Make an Informed Decision about Implementing AI
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
You’re no doubt tired of hearing about artificial intelligence (AI). You probably also realize that AI is not another trend that will disappear and fade into history. Call center AI is a persistent technology that’s here to stay.
Everyone, it seems, has an immediate reaction to AI. You may fear it, or you may embrace it—or somewhere in between. Yet personal opinions aside, it’s critical to make an informed decision about artificial intelligence’s place in your call center.
Here are three general AI perspectives for your consideration.
Reject It
One response to call center AI is to categorically prohibit it from your operation. Know, however, that you likely already have forms of predictive AI in place.
This could include something as simple as autocompletion for text communications or autocorrect for email messages. Today’s spelling and grammar checkers tap into AI, as do most database queries—along with all online searches.
AI is already part of our lives, and it’s impossible to avoid it.
Yet you may pledge to do whatever you can to keep it out of your call center. Although this will prove increasingly difficult to achieve, it is an acceptable strategy.
The next challenge is to figure out how to use this decision to your advantage. Your staffing paradigms, service success, and marketing strategy should all reflect this vision to avoid call center AI.
Embrace it for your staff, your customers, and your stakeholders.
Support Tool
A second option for call center AI is to tap its ability to support your human call center staff. Look for ways that artificial intelligence can help your agents do their job faster or perform their work more accurately.
But make sure they remain in control. Treat AI as a tool that your staff controls and not a shackle that controls them.
Hire staff that has the skill to discern when to trust AI’s output and the confidence to know when to dismiss its conclusions. Used in this way, your customers and callers won’t know your staff uses AI.
It should be transparent to them and a nonissue.
For this strategy, stress the human factor of the service you provide. That is, double down on being human.
Customer Facing
The final consideration for call center AI is the most forward-looking. It also possesses the greatest risk/reward calculus. Though it may seem futuristic, it’s a present-day reality, with AI interacting directly with those who contact your call center.
We’ve already seen this implemented—with varying degrees of success and failure—with text chat bots.
Yet it can also appear on social media interaction and email communication. The next level of customer-facing AI comes in the form of audio support, with AI generated video right behind it.
In pursuing this AI response, celebrate it as the future of call centers, building your operation around it and marketing it as such.
Call Center AI Conclusion
Each one of these three general strategies is a legitimate course to pursue. Just make sure you implement it knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your selection.
Then strategically introduce it to your staff and callers, with the goal of maximizing the positive outcomes of your decision. Done rightly, any of these can be a win—just as any of them could be a loss.
In addition, know that the lines between these three general options will blur. These are acceptable pursuits as well.
Finally, be aware that if the solution you pick doesn’t work out as expected, you can always pivot to another one that’s a better fit.
Whatever course you pursue for call center AI, may you realize success.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center industry.
Read his latest book, Call Center Connections.
