If you’re not in the AI fray, should you be worried?
This is the year of AI-everything. Sometimes it’s just sticking “AI” in a product name or email address. Other times it’s actually new functionality. No doubt, everyone is sick of hearing “AI”.
You can’t ignore it.
Reductions in Average Handling Time (AHT) of 25+%? Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) containment increases of 40%? Automation of 70% of customer requests? Cycle time reductions of minutes or even days? All possible. Even if you project half of these benefits, deploying targeted AI functionality is relevant whether your organization is 5 people, 50 people, or thousands of people.
Early adopters have already done some of the hard work
My colleague and frequent collaborator, Rob Bradford, MBA, and I did a deep dive into the use cases for AI in contact centers. Over the past two months, we learned a lot about what’s real now, what the benefits are, and where things are going.
We have heard from many of our clients – whether they are excited, skeptical, or overwhelmed – that they need a way to cut through the hype and get down to figuring out what makes sense. Early adopters give us insight on how to start as well as where the best impacts are in real life.
Choose a use case that you can get funded
Our clients with the strongest results are those that were very clear about what they wanted to accomplish and set objectives that were measurable around cost, quality, or revenue. We find that when you define a use case with value to your business, cost is the easiest to get funded. Quality and revenue are the long game plays because they enable experience.
It's about what you’re not going to do, too
No matter what vectors you zero in on, make sure you are as clear about what you are NOT going to do as you are about what you are going to do. Successfully integrating AI into your operations works best by starting with a pilot and spreading it out from there rather than pushing functionality everywhere at once.
Don’t ignore the haters – they’re just worried
Our clients that got the green light for their ideas are the ones that were able to anticipate the business risks that the organization’s stakeholders, employees, and customers cared about the most – in advance. This is about risk and return.
In our research, the most common concerns are data security and AI accuracy. You have to deal with these. How will you protect information? When it comes to security, you have to drill down into key questions: where is the data, and who has access to it?
What will you do when an AI model or bot returns a wrong answer? For our health insurance clients, we use the example of a gym recommendation versus a diagnosis. It’s one thing if your bot makes a mistake with a recommendation for something like a gym. It’s another thing entirely if it makes a diagnostic mistake for a patient… that you might wind up dealing with in court.
Prepare ahead and plan for time and resources to address the risks. Make sure the right people are engaged in the process from top to bottom.
You do need to know what kind of AI you need
A foundational piece is that, as a leader, you need to do the homework on what kind of AI you need. No, you don’t need to be a data scientist or an engineer. You do need to assess your organization’s tolerance for risk and match business needs with models appropriately. Actuarially driven? Working at NASA? Probably not much tolerance for risk or errors. Predictive or rules-driven models will be able to get closer to predictable answers. Looking to brainstorm product ideas or copywrite? Generative AI models give you a partner that can be extremely effective under the guidance of a human.
Let’s not kid ourselves: there are workforce impacts
Most leaders acknowledge that AI adoption will change how we work fundamentally. This revolution affects knowledge workers and people whose functions depend on language and processing. That means areas like customer service, supply chain, and back-office operations as well as legal and accounting have tremendous opportunities for efficiency and new ways of working.
AI adoption is already in progress with up to 70% of some roles being automated. Workers are directly affected. Even if a chunk of your job is automated, the rest doesn’t go away – but it does mean new skills are needed. Instead of researching contracts, perhaps you need to spend more effort interpreting what the analysis means. Instead of performing QA on a project, perhaps you need to spend more time defining the acceptance criteria and what you need the QA to validate.
Research done by McKinsey & Company, Zendesk, and others also shows that leaders are thinking about this and expect to reskill up to 20% of their workforces.
It all comes down to people
Adoption is a critical vector within any team, no matter how small or large. Implementing the technology is the smallest piece of the equation here. The tech itself is dwarfed by the need to adjust process and support people through the change. Strong organizational change management has been a huge factor in every client success story we have participated in. The story is critical to share with your team and everyone affected. For instance, it may be about reducing cost but not reducing people, or it may be about changing where and how human touch is applied to strive for a greater end user experience. The more you share the why, the more people understand your intent and can align with where you need to go.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.