Gen AI
Aug 27, 2024
Echo AI was recently included in the Forrester Report ‘Generative AI Is The Catalyst For Change In The Contact Center.’ Get our key highlights below, and download the report for more.
The journey toward adopting generative AI (genAI) in contact centers is more of a marathon than a sprint, with many organizations still at the starting line––or even falling behind. The challenges are not solely due to reluctance or resistance to change.
Rather, they stem from a historic underinvestment in the foundational technologies and operational processes crucial for taking innovative leaps. The hurdles of outdated systems, messy processes, and lengthy justifications for new investments trap many centers in a cycle of inefficiency and frustration. For example, one study found that 45% of call center leaders are not planning to move aspects of their contact center capabilities to the cloud in the next two years.
For CX leaders aiming at transformation—not just incremental improvement—the path forward involves embracing substantial changes. According to the latest Forrester Report on GenAI, the next 12 months will be critical for contact centers. Leaders must prioritize strategic initiatives that leverage genAI––like the solutions that Echo AI offers––to enhance customer interactions, streamline operations, and ultimately deliver a smoother, more efficient, and customer-friendly experience.
Read on to explore the report’s findings on how contact centers can integrate genAI to enhance customer interactions, streamline operations, and combine technology and human insight to transform customer service.
Table of Contents
Developing a Strong Knowledge Practice
Knowledge management often lacks proper investment because organizations struggle to justify ongoing funding. They find it difficult to directly link these investments to measurable business outcomes. As a result, knowledge bases are often neglected and outdated, leaving agents without the latest information on products, services, or offerings, which can hurt customer service effectiveness.
Additionally, optimizing sky-high content volumes has remained largely a manual process, resulting in poor adoption and inefficient use of knowledge operations. However, without effective knowledge management, customer service declines, leaving agents without the necessary resources to resolve issues efficiently.
GenAI is set to transform knowledge management by converting vast amounts of organizational content into easily accessible, relevant knowledge for both customers and agents. GenAI automates the categorization, updating, and delivery of information, which streamlines operations and enhances strategic value. This integration of GenAI enables contact centers to move away from labor-intensive processes toward a dynamic, AI-driven system that effectively supports customer interactions.
Echo AI uses GenAI to ensure that knowledge is not only accessible but also actionable. For example, QA analysts can easily surface performance themes and trends by double-clicking into specific agent conversations to understand sentiment and resolution. In addition, analysts can review top customer feedback themes to understand what questions are coming up frequently that need to be added to the knowledge base or on customer-facing FAQ sites.
Evolving the Agent Workspace
Forrester's research also reveals that agent workspaces––crucial to customer service frontline operations––are significantly lacking. Agents still spend much of their time on calls searching for information, and dispersed and hybrid workplaces have made it hard to empower agents from a distance.
Current unified workspaces, while unifying customer data across channels, fail to deliver customized insights and recommendations specific to agent needs. This inefficiency is a primary driver of high turnover and attrition rates in the industry.
Next-gen agent workspaces, augmented by genAI, promise a transformation. They’re designed to dynamically assemble customer-specific insights and actionable recommendations directly into the agent’s workflow. GenAI enhances the intuitiveness of the workspace and streamlines operations by eliminating the need to toggle between systems, significantly boosting agent efficiency and effectiveness.
This shift makes the agent's role more manageable and lays the groundwork for using AI more easily in daily tasks.
Investing in Agent EQ and AIQ
An AI-augmented contact center creates an environment where simpler tasks are automated, elevating the role of agents to include both emotional intelligence (EQ) and AI competencies (AIQ). With fewer, more skilled agents, the complexity and emotional depth of agent-customer interactions increase, requiring substantial training in soft skills alongside technical abilities.
GenAI tools integrated with conversation intelligence capabilities are crucial in achieving this two-fold development. They analyze how agents communicate with customers, providing insights through sentiment analysis and grading conversations at scale with capabilities like AutoQA, which helps businesses evaluate and grade agent performance in real-time, essential for honing their skills in handling complex interactions.
Investing in agent EQ and AIQ is not merely about improving technical proficiency but also fostering a workforce that can thrive alongside AI. Enhancing these skills ensures that agents are equipped to manage the demands of modern customer service and effectively use AI tools to deliver a superior customer experience. This strategic focus on agent development is vital for contact centers aiming to succeed in an increasingly AI-integrated service environment.
Future-Proofing Metrics
As GenAI reshapes the role of contact center agents, traditional metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) fail to capture the full spectrum of agent and AI contributions. This shift necessitates a reevaluation of how performance and customer experience (CX) are measured.
To provide a deeper, more comprehensive view of human and AI interactions within the contact center, modern metrics must reflect how GenAI enhances agent interactions and operational efficiency. By focusing on metrics that evaluate the quality of interactions—such as customer satisfaction scores and resolution rates—rather than just the quantity, contact centers can better understand the actual value being delivered to customers.
Conversation analytics emerges as a critical tool in this new metric landscape. By analyzing the content and sentiment of interactions, this technology offers insights that help contact centers improve reporting and make data-driven decisions. These analytics assess the effectiveness of agent responses and gauge customer sentiment, providing a holistic view of the customer journey and agent performance. Investing in GenAI tools like those offered by Echo AI can transform data into actionable insights, enabling contact centers to adapt and thrive in an AI-augmented era.
Navigating the Future with GenAI
Adopting genAI has become critical for contact centers to maintain a competitive edge, enhance customer service, and streamline operational efficiency. The Forrester Report ‘Generative AI Is The Catalyst For Change In The Contact Center’ outlines key areas where contact center leaders need to focus, including developing strong knowledge practices, evolving agent workspaces, enhancing agent EQ and AIQ, and adopting new metrics to measure success more effectively.
These initiatives are not just upgrades; they are essential transformations that enable contact centers to meet modern demands and prepare for future challenges.
To fully understand how these strategies can be implemented in your operations and to gain deeper insights into leveraging GenAI effectively, download the full Forrester Report. Its comprehensive analyses and detailed recommendations will help you not only keep pace with industry changes but to set that pace, ensuring your contact center remains a leader in customer engagement and innovation.
For a thorough exploration of these transformative strategies and to learn how you can apply them, download the Forrester Report on GenAI in the Contact Center here.
