www.managedITmag.co.uk 17 CALL CENTRE an assistant to a human agent. However, we also recognise that anything in a contact centre that was previously handled by an IVR system at the front end of the conversation can now be done by conversational AI. Let AI answer the phone; let the customer, in normal language, say what they need; let AI interpret that and route the caller intelligently to the best possible agent. That is very low risk because AI isn’t making any decisions, but it’s helping to optimise the process. That’s where AI assistance is now. In time, as you train AI models and they develop further, more and more standard interactions could be replaced with autonomous virtual agents. Personally, I would say that within the next five to 10 years maybe 40% to 60% of all interactions will be handled autonomously by virtual agents based on AI. However, I don’t think we will ever get rid of human agents altogether because humans like to speak with other humans. Factors like empathy, in Agentic AI for contact centres. Here are five observations, insights and talking points raised in the ensuing conversation. 1 Contact centre is one of best places to deploy AI “The contact centre is a great place to deploy AI because there’s always a balance between cost and the customer experience. If I want the best customer experience, I deploy a lot of agents, but they’ll be sitting idle for a lot of the time and if I reduce the number of agents, my customer satisfaction goes down because there’ll be longer wait times. AI can increase the customer experience and it can reduce the cost. It can reduce the average handle time by automatically routing calls to the most suitable agent. During the call, it can support that agent with the right answers, the right information, the right knowledge to handle that call as efficiently as possible. And after the call, AI can do a lot of the mundane work of writing up notes, putting them into the CRM and so on. There are a lot of different areas where you can get ROI from AI and because there are already so many different metrics in contact centres – average handle time, first time resolution, net promoter score, customer satisfaction score etc. – you can measure the impact of AI.” Jurgen Hekkink 2 AI is best deployed as an assistant to a human agent, rather than as an autonomous agent. For now “The question on everybody’s mind is how autonomous can AI be? And that relates to the success factor – is 98% or 99% sufficient? At the moment, we think the best way to use AI is as businesses to build a layer of Agentic AI across their CRM, ERP, back‑office systems and entire contact centre estate, giving them the ability to solve complex CX issues without the need for human intervention, while also providing the orchestration, boundaries and safeguards necessary for data security, compliance and trust. “Things like translation and sentiment analysis can be done pretty straightforwardly with an API call. But when you’re building more complex AI and more complicated prompt engineering you need to think about where you store your data, how you hand-off your data, about debugging, about performance, about guardrails, so you end up having to build a platform to manage these applications. That’s what we bought Deepdesk for,” explained Blench. At the same time, AnywhereNow has continued to develop the AI capabilities of its flagship Microsoft Teams customer experience solution Dialogue Cloud, which already provides an array of AI integrations and the ability to build flows in an intuitive way using the Dialogue Studio low‑code solution. Watch this space for news of additional solutions due to be launched throughout the year as AnywhereNow aims to accelerate the adoption of AI by its 2,000+ enterprise customers. Blench estimates that 5-10% of customers are already using AI in their call centres, mainly for relatively simple tasks such as conversation transcription and sentiment analysis, with a further 15% in the pilot and evaluation phase. Agentic AI & The Contact Centre: Five Talking Points What’s stopping wider uptake of AI was one of the main topics of discussion at a roundtable hosted by AnywhereNow at the Savoy Hotel earlier this month, when CEO Will Blench, CRO John Burghart and Head of Product Marketing Jurgen Hekkink were joined by Nick Heath from technology innovation partner BT to discuss the challenges and opportunities continued...
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