Observe.AI is an Intelligent Workforce Platform that transforms contact centers by embedding AI into 100% of customer conversations, optimizing agent performance, and automating repeatable processes that drive revenue and retention. Recently, the company’s CEO, Swapnil Jain (pictured) spoke with No Jitter to discuss the idea behind the birth of the Intelligence Workplace platform, what AI can teach us about sentiment in the contact centers, and paints a picture of what an AI-based contact center might look like. Here are his responses to the most interesting questions he was asked.
What AI capabilities could contact centers benefit from that don’t currently exist, but might in the future?
SJ: I expect conversational AI to continue, and agent improvement software will continue. We’ll also start seeing more proactive reach-out from the business to consumers—and that’s one area we don’t [currently] see.
I also feel like we’ve had this debate in the contact center for quite some time around—Is AI here to automate or augment?—I believe AI will do both and take care of simpler tasks. There’s a vast majority of tasks that exist which machines don’t do right from this perspective. Let’s say you call your mobile service provider for a certain problem. You’re a well-informed, educated buyer—probably using an iPhone or Android device. You already have the application, know how to use it, how to log in to their website — so you’re not calling for these simple things that you can do in the app or on the website. When you’re calling, it’s for something critical, a complex task — something that requires an agent, that requires empathy.
I think people will come to accept that AI is going to automate simple tasks. But at the same time, you need to build tools for the agents to do their job better for situations when machines can’t solve problems.
We’ve seen AI embedded in everything from fitness equipment to refrigerators. Can you paint a picture of what an AI-based contact center would look like?
SJ: Let me start with the ‘AI everywhere’ concept. I feel like this is one of those things where people are taking a hammer and trying to find nails. What do you do with [AI?] Alright, let’s put it in a Fitbit. Let’s put it in a fridge. Why do you need AI in a fridge? AI went through a phase where it was everywhere—it can change the world, it can cure cancer, it can make food for you and do everything.
Now we’re thinking—alright—what are the real problems AI can solve? The contact center of the future, I envision, will have AI from pre-interaction to post-interaction. We spoke about pre-interaction earlier, I.e., businesses mining data, and understanding that an order is delayed. When you call your e-commerce company, they should predict why you’re calling. Additionally, we will see advancements on the voice side, used to understand why a consumer is calling.
From pre-calls to post-calls, we’ll see automation, speech understanding, natural language understanding, and conversational AI coming into the picture, to change the nature of the contact center. We are living in a world where you can connect with your contact center over chat, email, full-context of what you said last time on the chat. We are living in a world where there’s no distinction between channels that you are seeing, but every function from beginning to end has AI, so none of us have to wait, and none of us have a bad experience.
To read the full interview with Swapnil Jain, please proceed to the source page.
