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  • October 3, 2024
  • By Donna Fluss, president, DMG Consulting

GenAI: Reaping the Benefits and Navigating the Challenges

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We’re now well past the midway point for 2024, and it’s clear that artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (genAI), is solidifying its role as an essential contact center technology. GenAI is being leveraged in many existing and emerging contact center solutions for its ability to improve implementation and ongoing performance and reduce development time and testing for these applications.

GenAI supplies the missing component in many contact center activities, from composing answers to customers’ natural language self-service inquiries, to drafting succinct voice and digital interaction summaries, to creating the underlying code for these solutions. This wide-ranging utility makes it an ideal technology for contact centers and other customer experience (CX)-related functions.

Great Benefits and Some Concerns

The innovation genAI delivers is substantial, beneficial, and necessary, but it is not without its challenges. Because genAI is still somewhat novel, companies can be overwhelmed with vendor offers and promises, and there is confusion regarding the best source for many contact center solutions. In general, contact centers often expect their contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) or CRM vendor to be their primary technology provider.

But this decision is complicated by the fact that there are best-of-breed vendors for most contact center applications or product suites, some of whom are new entrants with compelling offerings and competitive prices. Companies looking to acquire genAI-enabled solutions want providers who are reliable and dependable partners in addition to delivering secure, safe, trustworthy, and innovative capabilities at the right price. They also want vendors who are making significant ongoing research and development (R&D) investments, as these capabilities are in their early days and are still advancing. As good as these applications are today, they’re going to be a lot better in two to three years.

Will AI Replace or Augment Agents?

The debate about whether AI will replace or augment live agents will continue for years, although the answer is likely to be a combination of both. While many genAI-enabled solutions can reduce the number of live agents (e.g., enhanced customer self-service applications) or employees needed to perform certain functions (e.g., quality management), it’s only one aspect of the buying decision; the speed, accuracy, and value of the solutions’ outputs are also buying criteria.

Automating QM is a great example: The pace at which these solutions help companies identify and correct operational, procedural, and system problems enables them to proactively prevent the same issues from impacting thousands to millions of additional customers. There was no cost-effective way to do this in the past as manual QM was people-intensive and slow, but AI and automation eliminate these impediments.

Other Market Challenges

A second market concern is the limited number of resources available to help companies with their AI, especially genAI, initiatives. Most of the highly skilled and specialized people who develop, implement, manage, and maintain these solutions work for vendors and are very well-compensated. While a Ph.D. is not needed to implement one of the new genAI-based applications, it’s helpful to have employees who have experience managing these types of systems and projects.

A third market challenge is the need for businesses to have access to targeted, tagged, curated, verticalized, and (ideally) customized large language models (LLMs) that are easy to maintain to support their genAI-based applications. There is no shortage of LLMs in the market, but many third-party capabilities are expensive and lack the guardrails enterprises need to ensure answers are 100 percent appropriate for their customers and employees. As a result, companies are investing a great deal of time and effort to build their own data repositories that contain the appropriate answers for their audience.

As is always the case, particularly with new and enhanced solutions, there are legitimate concerns. However, the overall momentum for these feature-rich and advanced genAI-enabled contact center applications is strong and growing. Nothing is going to stop these solutions, as their value and benefits are significant; companies should proceed without delay but with due caution. 

Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of the people, processes, and technology that drive the strategic direction of the dynamic and rapidly transforming contact center and back-office markets. Fluss can be reached at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.

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