Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
AI will Spearhead the Evolution of Contact Centers in 2023
By Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of AI, Five9
AI has always held the potential to significantly transform the contact center. Faster response times for customers and lower costs for businesses are just two of the many benefits it can bring. The reality is these benefits have only come to a small percentage of the contact centers worldwide. If the benefits are so large, why the delay? The answer: the high costs of training and maintaining AI models uniquely adapted to each contact center. Despite significant drops in costs over the last decade, the use of AI in contract centers remains out of reach for many organizations. In line with revolutions in tech innovation and demand from both customers and agents to simplify CX, 2023 will be a turning point for the use of AI in contact centers. For business leaders curious about the specifics, here’s how that evolution will happen.
Natural Language Processing will break the barrier holding back mass market adoption of AI in the Contact Center
Over the past two years, Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI models – the ones needed in contact centers – have seen major breakthroughs. In particular, we are now in the era of “Large Language Models” or LLMs. The most well-known of these is ChatGPT from OpenAI, but there are other competitors and open-source variations. These models eliminate the need for model training yet allow for customization of what the model can do. This in turn means that the costs of training and maintaining AI models have the potential to drop dramatically. Finally, the last barriers of mass-market AI adoption will be eliminated as these technologies are applied within the contact center industry.
Transparency will push AI to the forefront of contact centers
Attempting to pass an automated voice off as a human has always been a recipe for breaking customer trust – especially in high-emotion scenarios. No customer wants to feel misled once they discover they’ve been communicating with AI. But in 2023, this deception is set to make or break brands. People are contacting customer service more than ever with high-emotion, high-stress issues. With these problems only set to intensify, brands that come out on top will be those that show empathy and understanding – and this often comes with a human connection.
AI distrust will be supplemented with human interaction
In 2023, companies will work towards achieving a better balance between human and automated service. Human empathy and judgment, combined with the speed and scale of AI, will be crucial to handle the increasing volume of sensitive interactions. This shift to humans and AI working together in a collaborative and intelligent way will help empower agents, while enabling higher levels of self-service and customer satisfaction.
Business Leaders will Build Existing Strategies Around AI
Historically, contact center software vendors achieved results by doing all of their own AI work in-house. They would collect data from each customer, one at a time, and use it to train, tune, deploy, test, optimize and maintain those models for each customer, one at a time. The results were good, and so the industry began to accept a norm: to win in AI, you had to build over buy. Now, the best work is being done by many of the scaled technology providers like Amazon, Google and IBM, who can afford the high costs, and recoup those costs through sales across a wide range of markets, not just the contact center. Companies no longer have to build solutions in-house at great expense, and this mindset will become more widespread in the recession as leaders look to streamline costs.
In 2023, these trends will only accelerate as technology increases in its complexity and power. Teams will benefit in focusing on innovating based on existing technology at their disposal, rather than spending precious time and resources building customer AI models and collecting huge volumes of data. When combined, these aspects of AI will create a new norm in the contact center industry: stand on the shoulders of giants.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Rosenberg is the Chief Technology Officer and head of AI at Five9. Jonathan has dedicated his career to transforming the telecommunications industry and joins Five9 from Cisco where he was CTO for the Collaboration Technology Group (CTG). Jonathan is also well known for his authorship of the SIP protocol, which is the foundation for modern IP-based telecommunications. Prior to Cisco, Rosenberg was the Chief Technology Strategist at Skype, where he guided the company’s technology strategy. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia University.
In 2002 he was named one of the most innovative young technologists in the world by Technology Review magazine. He also was named a “Top Supergeek” by CRN and won a Pulver Von Pioneer award for contributions to the VoIP industry. In 2015 he was presented with the Ohio University Strowger Award for transformational innovation in the Telecommunications industry.
