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AI investment in the contact centre is on the rise.

Written by Alex Bentley | Aug 21, 2023 11:16:43 AM

Gartner has projected 16.2% growth for AI in the contact centre this year as CX leaders look to dazzle customers with their interactions.

One thing you can be sure of when Gartner comes out with a prediction about increased AI investment? A good chunk of that money will effectively be going to waste. According to TechRepublic, 85% of AI projects eventually fail to bring their intended results to the business.

There’s one surefire way to avoid sinking your budget into foolhardy AI investments, though: focus on the value you already have. 

Before shopping around for the latest jewel in the AI hype cycle, CX leaders would do well to realise that the real gold is already in-house, waiting for them to rinse the value from it. It lies with the expertise of your best: your best customer retention strategists, your best CX leaders, your best KYC experts; the people who know your company, your industry, your customers and your compliance requirements inside out. 

In short: it’s already in you. The trick lies in applying it to every interaction with every customer who comes knocking. Here’s how.

Decision-power your customer interactions.

If the contact centre is to become a ‘brand guardian’ as some prophecise, then CX leaders need to equip every employee to embody the very best of their company.

70% of UK customers say that they expect companies to resolve their issues in a single interaction. In reality, though, not every employee has the experience, the knowledge or even the time to offer the best, most tailored solution to each customer. 

Powering every decision with the expertise of your best knowledge workers, across every channel, means that every one of your agents can offer the kind of service usually only reserved for special cases. 

The result? A huge increase in first-call resolutions. With invaluable expertise scaled across the omnichannel and combined with the predictive analytics in your data to power every decision and every interaction, your agents can offer the best solution, first time, every time. 

But that’s not the only benefit to augmenting your agents. In empowering your best people, you’ll also retain them and the value they provide.

Protect your value. 

No matter how smart your AI is, it can’t prevent knowledge leakage when skilled people leave your company. With employee churn at a high right now, this is a serious problem. According to a report from Cresta Insights, the employee attrition rate at customer call centers that focus on support is about 1.3 times higher than the average.

This is not surprising given that call centre agents are at high risk of burnout, with 54% of agents in the UK saying that they would be more productive if they had better technology and software tools to work with. AI-powered assistance can prevent burnout by reducing workloads, improving the quality of interactions, and raising the performance of your agents.

Don’t replace your human expertise with technology - use technology to protect it, enshrine it, and scale it.

Digitally capture your best agents’ expertise.

So, how can CX leaders make all of these dreamlike benefits a reality?

viabl.ai makes it easy. Our platform allows you to digitally capture and automate your best agents’ expertise, decision-making, and advisory skills in a way that scales great customer service across every interaction. 

Designed for business people, our viabl empowers your people to rapidly build, manage and optimise decision workflows which can be automated or used to support and augment human knowledge workers across every channel.

“Implementing viabl.ai was a way to capture the knowledge from the minds of our power users”, says one retail CIO. “It turned this individual wealth of knowledge into company wealth.”

Are you a CX leader looking to improve your first contact resolution by 35%?

Let’s talk!