AI Tools in CX: The Truth about ROI

00:00Hi, guys. advice from a call center geek. A weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operation, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expivia and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye. Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items to take back in your contact center, and improve the overall quality, improve the age and experience. And this one hopefully improve your technology experience, the overall goal here, right?

01:23Improve that customer experience. How's everybody doing? It is December 14th. We're getting. I just got some inspiration here this morning talking about a post this morning talking about a post that I didoubted yesterday. Got to go on with my my good friend Mark Bernstein from Baltimore. We talked a lot about a lot of these topics in a kind of a different format. I really think that a lot of people are either confused, they're blinded, they love the shiny new are they're being forced by, you know, higher ups. They're new, they're evolving. And for organizations, they're being pushed from salespeople from vendors. But when you really look at it, the RO, and speaking, mostly of our, is just there yet. Now, we can talk about return on investment in a lot of different ways. We talk about it in dollars and cents, which I think we'll mainly focus on here.

02:29If I invest in a piece of technology that is AI or a piece of just solid AI technology, you should expect to have some type of cost savings, some type of return on that investment in some short order. The other way we can talk about ROI is based on the customer experience, based on HSE set score, sentiment scores, NPS scores. If we have a core goal of raising those, I think that there's some tools as, as well, the dollars don't make total sense, but maybe you're at a break even, but you can improve CX, and there's a return there. and there's a return there. Let's talk about these main tools that. What is the best kind of the most mature products now that I think you can see the quickest return on your investment? What are some that everybody thinks there's a return? And there's really not.

03:25I have been kind of researching, demoing, trying to get for Expivia, trying to get for other clients that come from a referral partnership standpoint as well. So let's kind of talk this through. The first, let's do the big one, right? These large language model kind of AI chatbots. These are the kind of what you really, really think about when you hear AI in the contact center. These generative chat bots for that first touch point, whether it be through voice, whether it be through chat, and they're just going to kind of handle everything and deal with customer issues with a very human-like presence. They're going to kind of start to learn about some of the nuances of your customer base and the questions and learn from your KMS and things that you've built out for it. And, again, if we talk about this in three years, it's probably going to change, maybe even next year.

04:24In 2023, going into 2024, for the most part, these really robust chatbots, based on AI, are really only for enterprise-huge customers. The cost is too expensive for a mid-tier to lower contact center for the most part. is large implementation costs, not only that. There are large minimums that a lot of these AI technology is more and more is more and more companies are getting involved in this, but it's still very a pretty a- a pretty process to go through. And really for most contact centers unless you t a big enterprise. If you're a big enterprise, I think it really does make sense. But for most contact centers, internal centers, internal, internal centers that are, that are, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, it's just too expensive. It's it's, it's pretty crazy right now with what they're charging for some of the stuff with their minimums, how many interactions, you really need until they say, Hey, you know, You see the return, I mean it's it's hundreds of thousands of calls and a lot of contact centers just a little disappointing with I think the price structure of how people are that come drastically down as more of these, as more of these guys get involved in, they're still going to make a, a, especially as the CCaaS players get more involved in kind of, this, this, the AI realm. That's the, that's the big one, right? But let's talk- These other kind of AI tools that we think the best bang for your buck right now in 2023-2024 for an AI tool is with analytics and advanced analytics.

06:46Some of the tools that glared out there now are absolutely phenomenal with really getting insights getting insights into what customers are saying to be to offer using AI to do kind of a preemptive customer support where you can start to see and things are starting to come into your contact center that maybe you couldn't put the pieces together to see that. There was an issue where now you can. or maybe send that email out to say I know we're having a problem with this before, kind of the shit of the shit hits the fan and everybody hammers your center. A lot of really cool things are happening in the analytics front with AI, with kind of that preemptive customer I think from our, or experience and the sentiment scores and those types of things. You can use analytic for speech analytics for just a ton of different analytics have been around now for a while and now we just kind of slap this amazing engine on it and I think that you know And I think that you know analytics is something that you can find ROI on right if you go all in on it You want to utilize it.

08:31self-service, self-service, self-a these large language models, these AI chatbots, I think there's a ceiling for them when it comes to customer. I mean, think about your online banking right now. You can pretty, pretty much, do everything. It might be a little bit robotic, right? When they read the numbers back, your account number is four, eight, three, you know, that kind of stuff where it's going to be so much smoother, more human-like, but the actual job that it's doing, and it can't really do that much more. For smaller type contact centers, for smaller natural language processing IVRs, IVAs, I think is the way to go because the ceiling isn't too much different and I think the cost is way different. You're really getting the same amount of utilitarian and work from both models. One is just a little bit smoother and cleaner. Now, when we talk about other personal assistants and crazy things like that, the sky's the limit for an AI type chatbot that is way beyond kind of the IVR, IVA, I think, like Siri and Alexa., right?

