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  • January 15, 2025
  • By Donna Fluss, president, DMG Consulting

Transforming Contact Centers with AI: Lessons Learned and Key Takeaways

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Two years ago, OpenAI made its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (genAI) chatbot available to the masses, altering the customer experience (CX) technology landscape and accelerating the velocity of innovation. This set into motion the most radical and impactful transformation of contact centers and customer service organizations ever experienced.

While achieving the AI vision and realizing its full value and benefits is yet to come, a great deal of progress has already been achieved throughout the CX industry. Below is a list of lessons learned and top takeaways that will help CX, contact center, and customer service leaders successfully move forward on their AI journeys:

1. Create an AI vision, strategy, and plan. Determine and draft your AI approach to minimize missteps, but make it a “living” document; these technologies and practices are changing quickly.

2. Implementing AI is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. It takes a substantial investment of time, effort, and resources—frequently more than twice as long as vendors indicate—to implement many of the AI-based solutions. And there is a good reason for that: Executing AI initiatives correctly is harder than it sounds. Vendors and their clients are still learning the solutions’ intricacies, and many unknowns arise during the process.

3. Consequently, it’s smart to start with a small pilot. Learn how to use each new solution and resolve technical and operational challenges prior to a widespread rollout.

4. All AI initiatives require oversight and humans in the loop. Given the current state of AI technologies, humans should be involved in the solutions’ ongoing oversight and management.

5. GenAI is the missing link for contact centers/customer service organizations. Its ability to automate the process of identifying, understanding, and responding to intents is a game-changer for enterprises. However, users must proceed with caution, as this technology can be creative without appropriate guardrails and grounding data.

6. It’s all about the data. Any AI initiative is only as good as the data used to support it.

7. AI is not a silver bullet. AI is not the answer to every CX challenge; it provides intelligent automation tools that should be deployed strategically to improve business operations, functions, processes, and workflows.

8. AI will not eliminate live contact center agents. It should boost self-service automation rates by handling increasingly complex tasks now performed by agents, particularly if a continuous improvement process is in place, but it will not replace the need for the human touch in certain circumstances.

9. In fact, AI augments agent performance. Agent assist applications are being well-received by employees due to their helpful guidance and information; these solutions enable employees to spend their time helping customers instead of searching for answers or writing summaries.

10. AI alone isn’t enough. To realize an AI-enabled system’s expected outcomes and benefits, all related activities and tasks impacted by the addition of intelligence and automation must be updated.

11. Best practices are needed to support AI initiatives. Since most AI-enabled systems are only a couple of years old, industry best practices to support and improve the success of these implementations are still emerging.

12. At this point, there are limited AI resources and experts. There is a shortage of CX, contact center, and customer service AI experts with the knowledge/experience to implement the new generation of AI-enabled solutions available in the market; most AI expertise still resides with the vendors.

Adopting AI-enabled systems is a competitive necessity, and within two years—if it takes that long—AI will be a standard core component of almost every contact center system and application in the market. (There will continue to be a few premise-based applications that are not enhanced and do not include AI functionality.) When AI-based solutions are implemented properly, along with a refresh of all related workflows and processes, companies will realize measurable benefits.

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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