A Roadmap for Getting AI into Your Organization [Part 2]

In the first part of this blog series, we explored the reasons why many companies are slow to adopt artificial intelligence. We also discussed how the contact center can be a natural place to consider an augmented intelligence/augmented experience deployment, which can serve as a precursor to artificial intelligence or stand on its own. In this post, we will look at AI in action to discover how it can help transform enterprises.

If you use Siri on your mobile device or Alexa or Google at home, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing component of the consumer world. Six billion devices are going to begin proactively asking for support in the near future, according to Gartner. Voice-enabled AI applications like these and others are making life more convenient for millions of people around the world.

With Avaya ENGAGE quickly approaching, we decided to check in with ConvergeOne thought leaders—who will be presenting at 27 sessions during the event—to get a sense of what we can expect. These are the primary themes that emerged.

Customer experience is perhaps the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your company. According to Forrester, companies with superior customer experience grow revenue more than three times faster than companies with inferior customer experience. Greater customer loyalty also abounds, as these satisfied customers will stay with you longer, spend more with you, and recommend you to others.

The new year is quickly approaching, so there is no better time than now to determine your top business priorities for 2019. Need some help determining what these priorities should be? When a previous year’s Computerworld Tech Forecast survey asked IT executives about their upcoming priorities, the respondents’ top priorities included “improving employee productivity/efficiency” (47%), “improving customer satisfaction/experience” (46%), and “containing costs” (44%). These are all important priorities that will greatly impact the success your business finds in the coming year. However, a difficult question emerges: What steps can your business take to fulfill all of these top priorities?

Has your business undergone the transformation it needs to thrive in an increasingly mobile-driven world? Enacting a bring your own device (BYOD) policy and making your employees accessible anywhere, with any device, is a good start. According to a KPMG survey, 74% of executives who work for highly profitable companies say they have a mobile-enabled workforce.

Conversations abound with talk of the BOT (a web robot that automates tasks) takeover in our customer care practices, but how will the human element evolve? If in just a few short years, 85% of interactions will be handled by BOTs, where does that leave the other 15%? In this post, I will focus on the 15%, its importance within our customer care ecosystem, and how you can ready yourself for the impact this will have on your organization.

Automation has been changing the customer experience (CX) for years with self-service and predictive routing. Artificial intelligence (AI), however, takes it to a whole new level. To understand this, we must first weed through some of the hype. For example, AI is not going to entirely replace your workforce.

As Leslie Willcocks, a professor at the McKinsey London School of Economics, stated, “AI will take the robot out of the human.” This means that AI will free workers from mundane, mind-numbing, repetitive tasks and allow them to concentrate on the more challenging and complex customer issues where they can take pride in adding value to the customer experience.

As a gamer, I'm always amazed by how realistic the modern gaming experience is. I'm currently playing the latest God of War on the PS4, in stunning 4k resolution. I can't help thinking about how far we've come since the video games of my childhood. I vividly remember playing Adventure on my Atari 2600, where your character was represented by a small square able to move from room to room, picking up things that kind of looked like a key or a sword. Pretty amazing transformation since then.

Scheduling can be a complicated and daunting task, especially for companies that manage many employees. Between family, illness, and absenteeism, employees may choose to take time off work, leaving Contact Center managers scrambling to find coverage.

Has this ever happened to you?  How often?  

In all these cases, employees not only want to work and get paid, but they also want flexibility in their jobs. In contact centers specifically, staffing needs are consistently inconsistent, making it hard to plan for these situations.

This is where shift bidding comes in. Shift bidding allows agents to self-select when they would like to work by going online or by using an app on their mobile devices. These applications then use algorithms to determine the type of work or skills that are required for coverage and identify the most qualified bidders to cover each shift.

Read on to learn how shift bidding has evolved to help companies better schedule employees, boost engagement, and improve the customer experience.