The Real Benefits of Artificial Intelligence

“When it comes to training, the way people learn has changed pretty dramatically, even over the past 10 years,” points out Doug Taylor, program director at HighPoint Global, a customer experience company that caters primarily to government agencies. “Instead of committing a fact to memory or taking a class to learn how to do something, people often prefer to learn something in the moment by referring to a YouTube tutorial video or finding steps through a Google search.”

Spending a lot of money on training is no longer a wise investment, he adds, noting that information changes so quickly today that once a fact is memorized, it could become quickly obsolete or be proved untrue. Today’s contact center agents need tools that update in real time and are able to keep up with the pace of a conversation.

“That’s why knowledge management is such an important component in the contact center,” Taylor says. “It’s really the knowledge management component of your CRM system that people access for that real-time information.”

As agents are on the “front line,” Koeliker says, they need to be well equipped. “If you’re not giving employees all the tools that they need and everything in their arsenal to make absolutely sure that they have the best chance of making this customer happy, then you’re not going to be successful,” she stresses.

ENSURING DATA IS CORRECT

Experts agree that for AI to be successful, the data on which it bases its conclusions must be reliable. Knowledge management tools can only work if the FAQs, support forums, community pages, and social media posts they access are reliable sources of information. If a tool is drawing from faulty data sources, it doesn’t matter how smart it is, the answers it gives customers are going to be wrong.

The data also has to be available, accessible, and consistent.

“One of the base challenges companies had in implementing [omnichannel] was that all of their channels did not have access to the same customer information or information in their own CRMs,” Jezierski says. “With artificial intelligence, you’re going to run into the same issue if you don’t have access to all of that information. One of the first things companies need to [realize] before they start implementing [AI] is that it is data that drives learning and this technology.”

To solve the data quality issue, companies “have to do course corrections,” Leggett says. “You have to feed [systems] the right data sets to get going. And you’ve got to keep an eye on them to make sure that they’re learning and performing properly.”

For companies still using legacy systems, Jezierski recommends investing in a layer that can integrate itself into each applicable data source and pull out the information. “If you’re building from the ground up, then it’s much easier,” she says, repeating an old saying: “God created the world in seven days only because there weren’t legacy systems.”

HighPoint recommends working on content curation before implementing technologies to support them. This step is especially important when dealing with very complex topics.

Taylor recalls the recent difficulties experienced by a medical equipment supplier. The company’s portfolio included thousands of products, from wheelchairs to walkers to oxygen tanks. Since the rules and guidelines for using such equipment vary by geographic region, the organization had to simplify the process of finding information for callers. By implementing search and knowledge management functions that supported this case, “what would have taken a fairly extended period of time became a quicker process,” Taylor says. “And because it became quicker, the agents themselves were more likely to use the process.”

“When you think about how complex some of these [government] programs are, [AI] is really the only way that you can effectively give the right answer to the person who’s calling,” Taylor explains. “Some of it is just so complex that there’s no other way to prevent misinformation.”

After all, it wasn’t too long ago when government agencies armed their agents with fat, three-ring binders and forced them to manually flip through them for the information their customers wanted. Now, compare that to simply typing in a few keywords, accessing the exact section within a digital document, and being able to read a solution out loud to the caller verbatim. In such a situation, everyone wins.

Leggett points out that advanced search technologies are available from companies such as Coveo and Sinequa.

Wartgow compares educating these systems to educating a child. “It can be quite complicated, but it is definitely the way of the future,” he says. “Most of our customers will be using artificial intelligence in some way, shape, or form in the near future. Once it’s in place, the return on investment is so extreme that it’s kind of silly not to.”

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Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.