Generative AI has arrived – Let’s embrace it to the ‘T’ in Contact Centers

The Contact Center industry is known for embracing new technological evolutions with utmost humility. From DSL to fiber, EPABX to on-prem to cloud, from basic macros to RPA to ML — embracing voice, email, chat, and self-service from call centers to contact centers to customer experience centers; from B2C to B2B to B2B2C — it has taken the journey in its stride and leaped to embrace the unknown and help it evolve. The latest addition to this list is generative AI, which has arrived and is here to stay. Generative AI is the technology that enables machines to learn human language, creating an opportunity for businesses to provide exceptional customer experiences through their contact centers.

While many of us may have apprehensions about generative AI, it is real and will absolutely go through the grind to reach near perfection before another tech intervention kicks in. As contact center practitioners, it is time to take the giant leap and embrace generative AI with all its vagaries. Typically, “humans learn programming languages to interact with machines, but in the generative AI scenario, technically, the machine is learning a human language” — this calls for celebration and adoption with the intent to keep looking for white spaces to differentiate and provide exemplary customer experience through contact centers.

The industry has started exploring many possible use cases, and some deservingly qualify for a “Shout Out.” The following, I feel, are the areas with the highest potential for disruptive transformation:

1. Chatbots Powered by Generative AI – Resolves questions about your products or services in 10 seconds, provides dynamically personalized cross-sell leads; analyzes customer feedback by extracting and summarizing important themes from text and images, email attachments, and embedded links in email, chat, self-service, knowledge base, and user-generated content including user reviews in rating and review sites. As per the coder’s understanding, what was addressed earlier through NLP-based Chatbots has now moved to users and considers user interactions to correspond. Contact centers should now concentrate on experts who can interpret outputs from generative AI and perfect it step by step as citizen users, not citizen developers.
   Powering your current chatbot landscape with generative AI will open a new level of first-time resolutions. Generative AI is helping prospects understand product details, select the right package or product, and close recent sales with minimal to no human interventions. Generative AI-powered Chat BOTs will now breathe new life into RPA, empowering end consumers to interact with a platform similar to ChatGPT, which in turn understands the intent and then triggers RPA to pull the right insights. Combining generative AI with the current automation ecosystem will even help organizations address sustainability and scalability concerns. With generative AI tapping into customer resolution data to analyze conversation sentiment and patterns, service organizations can drive continuous improvement, identify trends, and accelerate bot training and updates.
2. Help Agents Differentiate – Provides new and fresh content to agents at their fingertips, thus ensuring engaging and insightful conversations with end users. Its conversational nature is not restricted by a library and current source machine learning. Generative AI can also leverage coaching interactions, customer sentiments, and other interaction data to continuously optimize customer interactions, ultimately improving resolution rates and customer satisfaction. Fast-track case swarming can be another potential area where lessons from the previous case swarms will be shared. Generative AI can also be used to identify similar past cases, such as identifying who in the organization has the best, most relevant skills to address the issue; and recommending resolutions and customer communication to fast-track and even automate many aspects of the case swarm.
3. Reimagining the Art of Storytelling: from Concept to Creation in a Matter of Seconds – Generative AI is expected to bring one of the biggest disruptions in the user-generated content space. It is touted to change the game of making short, shareable videos by helping creators understand what drives engagement and showing only relevant content to viewers. BPO providers have a new landscape to explore – through generative AI, they help reduce barriers to content creation and provide insights into what resonates with consumers.
   Content moderation will be another area that will be disrupted. Generative AI will open a floodgate of content that needs to be moderated. Ensuring a solid moderation mechanism will be a must for enterprises now. Generative AI can be trained to moderate user-generated content, such as comments and reviews, to ensure they meet community guidelines. By analyzing the content, generative AI can identify potentially harmful content and flag it for further review before it goes live.

Contact center training and employee experience will get a massive facelift.

A. E-learning gets a huge impetus through generative AI

• Personalize content and accelerate time to proficiency (virtual tutors): Generative AI can help generate content much faster for training and onboarding new agents. It can create text summarizations and training material from long-form content and optimize content over time based on agent understanding and customer resolution. Content can also be personalized for the agent and delivered in a format that suits their learning style. It can also recommend relevant courses and learning materials that would be most effective for each learner.
• Provide real-time coaching through intelligent assessment: It can create intelligent assessments that accurately evaluate learner progress, identify areas where learners need more practice, and provide targeted feedback and recommendations. In tandem with gamification, this can lead to improved learner retention rates and better knowledge acquisition.
• Language translation: By using NLP and translation tools to translate content accurately into multiple languages, it is possible to make e-learning accessible to a broader audience.

B. iBuddy for your employee experience: A virtual assistant for all your employees

• Generative AI can assist in answering questions about company policies, culture, procedures, and benefits, as well as provide guidance on completing various forms and requests. Providing employees with access to training and professional development opportunities is essential to keeping them engaged.
• It can provide self-serve HR functions (e.g., automate employee onboarding or Q&A or strategic advice on employment conditions, law, regulations, etc.)
• Generative AI provides employees with up-to-date information on compliance-related matters like employment laws, payroll and tax regulations, and health and safety protocols.
• It can also capture grievances and propose the right channel and solution.

Generative AI helps contact centers create customized industry-specific services

• Order tracking in e-commerce: Generative AI can analyze order data to provide customers with real-time updates on the status of their orders, thereby improving customer satisfaction.
• Card activation and verification: In banking, generative AI can activate and verify credit cards by analyzing customer data and generating personalized customer responses. It can guide customers through activation and answer any questions or concerns.
• Healthcare patient education: Platforms like ChatGPT can educate patients about health conditions, treatments, and medications. By analyzing patient data, generative AI can craft personalized responses to patient queries and concerns related to patient education. It can be extended to create personalized plans for patients too.
• Prescription refills: It can process patient prescription refill requests by analyzing patient data and account history and guiding them through the process.
• Virtual tour guides for the travel industry: It serves as a virtual tour guide for travelers by offering personalized itineraries, recommendations for activities, and suggested attractions based on their interests.
• Travel Reviews: Generative AI provides insights into the quality of travel experiences, such as customized recommendations for destinations and activities based on customer reviews and preferences.

The possibility of implementing generative AI is endless. It can be implemented across multiple channels, such as email, social media, and messaging apps, to reach a wider audience and engage customers more effectively. Integrating conversational generative AI with call center agent systems can enable seamless handoff between virtual and human agents, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted customer experience. Implementing a continuous learning process for conversational generative AI can help it adapt to changing customer behaviors and preferences, resulting in more effective sales conversations. Integrating conversational generative AI with predictive modeling techniques can enable call centers to anticipate customer needs and offer personalized recommendations and solutions before the customer even realizes they need them. Lastly, implementing performance monitoring and reporting mechanisms can help call center managers track the effectiveness of conversational generative AI and identify areas for improvement, ultimately enhancing the sales process and improving customer experience.

In short, generative AI is poised to revolutionize the contact center industry by enabling faster, more accurate, and more personalized customer interactions. A few apprehensions and challenges may need to be tackled before we can utilize generative AI’s full potential. Any technology before complete adoption should be dealt with caution. The key is to embrace this new technology with an open mind and a willingness to learn and adapt – more on navigating these challenges to make the most of generative AI in our next blog!

That being said, the future of contact centers is bright with generative AI, and those ready to embrace it will reap the benefits of enhanced customer experiences and improved business outcomes.