Leveling up your Contact Centre AI Game

Everyone says they want to adopt AI or level up their current AI use. But not everyone knows what leveling up might look like for their business or even where they’re leveling up from. Some AI tools, like autocomplete, are already so widely used that people have forgotten that they’re even using AI.

So, let’s take a look at the three basic levels of AI adoption (and one super secret bonus level) to see what level your contact center is on and what it would take to level up.

Level 1 - Autocomplete and Conversation Templates

The first step in AI adoption is to understand the ways in which you are already using AI without even realizing it. If you use conversation tools that provide autocomplete suggestions or templatized greetings and signoffs, you’re using basic, Level 1 AI. These tools are everywhere, as standard features in most CRM and email platforms.

Just because Level 1 tools are basic doesn’t mean they are not valuable. When you consider the scale of customer interactions, just templating the greetings and signoffs in every conversation, while only saving a few seconds per interaction, translates to many hours saved when multiplied across the number of interactions per agent per day.

How to level up from here?: The next step is to hand over some of these more basic interactions to a chatbot and/or to start looking for more time-consuming parts of the interaction. With Summarizer and Knowledge Assist, you can automate some of the important but thankless parts of the customer support workflow.

Level 2 - Summarizer, Knowledge Assist, and More

Once you’re already doing the basics, you’re ready to start using AI to tackle more time-consuming and difficult tasks. Contact summaries are a great place to start.

For the most part, agents hate writing summaries after every call. But they have no choice. Call summaries are valuable sources of customer data and knowledge for future interactions and are required in heavily regulated industries.

AI doesn’t mind doing summaries, and it actually does a better and faster job than a human agent. The time savings here are tremendous. A few minutes saved on each contact summary translates to hundreds, if not thousands of hours per year that agents can spend on more impactful work.

AI Knowledge Assist can use these summaries and data from anywhere in your organization to put the right answers right in front of your agents right when they need that info. This means more cases resolved in less time, happier customers, and happier agents.

How do you level up from here: There’s a lot of room for fine-tuning and incremental improvements within level 2. Many businesses come to this stage for compliance and stay for the transformative benefits of automating thankless tasks. Our advice at this stage would be NOT to level up until you’ve mastered these agent assist tools.

Level 3 - “If This, Then That”

Level 3 is where things get closer to the limits of what AI can currently do for contact centers. This stage in AI adoption is about handing over more autonomy to AI tools by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to have AI do more of the talking. A great place to level up from L2 to L3 is having AI handle frequently asked queries so agents don’t have to answer the same question 100 times per day. The classic example would be “Where’s my package??”

That’s just the beginning. LLMs can inform sentiment detection tools that can help human agents sooth irate customers, detect language used by scammers, and perfectly time an upsell or special offer.

As exciting as these use cases are, the important thing to remember is they still require a human in the loop. AI is improving rapidly and automating tasks it could not have handled just a few years ago. But beware, it still does its best work when paired with a human, enabling and enhancing the human touch.

How to level up from here: The sky’s the limit in level 3, and if you’re already using LLMs in an advanced way, you probably already know most of what’s in this guide. The next step is to apply creativity and innovation to fine-tune a custom model.

Level 4 - Choose Your Own Adventure with a Bespoke Model

Again, if you’re here, you don’t need this guide. But we wanted to include it anyway just to show what’s possible. Level 4 is all about customization and using the model of your choice to build-out your own solution to meet your exact needs and those of your industry.

If you’re at L4, the future will probably be kind to your business, because you will play a part in writing the next chapter.

Time To Level Up?

While Level 4 is a cool place to be and a worthy goal, it’s worth acknowledging that the air is thin in the stratosphere of AI development, and you can expect marginal returns compared to the big leaps you can take in Level 2.

At the end of the day, AI is a tool. It’s only as good as what it accomplishes for you and your team. The question of when to level up is one you should always start by asking the agents and team leaders who will be using these tools. Without their enthusiastic buy-in, it’s just a digital gadget with a big vocabulary.