Artificial intelligence is helping to change what success looks like for customer service teams, with less focus on call speed and deflection and greater emphasis on resolving customer issues. That shift is changing how companies think about the role of AI, from automating individual tasks to orchestrating interactions between customers, AI agents and human employees.
The conversation at The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit revolved around the ways companies can blend humans and agentic AI to deliver better customer service experiences. In the event kickoff, theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte (pictured, left) explained why call centers are ultimately an ideal proving ground for the efficacy of agentic AI.
“Contact centers have large volumes of interactions. There [are] significant labor costs and direct moments of truth with customers,” Laliberte said. “When something fails, the consequences are also pretty highly visible, and a poor AI interaction can increase customer effort, damage trust and ultimately hurt the brand.”
Laliberte offered that analysis alongside Zeus Kerravala (right), principal analyst and founder of ZK Research, A Division of Kerravala Consulting, during theCUBE’s coverage of The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit. They also talked with industry experts from TalkDesk Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Five9 Inc., among other companies, about how AI is changing customer experience economics. (* Disclosure below.)
Here’s the complete video interview with Bob Laliberte and Zeus Kerravala:
Insight #1: Customer service success goes beyond resolution time
Customers and call center operators can often disagree on what makes for a successful customer service interaction. That’s partly because the industry has historically focused on speed of resolution, Kerravala emphasized.
“Historically, we’ve measured success in the context of things like average handle time, first call resolution,” he said. “Those metrics don’t … matter as much anymore. We’ve had such a focus on average handle time in this industry, but is that shorter call actually a good thing if the issue remains largely unsolved?”
Agentic AI could enable richer customer service interactions, but the focus needs to remain on relationship management, according to Vinod Muthukrishnan, vice president and general manager of Webex customer experience at Cisco. That’s the vision behind Cisco’s AI Concierge, which seeks to provide continuous conversational context regardless of which “front door” a customer enters through at the start of a service interaction.
“An AI agent that can fill a slot or fulfill a transaction is not agentic. Agentic is much more of a framework of tools and products and processes,” he said. “The big thing around agentic is going away from just voice agents that can answer a question, fulfill a transaction, to orchestrating a journey, to now evolving all the way to be able to orchestrate a relationship.”
Here’s the complete video interview with Vinod Muthukrishnan:
Insight #2: AI agents can help close the gap between conversation and resolution
Customer success teams should be measured on “conversation to completion,” or how effectively they resolve the customer’s problem. AI agents can help by preserving context across handoffs between AI and human agents, noted Ram Rajagolpalan, head of product, AI for Zoom CX at Zoom Communications Inc.
“You want to transfer the full context, the reason why they’re calling, the collected variables that you need to pass on to a human being so that human being can get on with the job and get it done without having to repeat themselves or look at 10 different places of record just to answer a simple question,” he told theCUBE.
To get started, businesses should deploy AI agents where they can have the most immediate impact. There are some obvious places to start, explained Joe Rittenhouse, co-chief executive officer of Converged Technology Professionals Inc., a Zoom implementation partner.
“Usually where we try to start is, where’s the low-hanging fruit?” he said. “Just a simple question of what do you do after hours? We’re usually staffed, we follow the sun from the East Coast to the West Coast, but then after hours we just have a general mailbox. The answer is typically, I don’t know.”
Here’s the complete video interview with Joe Rittenhouse and Ram Rajagopalan:
Insight #3: AI can handle volume while humans handle complexity
The best model for call center workflows could be a mix of human and AI agents, with AI handling high-volume, low-stakes calls such as password resets while humans focus on sensitive conversations and high-value customers. That balance could help bridge the gap between how contact centers measure success and what customers expect, explained Amit Mathradas, CEO and board member of Five9.
“From the research we have done, we found one stat really amazing,” he told theCUBE. “Ninety-nine percent of business practitioners who are deploying AI think their contact centers and their serviceability has gotten better. Only 66% of actual users think the contact center has gotten better. More than 50% of them are saying the reason is, ‘I want to access a human and I don’t get that.’”
Here’s the complete video interview with Amit Mathradas:
The industry needs a better operating model to enable agentic orchestration. This kind of model would account for governance, integration and connected workflows to ensure enterprise readiness, according to Pedro Andrade, vice president of AI and generative AI business specialist at Talkdesk.
“Customer Experience Automation, CXA, is what we defined as an operating model,” he said in a theCUBE interview. “It’s not a category of technology. It’s the system that coordinates a hybrid workforce of AI and human employees. Then connecting the systems, connecting knowledge and also connecting the workflows.”
Here’s the complete video interview with Pedro Andrade:
Catch up on our complete video coverage of The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit.” Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)