. For many companies that don't understand how to do this. We have to be comfortable saying, yeah, you have 100 seats now, but through AI, through some of the efficiencies that I can do, we can get that down to 30 seats. Right, and before we would hate that, right, because you're losing 70 headcount or 30 headcount and you're billing by the hour. But the model has changed. Technology is now a bigger player in this and it needs to be a technology play now instead of just an agent answering call play. The BPO's and the outsourcers that understand that are going to be the ones that really thrive. If you don't understand that, you keep the old model, you're going to be in big trouble. All right.
Speaker 2:Then the last thing I got here is and this goes with what I talk about with workforce intelligence. Then, when we talked about having how right having that from an analytics standpoint, just asking questions the end of CX dashboard I think you're going to start to see in 2024. So currently I have a dashboard that shows me service level and handle time and all my KPIs and agent sentiment and trending keywords for analytics. It's going to be more of a voice of a having dashboards that you ask for instantly. Hey, can I see a dashboard of the top 10 agents with the lowest handle time? Boom, then that pops up. Can you tell me how many calls and pool the calls of the agents where customers have used the phrase too expensive yesterday, like tying together analytics with the actual agent, like any question that you can think of. That starts to become part of the process of how a dashboard gets done.
Speaker 2:So there's no more looking through data, it's knowing what data you want, asking for it and receiving that data instantly. So again, it's almost like a voice prompt. So I still think prompting is so really important. You have to know what to ask for. Maybe you could set things up like hey, anytime that the service level goes under 80 percent. Can you please pop that up? Can you please tell me why? Tell me who the longest handle time Like you could do so many different things.
Speaker 2:I think that that's really starting to get people to think about not only how CX is done, but how we operate, how we literally, as a call center manager. What does the future of that look like from an actual management perspective, from a reporting aspect? What is the data that we need? What is the data that we can get? I think that that's interesting for me as well. So that's what I got, guys. That's 27 minutes of predictions.
Speaker 2:I'm going to throw this in the show notes, but I just did. I think one of the coolest posts ever. If you're into CX, if you're into contact centers and AI, I posted a newsletter that have like the top 80 people to follow on LinkedIn when it comes to AI, when it comes to CX, there's probably 30 of them that I did not follow, that I wasn't following until I did this. My feed now is awesome, like all it is now is awesome contact center, cx, ai. So I'm really glad I did that. If you're into that too, I think it can be really, really helpful out of ton of value to you guys as well. So that's really all I got for you.
Speaker 2:If you guys have any questions, let me just scroll through TikTok to see if I got any other questions Other than, what hair product do I use? I probably should have that in the. We could do some. I don't know nothing, be a little bit of an advertiser for the funny guys. But all right, guys, thank you so much. We'll get back on to the podcast weekly. We'll have another one out next Thursday, friday. Thank you guys. So, so, so, very much. Any questions? Please DM me on LinkedIn or hit me up here on TikTok. Bye.