4 ways AI is set to change contact centers

In CX Network’s Global State of CX 2023, CX experts and professionals discussed the current state and future of CX, shared trends and offered predictions for its trajectory.

It will surprise no-one that artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a key trend in CX and the impact of AI-powered technologies on the contact centers was front of mind for many of our analysts and survey respondents. Here we will look at three key findings from CX Network’s research regarding AI in the contact center, including how AI will boost business intelligence and empower customer agents.

Chatbots and conversational AI

We have heard a lot in recent months about how ChatGPT and related AI technologies will change the way CX is delivered forever. The primary impact of conversational AI technology on the operation of contact centers revolves around the advanced capabilities for handling customer issues and queries that such technology offers.

The Global State of CX 2023 research revealed that two of the top-10 trends that will impact CX this year concern AI, specifically conversational AI and other AI-powered technologies. This shows that conversational AI is front-of-mind for CX professionals and, according to Iain Langridge CX Network advisory board member and product and CX lead at Amazon Games, this is with good reason as large language models (LLMs) show a lot of promise.

“LLMs are a huge opportunity to improve and reduce the cost of what we traditionally spend a lot of time on in CX.” Langridge said.

Devon Mychal, senior director of product marketing for Talkdesk, expanded on this, noting:

“I cannot overstate the importance of LLMs. GPT is the most prominent today, but we will see many advanced LLMs emerge over the coming years, with significant improvements on how well they can execute their core functions.”

Mychal made it clear that while AI-powered LLMs are already a huge success for CX in the contact center, their capabilities will only improve in the coming years.

Boosting business intelligence

Another way that AI promises to transform the contact center is through its capability for collecting and analyzing data, which far outstrips the capacity of any human. With AI and LLMs being applied to provide automatic responses to simple customer queries, they also become a continuous source of data as they collect statistics and metrics based on their conversations, often handing this over to agents in the case of a transfer.

Mychal explained that the contact center holds a vast wealth of high-value data but it is currently underutilized.

“The contact center is one of the best sources of business intelligence available to organizations, but today it remains largely untapped,” Mychal said.

The capabilities that such rich and accurate data offer promise to change the role of the contact center agent permanently, but it will not make them redundant. In fact, the opposite is true as such technologies promise to empower the contact center agent.

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Empowering the contact center agent

The data gathered by LLMs and AI-powered tools does more than just inform the business on customer behaviors and preferences, it also serves to empower the contact center agent by putting as much information regarding customer queries into their hands as possible. Not only does this allow agents to serve customers better, it also helps to improve the employee experience as agents feel empowered to do their job, rather than frustrated or helpless as can often be the case.

Mychal explained: “A lot of agent burnout is due to working a difficult and intense job providing good service even when a customer is angry. In part, these roles are stressful because the tools at hand do not necessarily make it easier to do the job. Tools like AI agent assistants can provide real-time support to serve customers more effectively and access the information they need to provide good service, while automating some of the most boring or repetitive parts of the job.”

When agents feel they are supported, they will also become more productive as they realize they have been given the tools they need to keep customers happy. Not only will this have a positive impact on employee retention, which can be a significant issue in contact centers, this will also allow businesses to attract top talent, possibly from contact centers that have not taken steps to empower their agents.

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Elevating the status of CX leaders

While many have said they expect AI to replace human workers, those across CX believe the data and insights AI can mine will actually elevate the status of the CX leader.

Mychal says: “The valuable insights that such data can unlock will enable CX leaders to become trusted advisors to other important decision-makers in the company. At the very least, they will be expected to implement this technology in a way that makes it broadly available to the business, so other leaders can self-serve and analyze.”

While currently only the more forward-thinking companies are leading the way with these data practices, Mychal believes that the ready accessibility of CX insights for CX leaders will soon become the norm.