When people talk about automation, including customer experiences (CXs) powered by AI, it often comes with dramatic headlines: jobs disappearing, customers shocked and awed, entire operations reshaped overnight.
The reality for most businesses’ contact centers has been relatively mundane. They’re using automation as a “band-aid”: slapped onto flawed systems as quick fixes rather than used to fulfill its real promise.
Let’s be clear. The band-aid approach may help your organization survive for the next month (or maybe even the next quarter) but it is a disaster over the long term.
Even worse, it will never get you to the point where you’re reaping the full benefits of automation. Namely gaining control over contact center operations (including their costs), building customer loyalty, and delivering revenue-generating experiences.
Turning Automation Into Transformation
Layering AI on top of flawed systems doesn’t solve problems. Instead, it generally makes them worse, with results ranging from hallucinations and inconsistent answers to frustrated customers and lost business.
To continue the medical metaphor, scaling up AI and automation initiatives without the proper data infrastructure, planning, security procedures, and partners are cures worse than the disease.
That doesn’t mean you should halt your AI investments. When done right, such automation can be transformative in the contact center. This comes to life not in the dramatic “robots take over” sense but in real ways that support better outcomes for both your customers and your bottom line.
For example, we all know that voice AI can take on repetitive, high-volume tasks and free up human agents to focus on the moments that actually require empathy and judgment.
But the impact may be far larger than you think. These solutions can scale to handle the workload of over 1,000 full-time employees. This is a truly transformational, enterprise-scale impact.
Where AI-Based Automation Helps
One of the greatest results that our customers see from this kind of investment in smart AI-based automation is that it helps them reestablish control over incredibly complex systems.
Take customer service policy updates, for example. Rolling out a new compliance script across thousands of human agents is a slow, messy process.
Layering AI on top of flawed systems doesn't solve problems. Instead, it generally makes them worse...
With AI, those changes can be deployed instantly and consistently: without the risk of someone going off script. Automation also brings visibility: you know exactly what’s being said to customers without digging through endless transcripts or hoping for consistency across shifts.
Another area where automation gives you back control is all too familiar to contact center leaders: volume spikes and surges. The applications here may stress you out, but I name them to show the breadth of use cases that can be solved with it.
- If you’re at a utility company, a natural disaster will have your customers calling you constantly.
- If you’re at a travel or hospitality company, disruptions to global flight patterns will do the same.
- And if you’re at a retail company, you count on holiday shopping every year, with all of the questions, complaints, and returns that it entails.
The results speak for themselves. For example, one of the world’s top utility companies takes millions of calls every year. But understandably, these sometimes rise up to 1 million per day when outages strike.
When it adopted our AI-driven automation technology, the voice agent they used to talk to customers successfully contained 15% of calls on the first day.
...AI agents allow you to more easily handle dramatic upticks in call volume without the need to increase headcount.
Since then, that overall containment figure has reached 67%, leading to better outcomes for both sides of the conversation. In fact, customer satisfaction has increased by 22%.
AI and People Working Together Without BPOs
In all these cases and more, AI agents allow you to more easily handle dramatic upticks in call volume without the need to increase headcount.
Compare this with a seasonal or temporary workforce, where every new person requires hours of training on your business and brand voice. Not to mention the risk of them misremembering information or deviating from their talking points. Talk about putting a band-aid over a problem!
In contrast, AI agents can contain a huge chunk of call volume with consistent and on-brand responses. This helps decrease employee burnout, slash customer wait times, and gain control over both unpredictable and predictable surges.
To name just one more benefit, automation can increase your command over your contact center by bringing outsourced business processes back in-house.
For many CX leaders, using a third party for contact center operation was the only path available due to budget constraints. But with smart automation, you can nurture your relationships with customers directly, thereby strengthening trust in your brand and increasing loyalty over time.
There is certainly a place for BPOs in the age of AI, but it’s time to think about clawing back parts of your relationship with your customers.
With AI agents taking on a greater share of conversations, you no longer have to make BPO-related quality and control trade-offs that can hurt how customers perceive your brand.
Don’t Let the Headlines Distract You
Technology should not be built and bought for technology’s sake, but to fix real problems. AI has moved on from the curiosity, creation, and proving stages to real-world successful deployments that we’re seeing.
But as with any important tool, AI is only as valuable as the processes and methods to support and enable it. Just like life-saving medical tools are only as good as the materials they are made of and the skill of the medical professionals who insert them.
The dramatic headlines about AI and automation may persist in the newspapers, but you don’t have to fall for the hype or be scared of investing in smart use cases for automation.
We’re of the belief that the more you automate, the more you own; and there’s nowhere that’s more true today than in the contact center.