Historically, contact center costs have been “linear, ”meaning that the only way to support more customers was to scale up customer service teams. But this calculus is changing with the introduction of AI into the contact center.
Experts say that a number of companies are already using generative AI to both improve customer service and manage costs in the contact center.
However, they also warn that IT and business leaders must be careful to operate within the current limits of the technology or risk alienating the customers they’re trying to serve.
GenAI for Self-Service
“Self-service is one of the most common and most powerful ways that technology can help brands save money while providing good customer experiences,” said Max Ball, a principal analyst at Forrester research, in an interview with The Forecast.
Ball noted that many organizations were already using AI-driven self-service tools for simple tasks even before the advent of generative AI, and he said recent advances in the technology offer the opportunity to do even more, leading to significant potential cost savings.
“Typically, the labor costs for an agent-assisted interaction come in at around five dollars, while an automated interaction typically charges fifty cents even with the costs of generative AI factored into the equation.”
Ball suggested a measure of caution, noting that current AI tools are prone to “hallucinations,” where the technology simply invents an incorrect answer if it lacks the necessary information to answer a question. However, he noted that techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which limits bots to answering questions using only data from a specific set of documents, aims to mitigate these dangers.
Jeff Katzin, a partner at Bain & Company, said that companies should be especially mindful about how they deploy AI in highly charged “moments of truth” that have the potential to either delight or frustrate a customer, depending on the outcome.
“It’s an opportunity to really wow your customers, but there’s a risk that automation gets it wrong,” he said.
GenAI for Agent Assist
Generative AI, Katzin said, can “supercharge” the capabilities of human customer service agents. He noted that telecommunications and financial services companies have been especially active in using AI tools to provide this assistance.
“Their agents need to navigate complex issues across a range of products and services,” he said. “The technology can serve as a knowledge assistant to reduce the time to find answers and the friction of navigating internal systems. One financial services firm has been seeing a 15 to 20 percent reduction in handle time as a result of its AI rollout.”
Nutanix built its own SupportGPT solution to provide system reliability engineers (SREs) with immediate answers to complex customer queries.
“We’re taking away the mundane tasks so our representatives can focus on the harder problems,” said Chad Singleton, vice president of support readiness at Nutanix.
“At the same time, we’re not degrading service. When this came along and I started to see the first results, I said: ‘Wow, this is a game changer.’”
While the system, or something similar, may one day provide direct customer support, Nutanix is currently making it available to SREs who can validate answers before relaying them to customers.
“I wouldn’t want our customers to be asking questions of SupportGPT yet,” Singleton said. “There are plenty of examples in other industries where GPT bots have given customers the wrong advice, and we can’t afford that.”
GenAI for Customer Analytics
Ball said that AI tools can help demystify customer data, allowing companies to mine their contact centers for information and insights that might otherwise go unnoticed.
“Prompt-driven analytics tools take much of the black art out of data analysis, helping businesses with better insights into their customer experiences,” he said. “In addition, AI allows transcription and analysis of customer conversations opening up a whole new set of data for insights on customer service and the overall customer experience."
Katzin noted that generative AI can help companies to replicate call studies, which are often too infrequent and costly to provide companies with a steady stream of data-driven insights.
“The technology is effective at analyzing unstructured data and looking for themes,” he said.
“One airline, as an example, created a model within weeks to analyze 125,000 call transcripts to better understand customer issues, sentiment, and resolution rates.” The model, Katzin said, informed policy changes, revealed better ways to coach agents, and yielded improvements to the digital customer experience.
Katzin warned, however, that customer data must be rigorously safeguarded.
“Customer service teams need to have a sound infrastructure, policy, and adoption program in place to ensure that the technology is used securely, protects customer data, and meets regulatory standards,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Katzin sees three coming trends related to generative AI adoption in customer service. First, companies will improve training and adoption of AI tools for their frontline workers.
“That is table stakes, and it requires a concerted effort by customer service leaders to reteach the frontline on how they have worked for a number of years,” he said.
Next, he predicted, contact centers will begin to adopt an “AI-led” contact center, with advanced language models engaging with customers directly and resolving their issues autonomously with human oversight.
Finally, Katzin said, companies will need to consider when “human elements and empathy” need to be retained.
“The brands that are able to predict and then inject authentic moments for customers in moments of truth will stand out as customer service leaders.”
Editor’s note: Learn how Nutanix software helps align the best AI solutions and use-cases to meet business needs now and going forward.
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Follow him @CalvinHennick.
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