Can AI be a solution to challenges of the omnichannel customer service?

Why there are so strong expectations on what AI can do in the contact center domain? With omnichannel communication tools, customer interactions become very complex. This is hard to manage from the single-agent perspective as well as from the organizational effectiveness perspective. On top of that, agents need to master a lot of knowledge and resources to be able to handle customers in the right way. This dramatically raises the costs, and the hope is that A.I. technologies could lower the workload of a contact center representative, or even replace him. 

Classical contact center solutions have been traditionally built as stand-alone tools, with limited omnichannel communication options and selective access to company resources and databases. Moving towards assistive, and later, generative A.I. in the customer service domain will change this paradigm, so let's see, which vendors and solutions will get ready on time!

What is your challenge? Direction of customer service developments or how to utilize A.I. in your business? 

Is AI hype or contact center reality?

We have heard about many applications of A.I. in the contact centers. This technology is implemented for example in speech/text conversion algorithms, chat and voice bots, and related process improvement tools. However, to clear some of the confusion created by marketing campaigns, we need to call it "machine learning" rather than full AI, which has become a topic of the day thanks to chatGPT and similar tools, which can be trained to generate answers "on their own".

Real generative AI today is seen as not yet ready for wide deployment in customer service due to the commercial risks involved. But definitely, it is an anticipated way forward.

So what is realistic? AI can bring substantial benefits in providing contact center personnel with up-to-date information, so they can focus on serving the customer and not on searching through corporate databases. So big focus now is on "assistive AI" applications, with Microsoft Copilot as an example.

At present, AI is neither hype nor reality, but rather an expectation of future benefits in the customer service domain. But we are just at the beginning of the AI path, and only the future will tell, what applications will become most useful.