Is Your Contact Center Ready for AI? 3 Questions to Ask

It seems that all we hear about in the tech and contact center world is how AI is going to change the world. How wonderful, how effective and from a business perspective — how it’s going to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

All these things can be true, but contact leaders need to be cautious about AI. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before you implement an AI solution:

What are the customers complaining about?

Are customers calling several times for the same issue? Are you having issues with AHT for call follow up? Are you having process variance amongst your agents in response to the same customer issue? Define that No. 1 problem, then decide how and if AI is going to help you resolve that issue. 

Identify the customer experience: how will your customers feel about this change, will they even know it’s AI that is responding? How will the agents feel about the change, do they see it as making their role easier, or trying to eliminate their role?

Who are the people, process and tools needed to implement AI?

Behind all great tech are people — the people who implement, the people who program manage, the people who document the changes, the people who train your agents and the technology teams.

If you have AI teams in existence, are they already swamped with other projects? How could they implement what you want to change in a timely fashion? And can you measure what is going to be implemented? Does your “AI Department” have Program Managers who understand your service/business and can you measure the outcome compared to the ideated outcome? 

What does your transformation journey look like for the customer, contact center and do you a communication plan, if one is even needed? What are the potential risks of this change — will the customer feel closer to your products and services? Create a list of all the AI projects you want, and then create a weighted criteria matrix to go after those that are easiest to implement with the biggest outcome for your customers. 

Do you have AI governance standards?

Define how the AI project functions in your organization, who is going to implement, test and ensure the general transparency of the process and the project. Be clear with the stakeholders, identify risks, talk about the responsibilities, the reputational risks, and the unhappy path mitigation plans to ensure that your AI transformation is going to result in the experience for the customer.

You also have to understand if your AI is going to provide correct responses to questions posed from customers. The best way to understand those questions is with the data you currently hold. 

For the past year, what types of questions were asked prior to implementing the AI? Use those as your testing structure. Ensure that no AI hallucinations are happening in the responses to your customers. If your contact center has customer personal private information, ensure your testing covers that it is not being shared or used with anyone or anything else in the process.

Governance of AI should be focused on proper uses of AI and ensuring no misuse of PII, company data or illegal responses to customers (depending on your business). Is there a corporate governance body, and if not yet, suggest creating one to ensure that your company is focused on delivering the right outcomes.