I think it’s safe to say 2023 will go down in the history books as a significant year in the evolution of AI. Microsoft’s significant investment into OpenAI continues to pay dividends with not just the exposure of ChatGPT from their Azure cloud platform, but also with their ChatGPT powered Copilot technology now coming to Office and Windows. What is the future of AI in the contact centre going into 2024?
OpenAI isn’t the only game in town though, with Google, Anthropic, Meta and many open source models chasing their tail.
QContact launched our Communication AI (CAI) product in April, offering a combination of drafting automatic responses, conversational analytics, and automated translation to augment your contact centre. For those customers who have started to use the technology, we’ve seen significant decreases in Average Handle Time, allowing improved throughput and utilisation of agents.
QContact has been very careful though to position CAI correctly with our customers. It is a great tool to save your agents time, but the AI technology certainly isn’t ready to replace the human or be left to reply to customers unattended yet.
Imagine an medical insurance company telling a customer their procedure is definitely covered when it isn’t. We are confident the technology will improve though, and QContact remains an open platform, so if another AI vendor comes along with a great solution, we’re ready to plug it in.
It’s also important to understand that the contact centre industry has had self-service for many years now – from IVR to chatbots, customers already have the ability to use technology to help themselves 24×7. However, we all know while this may reduce call volumes, it isn’t going to fully remove the need for live agent interactions. From complex queries, to processes that may not be automate-able, to just the simple fact that often customers just prefer dealing with a “real human”, we don’t see AI fully automating contact centres anytime soon.
So, what can a business do to prepare for advances in AI? First and foremost, building your knowledge base is the most important first step. Whether using AI models or chatbots, the systems need training data to understand your specific business problems, and how to solve them. The more articles you can add to your Knowledge Base, the better the training for the AI, and the more queries that could be solved with Self-Service. QContact has continued to improve the Knowledge Base within QContact:
- Agent Assist allowing agents to search for help directly in a live conversation
- Help Centre allowing you to expose custom help portals to allow customers to look up knowledge base articles and track the status of any tickets
- CAI can analyse website pages, documents and automatically generate articles for you based on what it finds.
- CAI can even look back over previous conversations and suggest possible articles you may want to write based on common questions.
Overall, we remain excited about the fast pace of AI technologies, and look forward to improving CAI automatically for all our customers as the technology evolves.
