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Balancing People and Technology: Optimizing Contact Centers with Generative AI
The contact center has gone through enormous transformation over the last several years. Companies need to meet evolving customer demands in ways that not only streamline operations, but provide a positive customer engagement—which has been happening through automation and technology integration for a long time.. Uncertain financial environments continue to underscore the conversation between investing in technological advancements and maintaining cost efficiencies.
Many of the new technologies boast the ability to reduce overall costs while increasing customer satisfaction. The hope is by increasing self-service for routine tasks or queries, it leaves advisors free to handle more complex and business impacting customer interactions. According to a Forbes Advisor survey, 73% of businesses use or plan to use AI-powered chatbots for instant messaging. Most business owners think artificial intelligence will benefit their businesses, with 64% of respondents anticipating AI will improve customer relationships and increase productivity, while 60% expect AI to drive sales growth.1
While some fear that generative AI will replace humans, the reality is organizations need to evaluate how they can balance both technology and human interactions for optimal business outcomes. Gartner® recommends to, “Focus generative AI use cases on making agents more efficient by summarizing cases, categorizing data and assisting with knowledge capture.”2
Being able to provide excellent customer care is not only dependent on adopting new technologies, but also considering how to empower advisors so they can provide a personalized, consistent, and efficient customer interaction. Optimizing the balance between people and technology is the best way to achieve strategic business goals.
The Role of Generative AI in Contact Centers
Generative AI holds a significant place in the contact center. It can increase efficiencies in customer engagements, streamline data analytics, execute repetitive and mundane tasks instead of taking up valuable advisor time, and onboard activities, to name a few use cases.
By reducing effort and time to execute activities across the organization, generative AI can drive optimization, reduce costs, and improve employee retention. Providing customers with self-service options helps streamline the customer interaction. Inquiries about store hours, shipment information, and appointment times are easily handled by a self-service option.
Allowing generative AI to drive better self-service options frees up advisors to handle queries that involve more explanation or details. Customer information gathered during the initial self-service interaction can be retained and passed to the advisor, eliminating the need for customers to repeat information—reducing frustration and increasing customer satisfaction. Generative AI advisor tools can not only provide real-time coaching, but also help the advisor quickly access customer information that will enhance the conversation, such as customer call history, purchase history, and appointment history.
Challenges and Benefits of Balancing People and Technology
Integrating generative AI across the organization is not without challenges. Many contact center leaders don’t know where to begin, what processes would be best served by generative AI, or haven’t considered how generative AI can impact their advisors’ productivity and morale. Businesses must think about how to implement a seamless collaboration between technology and humans. Identifying the key business drivers and goals, what processes influence those goals, and the impact of new technology on employees is the best place to start.
Many people may erroneously believe that generative AI is going to replace all human tasks. That is just not true. The most effective organizations find a balance between humans and technology, leveraging ways to support and enhance job functions and tasks, not take them away. Communicating this to employees is essential to ensure buy-in and help reduce attrition. When an organization strikes the right balance between humans and technology, efficiency gains are seen in productivity, customer satisfaction increases due to lowering customer effort, as well as making customer and employee interactions smoother and more personalized. Because of these operational and customer engagement improvements, organizations typically see cost reduction and increased customer loyalty.
Optimizing Contact Center Processes with Generative AI
Understanding where to begin scaling generative AI across the organization can feel daunting. There are some best practices to consider when starting this journey that will help guide you forward and define the road ahead.
1. Understand what you want to get out of the new technology. What are the expectations for the business, what outcomes are leaders hoping to achieve, what is happening with the customer journey now and how is generative AI anticipated to impact that journey? What KPIs will be used to measure effectiveness? Being able to clearly answer these questions will help you build a foundation and manage business expectations.
2. Assess and identify top opportunity areas. Based on your expectations and goals already defined, determine what will stay the same and what will be different, what are the key use cases that will be impacted, and what is the gap between where you are and where you want to be. You’ll also want to consider AI risks—what data security measures need to be taken, how generative AI will impact the various business groups that interact with the proposed opportunity areas, and how will the new way of doing things be governed.
3. Lay out the recommendations. What does the roadmap from where you are to where you want to be look like, and how long will it take to get there? Prioritize items based on ROI, business impact, and your ability to deliver. Determine what solutions are needed to execute and achieve your goals, and what will it take to implement these solutions.
4. Build it out. Ensure all parties are on board and that there’s a clear understanding of what changes will occur. Have a clearly defined implementation plan and change management plan with proof of concepts baked in. Map out necessary internal training to ensure all parties understand the new technologies and processes and feel comfortable using them. When all the elements have been implemented, roll it out.
Continuous monitoring of the new technology and processes is essential to continuous improvement, as it’s not a one and done situation. Technology and customer expectations are ever evolving, and adjustments will likely be needed to keep things running smoothly with the best results. Ensure there is a mechanism to evaluate the KPIs and adjust as needed. Approaching AI from a “human in the loop” perspective helps to validate and mature AI technology through the contact center and self-service engagements.
Driving Toward Transformative Customer Care
Providing exceptional customer care is not just about your people, the technology you use, or the processes you have in place—it’s all of these things together working in concert towards a common goal. Historically, these aspects have been managed separately leading to siloed views of the customer experience and satisfaction, leaving organizations with a fragmented view of their people and technology and leading to inefficient processes. Generative AI drives us to think outside the box and consider new ways of looking at and solving problems.
Concentrix and Salesforce have teamed together to provide one solution to drive next generation care for your organization, with technology, people, and processes all managed under one roof, including helping you implement and operationalize Agentforce. Discover how we can help you deliver exceptional customer care that leads to agile automation and virtualization of business processes, reduced TCO, and improved ROI.
1 “How Businesses Are Using Artificial Intelligence In 2024,” Katherine Haan, Forbes Advisor, April 24, 2023.
2 Gartner, Strategy and Leadership Predictions for Service and Support Leaders in 2024, 2024.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Colin O’Neill
Senior Director, Strategy & Design
