Cloud the cornerstone of AI-enabled contact centres of the future

AI, automation and cloud technologies are transforming customer interactions and experiences, said guests at a CX Professionals Executive Dinner, hosted by Connect South Africa, in Johannesburg this week.

Transformative AI

Clint Payne, Architect of Upside Down CX, CX Culture Transformation Expert and Leading Change Metrics Visionary at Ipsos, outlined the progress in customer experience in recent years and how AI is proving transformative in the space. AI is already helping us to do speech analysis, sentiment analysis and reporting that we once had to do manually.”

However, AI also has the potential to do far more – for example, modelling agent churn.

“With AI deployed in your voice of the employee environment, you can predict churn in your agents. What makes this unique is that at the intersection of the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee, you can identify which employees are delivering the best customer experience,” he said.

Another useful application is AI-generated summaries of engagement, he said.

“We all know the difficulty of getting accurate information into CRM, and if you have an AI tool to accurately summarise that, you’re saving time.”

AI also supports the closed loop feedback, enabling escalation of complaints or improved processes, he said. And AI can pre-write responses on how you need to solve the customers’ problems, and allocate sentiment of both agents and customers in real-time during a call, enabling team leaders to get into the call quickly to address any challenges.

Payne highlighted how GenAI can support marketers by creating ‘personas’ representing demographics in their markets. In the past, creating customer personas took months of fieldwork and research to create. AI can now consolidate existing data to offer picture-perfect representations of market personas, which can respond in real-time to queries by marketers.

“You can actually talk to them and ask them what they’re about, if they would like a certain offer from the brand, or what is most important to them in terms of brand service. When we do this manually, we make assumptions about what they want, but we look at what the customer wants through the bias of our own experience,” he said. “Things that used to take us months with a lot of bias can now be done accurately, in a flash, by AI.”

Cloud underpins AI

Jordan Seke, CRM advocate, change manager and strategist at the University of the Witwatersrand, said advanced AI and real-time analytics – such as those embedded in self-driving cars – demanded massive data processing and storage capabilities, which pointed to cloud computing.

Greg Jarvis, Head of Customer Success: SA at Connect, said there were AI models that run locally, but for massive data processing and analytics at scale, the cloud was the ideal solution.

Karl Reed, Vice-President Solutions at Connect, added: “The way cloud has evolved in the contact centre space is to enable agents to be sitting anywhere across Africa, or anywhere in the world, connected to the same cloud and enjoying the exact same experience. For real-time updates and feedback while agents are on calls, cloud has the power to enable that – you won’t get away with it on-premises.”

Gregory Jarvis, Head of Customer Success: SA at Connect.

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Trusted AI data

Connect South Africa noted the data used for enabling AI and analytics should be secure, of good quality and contained within the organisation’s own environment. “If you’re going to put your customer data and company IP in the public domain, it’s public information in a split second,” the company said.

Charlene George, Sales Director at Connect South Africa, noted that the company is a global contact centre and CRM systems integrator and digital transformation partner, and specialises in creating impactful, technology-enabled customer experiences. She said: “We bring technologies together. Where contact centres used to be monolithic, now we have the convergence of your customer service management, customer relationship management and your contact centre. How do you bring all of that together in a way that serves your business? That is what we do really well. Our differentiator is our people – experts like Greg Jarvis and Karl Reed.”