10:09Siri, and Alexa though are still really good when it comes to actually asking for account balances and R&D, I need to transfer money, and I need to R&D, I need to pay. alone. Again, where do you really want to spend money? Do you want to spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions on some AI that can maybe learn a little bit, maybe make things a little bit quicker, but what can it do from an onlineBanking standpoint that really you can't do now? Maybe there's a couple things, but is it worth that amount of money? a natural language process, IBR, you know, those integrated into your core, integrated into your CRM. I mean, spend your money somewhere else. And let's talk again in a couple years when things drop in price significantly. Okay, let's talk a auto summarization, right? Auto-memo-ing, you the things you've heard in that rate.

11:06So at the end of calls, Instead of an agent typing into the CRM, what happened on that, doing some other maybe some other after call work, it automatically auto summarizes that call and I think this is a low hanging fruit of what we think about ChatGPT type AI because we're doing that now. We're not everybody, but a lot of people are saying, hey, here's a transcript that I did like like I'll do. Here's a transcript I did on this podcast. Can you make a blog post out of this? Right? Can you summarize what I said in this article? Or in this in this podcast episode and boom, it'll summarize that right makes total sense. Here's the thing. Thing though, and this is where you have to be careful. If you have very long calls, and you're after call work or your wrap time and the agent needs, I would say over a minute worth maybe 45 seconds or more, then it probably is worth it for you to look at it, especially if you're at scale, right? So a couple hundred, hundred seats, you have two to three minutes of after co-work, auto summarization can be an absolute lifesaver for your organization. If you don't, if you are 40, -44 seconds and under the

[Gap 13:23–13:53: no reliable transcription]

13:53to just make sure that you don

[Gap 14:23–15:23: no reliable transcription]

15:23it because it's just kind of that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and I A,... and the and and To fully score your calls with AI, to be able to really lose headcount, and not to say that and and You have more people that can do coaching. You have more people that can be on the contact center working with your agents. maybe you could only do it with Auto Q. A. So I think that there per agent per week, you can do 40 per agent per week And you can utilize this and utilize the tools and utilize prompting. Especially for things that you can find right in transcripts. club and our auto QA product K but we think that, you know, for a 25 seat contact center that say has a five minute handle time and wants to do 500 scores. QA scores per month. [pricing remark omitted]

18:53To score all of those calls. [pricing remark omitted] It is currently being propagated out for enterprise type solutions as we speak. The larger contact centers are the ones that can afford it, can reap the rewards of it. Right now it's not been democratized for smaller contact centers unless you want to build something on your own. Use a B.. in and those prospective things. The BPO is even though you might be 10 or 20 seats, they could be thousands of seats or hundreds of seats. So they're utilizing this technology and kind of spreading that cost amongst customers. So I think, again, if you're smaller, that's another good reason. It's probably a cheap plug, but I a honestly think that's another good reason to outsource, because most BPOs like us are going to have this technology. We're going to be able to show you how to do it all, and you're going to be and you're going to be able to get it where you could never afford to do it internally if you wanted to slap all these things on.

20:21It's expensive right now. Everybody plays it off as this giant cost savings, it will be a cost savings for sure. But at this point, it's still a pretty expensive deal, especially if you're on the smaller end of the spectrum. So again, I hope that and Chatbot to the limit. Don't just let that that salesperson or that's me Take you down this awesome-path, because again all of those things work out great be the 10 out of 10 ir I rate customer try to hammer it try to trick it right and and I think you'll find

[Gap 21:02–21:32: no reliable transcription]

21:32higher ups or when C, level people say, hey, listen, we need to invest in AI because I because we to cut our head most of those guys are extremely expensive and really only there for enterprise now. But there's just so many people doing the same thing in the space that it has to come down. And I think You guys, that's exactly what we'll see. So alright guys. Thank you. I will probably do one more podcast for the year. I can't believe this year's already over. I like to do kind of a day before, two days before Christmas. I know that'd probably be that Friday, next Friday, and then take that the next week off. But you know, we got to do a state of the C, a state of CX. And one also got to do what I kind of see as happening and some of the things to look out for in 2024, which is always kind of a lot of fun to do as well, but thank you guys. Love you all. Let me just ask you, if you've gotten to this far in the podcast, I think you've probably had some value in it. If you can please, please, please go on Spotify, go on iTunes. Wherever you're listening to this, throw out a review, a review, hopefully positive, throw out something on LinkedIn, do something for us from that standpoint. I, I think that will help continue to spread podcast and it'd be a great Christmas present for me as well. So thanks guys!