It's almost a rule that customer contact professionals have to rave about the power of artificial intelligence. But what can they do to actually harness that power? How can they ensure AI and automation are meaningfully contributing to the customer experience?
For Nate Ford of Allianz and Carmit DiAndrea of Verint, one particularly valuable application comes on the speech analytics and quality monitoring fronts. Automation technology can help organizations better understand customers, agents, and operational opportunities.
"Automated quality monitoring is a great example," says DiAndrea. "When you have machines assessing criteria and evaluating calls, every single call is evaluated the same way. So you have a great deal of consistency - consistency that you really could not achieve with human listeners."
Granted, the goal is not to completely eliminate the human touch. It is instead to combine technology and humanity to gain the best possible insight -- and create the best possible experiences.
"You really have to combine the automation tools that are provided to you with human insight," recommends Ford. "For example, I can use [automated speech analytics] to identify a small subset of calls in order to get a precise listening, rather than digging through the millions of calls that are available to me in the call center. You really are combining the two worlds of automation and the human input."
Ford and DiAndrea shared their thoughts in the latest edition of the CCW Digital Podcast, which is available below.